Australia Adventure Travel - Hot on the Trail (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2003

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The Hard Way
Hot on the Trail (Cont.)

THE AUSTRALIA THAT Burke and Wills ventured into was an immense, uncharted continent. Roughly the size of the U.S., it had been the home of Aborigines for about 60,000 years when, in 1788, a British penal colony was established near present-day Sydney. By 1860 there were one million European immigrants living on the coastline; two-thirds of the continent, including the entire western half, remained unexplored by whites.

Discovering what lay inland had far-reaching implications for communication and commerce. It took two months for news to travel by ship from England to its Australian colonies, and yet a telegraph line already extended from Europe to India to Southeast Asia. What if a line could be strung from Melbourne, the major port on the southern coast, straight through to the northern coast, and linked by cable with Asia? News would take a mere two hours, a reply a day or two. Certainly, untold acres of prime grazing land would be discovered in the process, maybe gold as well.

Members of the Royal Society, a Melbourne gentlemen's club composed of scientists, businessmen, and armchair explorers, took it upon themselves to solve the mystery of Australia's frontier. In January 1860, they announced plans to fund the Victorian Exploring Expedition and placed an ad for a leader in the Melbourne papers. After much internal politicking, the Royal Society chose Robert O'Hara Burke, 39, a small-town Irish police superintendent, as the expedition's unlikely chief.

"The idea of Burke leading any expedition anywhere at all was ludicrous," writes former BBC correspondent Sarah Murgatroyd in The Dig Tree, her 2002 history of the epic journey. "He was neither a surveyor nor a scientist and had no exploration experience."

Australian historian Alan Moorehead cites references to Burke in his 1963 book Cooper's Creek as a "wild eccentric dare-devil" who was in "no sense a bushman" and whom "some thought not quite sane" because of his strange habit of lying for hours in a bathtub in his backyard—wearing only a pith helmet.

"Burke was popular, charming, and intelligent, but excitable, impulsive, and headstrong," writes Murgatroyd. By all accounts, Burke appears to have been guided not by an explorer's fundamental trait—curiosity—but by two esteemed Victorian values: fame and glory.

Good thing, then, that the expedition's 26-year-old surveyor, William John Wills, was a diligent student of natural history and the sciences. According to his father, he was "ever pining for the bush . . . his love fixed on animals, plants, and the starry firmament."

On August 20, 1860, the Victorian Exploring Expedition left Melbourne, bound for the Gulf of Carpentaria, 1,500 miles of Sahara-like desert to the north. It was a circus from the start: 19 men, 26 heavily laden camels imported from India, 23 horses, a train of six bizarrely overloaded wagons, and a semisubmersible dray. All told, they were hauling 20 tons of accoutrements, including 12 sets of dandruff brushes, four enema kits, an oak table with two oak stools, and a large bathtub.

Burke declared that he would cross Australia "or perish in the attempt."

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