I got ambitious enough recently to trek all the way across a whole continent with a couple of blokes from the 19th century. Google Earth did most of the work and saved me plenty on shoe leather, but still – what a sweat! It’s an amazing story in an amazing place.

As much as America celebrates its Wild West frontiersmen, Australia looks fondly on its own outback pioneers, and while legends like that of Ned Kelly have spread beyond the country thanks to popular films, the mythical Burke-Wills Expedition of 1860-61 holds a special place in Aussie hearts that few non-Australians can truly appreciate.
There [em]have[/em] in fact been several home-crowd movies about the four men who walked across a whole continent 145 years ago, and the astonishingly brave and tragic things that happened en route, but even here a great deal of mystery and misinformation clouds the story. The popular website HistoryHouse.com has respun the yarn, but its chuckling derision does no justice to the immense undertaking and its ramifications.

The state of Victoria was at the time a fledgling colony of the British Empire, established just nine years earlier. Melbourne itself was only just marking its first quarter century. Beyond the city limits was a “ghastly blank”. It’s been noted, rather picturesquely, that we know more about Pluto today than Melbourne’s citizens knew in 1860 about the land north of the nearby Darling River. But gold had just been discovered in the area, and there was likely more out there. It was agreed that a properly kitted-out group could find it, while at the same time advancing science, finding new grazing land and of course extending the colony’s boundaries.

Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills set out from Melbourne on the south coast with 19 men and the intention of exploring Australia’s unknown interior as far as the northern shore, a journey of 1,650 miles – 2,660 kilometres. They completed the trek north, getting as far as the swampland on the Gulf of Carpentaria, if not the actual coast, but bad decisions and worse luck resulted in the deaths of both Wills and Burke and five others on the return trip. Only one man, in fact, returned home alive, all the rest having bolted the expedition – or been jettisoned from it – at different times.

Off we go …

The Royal Society
This is the home on Melbourne’s La Trobe Street of the Royal Society of Victoria, which originated the idea of the Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE), as the Burke-Wills endeavour was originally called.
The committee in charge received 700 applications from would-be participants, and Burke interviewed 300 of them at the hall in just three hours on July 4, 1860 – then chose only people he knew.
Many planning sessions for the expedition took place at this hall, and as the day of departure approached, the men of the party signed a formal memorandum of understanding and heard a stirring farwell speech here, one of several given at various church and community-hall send-offs.

Castlemaine
There were several meetings and a slew of votes in the early months of 1860 before Robert O’Hara Burke was chosen as leader of the VEE – despite his complete lack of experience in such undertakings.

Born in County Galway, Ireland, in 1821, he’d been a captain in the Austrian dragoons. One source claims Burke had bolted in battle and been disgraced, but he left the army as a lieutenant in ‘47 and signed on with the Irish Mounted Constabularly. He immigrated to Australia in ‘53 and joined the Victorian Police, first at Carlsruhe, then Beechworth and finally – after a stint fighting in the Crimea – here in Castlemaine, where he was a popular if eccentric superintendent. A fellow policeman submitted Burke’s application to lead the VEE, calling him “a most active man and very strong, and is kind and gentle in his manners, but possessing a strong will, ambitious, and had been accustomed to command from boyhood”.

Burke’s selection as leader of the expedition was not unanimous – two professional explorers were on the final ballot – his choice had much to do with personal influence and political motivations. It’s been claimed that his corrupt former boss on the Castlemaine police force was on the selection panel.

Castlemaine, deterred from its ambition to have Burke’s remains buried here after the expedition, erected a monument to him, pictured below, on Wills Street, where the placemark rests. John King, the VEE’s sole survivor, attended the laying of the cornerstone in 1862.
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Flagstaff Gardens
William John Wills, born in Totnes, England, on January 5, 1834, had first been a shepherd when he migrated to Australia in ‘52, but three years later he began studying surveying and astronomy and moved to Melbourne to work at the magnetic observatory and weather station that was situated here until 1863 (interference from the surrounding buildings forced its relocation to the King’s Domain). Thus also knowledgeable in meteorology, Wills was named the expedition’s third-in-command, showing himself to be a quiet, hard-working individual, and one who always managed a good working relationship with Burke.

The original Flagstaff observatory was founded in 1858 by Georg Balthasar von Neumayer, a Bavarian-born member of the expedition committee who had been Wills’ employer. He accompanied the expedition as far as the Darling River, completing his magnetic survey of Victoria. He died in Germany in 1909.

Mechanic’s Institute
When Dr David Wilkie of the Royal Society (then called the Philosophical Institute) came up with the notion of a Victorian Exploring Expedition in 1857, a committee of esteemed persons met regularly at the Mechanic’s Institute on Collins Street – today it’s the Athenaeum. They weighed several options but settled on an ambitious push northward by land, with the aid of camels.
In 1858, wealthy local merchant Ambrose Kyte anonymously offered £1,000 to finance a fresh expedition if another £2,000 could be raised through donations. The offer was seized upon and George Landells was sent to India to buy camels for the campaign.

Construction of the Mechanic’s Institute was completed in 1842, when city council began meeting here. The Mechanic’s Institute became the Athenaeum in 1873, at first serving primarily as a library but in ‘96 hosting Australia’s first movie screening.

State Legislature
It took a year to raise the £2,000 in citizens’ donations needed to secure the £1,000 in expedition financing bid by Ambrose Kyte, and then the exploration committee applied for another £6,000 from the state government, which was approved by one of its own members, Sir William Stawell, Chief Justice of Victoria.

The camels arrive
The camels for the VEE came from Karachi (then of course still part of India), arriving here at Hobson’s Bay aboard the Chinsurah on June 13, 1860. They were paraded the next day across the Princess Bridge and down Swanston and Bourke Streets toward stables at Parliament House, inevitably creating a sensation at every turn.

The man who brought them to Australia, Landells, was subsequently named second-in-command of the VEE.
Some Melbournians had seen camels before, at George Coppin’s Cremorne Gardens pleasure park, and the expedition actually purchased 10 of his beasts to supplement those brought from India.

Princess Bridge
The VEE’s beasts of burden, herded across this bridge into downtown Melbourne, weren’t the first camels brought to Australia to expedite its colonisation.

In 1846 John Horrocks had imported nine dromedaries from the Canary Islands for his own exploratory venture into the interior. He found little of interest, and in fact managed to get shot by a camel in the process, while scouting Lake Torrens on the Spencer Gulf. He was loading his rifle to shoot a bird when the beast carrying him – a foul-tempered camel named Harry, sole survivor among its compatriots – jerked its pack into his trigger. The bullet took off one of Horrocks’ fingers before embedding in his cheek. Harry was killed by his unamused handlers; Horrocks died of infection three weeks later. Australian exploration was clearly not without danger.

Royal Park
The Burke-Wills Cairn in Melbourne’s Royal Park marks the beginning of the legendary journey. The monument has been here since in 1890, taking over commemoration duties from the tree that marked the actual departure point, which was originally fenced off in tribute. The cairn is 200 metres east of the tree.

It was here that the expedition party trained in shooting and camel husbandry, and where the stores were amassed for the excursion. The VEE set off at 4pm on August 20, 1860 – three hours later than planned, but there were many pats on the back to be received.

The Melbourne Herald: “At an early hour crowds of eager holiday folks, pedestrian and equestrian, were to be seen hieing along the dusty ways to the pleasant glades and umbrageous shade … Hour after hour passed in the preparations for starting. In the bustle of hurried arrangements, some very amusing contretemps occurred. One of the most laughable was the breaking loose of a cantankerous camel, and the startling and upsetting in the scatter of a popular limb of the law. The gentleman referred to is of large mould, and until we saw his tumbling feat yesterday, we had no idea that he was such a sprightly gymnast. His down-going and up-rising were greeted with shouts of laughter, in which he good-naturedly joined. The erring camel went helter-skelter through the crowd, and was not secured until he showed to admiration how speedily can go ‘the ship of the desert’.”

On their way
Burke fired another assistant for being “a little too hilarious through excess of beer”, but hired three more men on the spot.

Then, to the roars of some 15,000 citizens and a brass band playing “Cheer, Boys, Cheer”, the party marched north in the direction of the Sarah Sands Hotel, turned, traversed whole length of the park again and headed out the South Gate onto Flemington Road, thence to Mount Alexander Road and out of town. One wagon broke down before it had even left the park.

Moonee Ponds
By midnight of the first cold, wet day of the expedition, August 20, 1860, the half-kilometre caravan had only covered a few times its own length, reaching Essendon on the edge of Melbourne. Here two more wagons broke down, so the party set up camp at the town of Moonee Ponds, in what is now Queen’s Park.

Moonee Ponds and the municipality of Moonee Valley tend to be more famous today because the comedian Barry Humphries claims his alter ego, Dame Edna Everage, hails from here, but the locals shrug off his derision and take pride in their hometown’s cosmopolitanism – more than a third of the population of 110,000 were born overseas – its Maribyrnong Riverside park and, of course, its historic Queen’s Park.

Bolinda
In the VEE party were six Irishmen, four Englishmen, three Germans, an American, a South African and four Indian sepoys skilled at handling the 27 camels. They had 23 horses and six wagons laden with nearly 21 tonnes of gear, including six tonnes of firewood, ostensibly enough food for two years, but it’s been said they should have known from earlier outings that they were at least three tonnes short of supplies. And much of what they had, HistoryHouse.com sneers, was “absurdly new-fangled and ridiculously excessive. It included an oak table with cedar top, 12 dandruff brushes for camels, six pairs of tailor’s scissors and, incredibly, 10 pack saddles and 10 pairs of hobbles for oxen, even though they weren’t taking any oxen with them.”

Add to this a bathtub, a Chinese gong and a specially made branding iron designed to burn the letters B/VE, for Burke/Victorian Expedition, into tree trunks at campsites, a task that could be accomplished with a few strokes of an axe. Inflatable cushions and enema syringes probably quickly found their way onto the second-hand market somewhere en route.
Burke had stubbornly rejected Captain Francis Cadell’s offer to transport the supplies to Adelaide by ship up the Murray and Darling Rivers.

Baynton
Three days out, Becker noted in his journal, “the appearance of the sky was not at all of a cheering character. Before we reached Bolinda it commenced raining, and ere night had set in, it came down in torrents. No tea, no fire, we slept in the wet.” The camels, used to dry sand, were struggling on the boggy ground.

Mia Mia
Passing the village of Lancefield over the Great Dividing Range now called the Burke and Wills Track, the party halted for day of rest at Mia Mia, and Burke hired a new cook. Sightseers from Heathcote and Bendigo, who were well aware of the expedition and its ambitions, came out to see the camels.
“We are now at the Mia-Mia,” Wills wrote his father, “lying between McIvor and Castlemaine (a roadside public-house). We are all right enough, except as regards cleanliness, and everything has gone well, barring the necessary breakdowns and wet weather.”

Heathcote
In the VEE party at the outset were George Landells, in charge of the camels; William Wills, the surveyor; Hermann Beckler, medical officer and botanist; and Ludwig Becker, artist, naturalist and geologist.
American Charles Ferguson was named foreman, William Patton the blacksmith, John Drakeford the cook and Robert Fletcher the storekeeper. The other assistants were Thomas McDonough, Patrick Langan, Owen Cowan, William Brahe, John King and Henry Creher. Then there were four Indian sepoys to handle the camels they’d accompanied to Australia just for this purpose.

Bendigo
Samla, one of the four Indian sepoys on the expedition but the only Hindu, quit after the third day. The dietary restrictions of his faith prevented him from eating salted beef, the staple diet of the convoy. He suffered through two days with little to eat before obtaining permission to return to Melbourne. With four of the original recruits now departed, Burke took to hiring casual helpers and people with experience who offered their services. Of the other camel drivers, Belooch was a Parsee and Dost Mahomet and Essau Khan Muslims.

Terrick Terrick Plains
The explorers enjoyed more favourable weather as they crossed the Terrick Terrick plains north of Bendigo, but once again the rain became torrential as they approached Kerang, where they planned to cross the Lodden River. They were forced to rest at Tragowel, where the hospitality at the local lodgings of Mrs Booth and Mrs Holloway, who were expecting them, was much appreciated.
In November 1998, after 10 years as a state park, Terrick Terrick was declared a national park.

Tragowel
George Landells, pictured here, was engaged in the horse trade between Australia and India, and was well placed to import camels on his return trips. On the basis of his expertise with camels, he was appointed second-in-command to Burke, and even received a higher salary. His personality, however, was unsuited to his position, and particularly to a leader like Burke. Landells died in 1871.

William McDonough was reputed to have known Burke, or at least his family, in Ireland. He was hired for the expedition at £120 per annum. McDonough died in 1904 at the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum.

Kerang
The Loddon River, which the expedition crossed here at Kerang in late August, flows 392 kilometres from its headwaters in the Great Dividing Range near Daylesford, through Castlemaine to Swan Hill, where it meets the mighty Murray River.
Melbourne’s German community had been well represented on the expedition’s planning committee, and two German-Australians were among the officers appointed.

Hermann Beckler, 32, the botanical collector and doctor, wrote his own account in his native language. The manuscript remained with his family for nearly a century before being translated and published as “A Journey to Cooper’s Creek”. Melbourne University Publishing says it “offers insights into the causes of the expedition’s failure – an ill-chosen leader and route, and inappropriate and excessive supplies”.
A Bavarian, Beckler was a physician, botanist, zoologist and mineralogist who came to New South Wales in 1856 hoping to discover new plant species. He tended the men stricken with dysentery and scurvy but could do little since the cause was malnutrition. He returned to Germany in 1862 and was a village doctor until his death in 1914.

Dr Ludwig Becker was the expedition’s official artist, naturalist and geographer. Born in Darmstadt, Germany, he’d come to Australia in 1851 and become a prominent figure in Melbourne’s scientific and artistic circles. At age 52, he may have been too old for the difficult journey, but his seniority within the Royal Society seems to have secured him his place on the expedition. Regardless, his sketches of landscapes, people and wildlife from the journey represent an outstanding accomplishment on such a troubled adventure.

Swan Hill
Bogs and rain slowed the overloaded expedition’s initial progress across the state of Victoria. It reached Swan Hill, 320 kilometres from Melbourne, on September 6. A major factor stymying their advance was Landells’ decision at the outset to forego loading gear on the camels so they’d be fresh for the desert campaign ahead. Burke had hired three extra wagons in Melbourne, but the poor weather and roads obviously took their toll on the carriages.

Burke, already fretting about mounting expenses, sacked three men from the party here, lying that he’d send for them later. But he took on new hands, indicating it was more a matter of personal dislikes. As well, sepoy Esau Khan was too ill to carry on. Among those hired was Charles Gray, 52-year-old sailor who was working as an ostler at the Lower Murray Inn. Charlie Gray was an experienced bushman, having travelled with the Gregory brothers during their expeditions.
Waiting for Burke at Swan Hills was an urgent telegram – a warrant for his arrest, threatening him with imprisonment because one of his personal cheques had bounced, a serious offence in those days. Burke telegraphed friends back home to sort it out on his behalf.

Swan Hill got its name in 1838 from a surveyor who couldn’t get a decent sleep while camped here because the waterfowl, primarily black swans, never shut up. In 1853 Francis Cadell sailed his paddle steamer, Lady Augusta, up the Murray this far. The whole town came out to welcome him – all 12 of them. Their numbers swelled when a punt crossing was established, the only one on the Murray within 70 miles. The punt operated until 1896, when a bridge was built, about the time the photo below was taken.

Today visitors to the town of less than 10,000 enjoy the Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement, an vast open-air historical museum on the banks of the Little Murray River. It’s a reconstruction of a 19th-century river port where the staff wear period attire and kangaroos and peacocks stroll about. With a more genuine story to tell is the Burke and Wills Tree, an enormous Moreton Bay fig, the seed of which was planted by the explorers’ local host in 1860, one Dr Gummow. The tree, arguably the largest of its kind in the country, is marked here on Curlewis Street.
The Burke party crossed the Murray on September 11, 1860, and set off into New South Wales.

A camel caravan
The camels caused a great deal of trouble for their handlers. Ludwig Becker was lifted bodily off the ground by one that managed to get its teeth into the seat of his trousers. Even an experienced cameleer like Dost Mahomet was later permanently disabled when another similarly lifted and shook him. The explorers seem to have been unable to stop them from wandering at night, and many morning hours were wasted mustering them. Specially made camel shoes, to help the animals traverse stony ground, soon proved virtually impossible to fit.

Overall, however, the camels performed well, though HistoryHouse.com cited another source as insisting they “were wilful and mischievous, disappearing from time to time with varying levels of success … However, the real problem was that the camels were half pissed, that is to say, drunk. The expedition had taken some 60 gallons of rum for the camels, which, according to Landells, ‘revived’ them when they were tired and hungry. However, other members of the party took to ‘reviving’ themselves, and Burke went berserk when he found out.”
At one point, thinking their camels exhausted, the party allowed them to slip out of sight. The camels then kicked up their heels and ran all night, causing Wills to note dryly that “they were not quite so much done up as they appeared to be”.

Balranald
The expedition left Swan Hill after being feted like heroes, and arrived here on September 17. Its leaders had by now recognised the wisdom in proceeding more lightly, so the party dumped containers of lime juice, bags of sugar and rice and heavy tools. Burke also discharged a number of men, among them the foreman Ferguson, although not as many as he would have liked.
“Our journey so far has been very satisfactory,” Wills wrote to his mother. “We are most fortunate as regards the season, for there has been more rain this winter than has been known for the last four or five years. In fact, it seems probable that we shall finish our work in a much shorter period than was anticipated, very likely in 10 or 12 months.”

Balranald dates back to the late 1840s, when the area’s Commissioner for Crown Lands, George James McDonald, arrived at what was then just a tiny outpost and named it after his hometown in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

Mungo National Park
Balranald bills itself as “the gateway to Mungo National Park”, which was Australia’s first national park to be named a World Heritage site. A great crescent-shaped dune dubbed the Walls of China stretches along the eastern shore of Lake Mungo, and its erosion reveals 40,000 years of Aboriginal history. Between the park and the Great Cumbungi Swamp, photographers, birdwatchers and fishermen love this place.

Glancing about him at his fellow explorers, John King alone would return this way alve. The Irishman, 22, served in the British army and was in Peshawar in 1854 during the Indian mutiny. He met Landells there while convalescing from a fever and came with him and the camels to Australia.
His salary as a member of the expedition was £120 a year. He died of tuberculosis in 1872, still just aged 34.

Tarcoola
Sources differ over whether the expedition, still proceeding slowly across the rough ground, landed up at “Gambala” or “Gambanna”, but it was here on the Darling River, at a place called Phelps’ Tarcoola Station on September 24, where bickering over the best way to utilise the camels started to boil.
At the end of the month, against Landells’ objections, Burke decided to put some of the provisions onto the foreign beasts, which had thus far only carried the men, though he did not yet load the animals too heavily.
“From this time you have to give up your scientific investigations,” Burke told Becker and Beckler, and “work like the rest of the men as long as you are on the road or not free from your camp duties”. They’d have to jettison some of their scientific gear too, he said, ordering everyone to strip down to no more than 15 kilograms’ pack weight.

With Neumayer returned to Melbourne, the party was no longer regularly sending scientific reports back to the Royal Society, and Burke was showing his disinterest in such studies. Beckler’s medical supplies were likewise trimmed to a minimum.
It appears that Burke had an ulterior motive: He didn’t want Becker to reach the north coast because he was 52 and it would make the whole excursion seem too easy. “The first two days of [walking] nearly cooked poor B– and I think he will not be able to stand it much longer,” Burke wrote to a colleague in Melbourne.
Meanwhile the camels were suffering doubly because Burke had cut off their rum ration. Landells believed they needed it for warmth, as a stimulant and to ward off scurvy, but Burke was fed up with his men and the labourers at the shearing station totting their way through the supply. He dumped the remaining 60 gallons.

William Campbell opened the Tarcoola livestock run in 1848. Three years later it comprised 30,000 acres, enough grazing for 4,000 sheep. John Phelps took over in ‘57, and by 1882 it sprawled over more than a million acres. The house at Tarcoola is pictured here.
Here Burke’s party set up camp and loaded some of their wagons and gear onto the steamer Moolgewanke for transport on to Menindee.

Pooncarie
Progress on the deep, loose, red sand was little more than mile an hour, with dense overhanging thickets on the little-used trail clawing at the party and the wagons frequently getting stuck, necessitatng the unharnessing and reharnessing of horses from one to another. But in the first week of October, the party chose their Darling crossover at Bilbarka, near what is today the pretty township of Pooncarie.
The nattering over the camels came to a head when Landells insisted on transporting them across the river by boat, even though none was immediately available. Burke put Wills in charge of swimming the animals across, so Landells quit, and Beckler too in sympathy, though the latter agreed to stay on until they’d reached Menindee and a replacement could be found for him. Wills was abruptly named second-in-command.

European settlement of the Pooncarie district is believed to have begun in the 1840s, when settlers headed west to illegally graze livestock on vacant crown land between the Murrumbidgee and Lower Darling Rivers. Burke and Wills’ documentation of the place served to bring far more of them.

Pooncarie is also famous today for Kinchega National Park, which boasts glittering lakes in a dry landscape, with many waterbirds and massive river redgums.
The Darling is the longest river in Australia, flowing 2,739 kilometres from northern New South Wales to its confluence with the Murray River at Wentworth in the south. It was named in 1828 by the explorer Charles Sturt, in honour of his employer, the state’s governor Sir Ralph Darling. Today the river suffers from overuse of its waters, pollution from pesticide runoff and prolonged drought. In some years it barely flows at all.

Menindee
On October 15, two months and 750 kilometres out of Melbourne, the expedition at last reached Menindee – the mail coach regularly did that same distance in a week.

This was, by all accounts, the “edge of civilisation”. Burke’s worries about the slowness of his pace were compounded by the approach of summer, when travel in the interior would be difficult, if not impossible. As well, he knew the experienced explorer John McDougall Stuart was vying to be the first to cross the continent and might beat him.
So he split the group in two, in direct contradiction of the Royal Society’s order to take the whole party at least as far as Cooper’s Creek. After a few days’ rest at Thomas Pain’s hotel, he set out with seven men and a lightened load, aiming to move quickly to the Cooper and there wait for the others to catch up. With him was the new third-in-command, William Wright, who after a few drinks with Burke at the hotel, had had agreed to get the party as far as Torowotto Swamp, 200 miles to the north.

Wright was the manager of a sheep station at Kinchega on the west bank of the Darling, and an experienced bushman.
Captain Frances Cadell had his paddle steamer on the Darling and offered to transport the expedition’s stores upstream for £500, but Burke spurned the idea, still stung by Cadell’s opposition to his appointment as party leader. Burke plodded on, wearing out his animals and blowing his budget on wagons even as cheques from the Royal Society started to bounce and the men’s wages looked uncertain. At this stage he had only two of his original six officers remaining, and had sacked 15 men in all.

At Menindee the explorers had a base camp on Pamamaroo Creek from which the secondary party was to follow. It’s today marked by a plaque on a tree. But Burke and company spent their 11 weeks in Menindee in more comfortable digs at Pain’s pub, which he opened in 1853. Here Burke and Wills organised their supplies for a trip into the unknown, and for years afterward visitors would come to see their room and the arrow they supposedly carved in the door post indicating the direction they were headed next.
On October 19 Burke, Wills, Brahe, King, Gray, McDonough, Patton and Dost Mahomet left with 15 horses and 16 camels. The balance of the expedition party stayed for the next year.

The Yartla Street inn became known as the Maiden Hotel after the Maiden family bought it in 1879 (and held onto it for a century), and although a fire resulted in much of the building being razed in 1999, the hotel kept operating its historic bar out front as rebuilding proceeded. You can drop in for a pint to this day.
Menindee’s striking string of lakes draw local daytrippers, and tourists also might take in the spot where John Cleary briefly introduced the state’s first motorised postal service in 1910, then gave it up because it became too expensive to have a coach and horses follow him everywhere in case he broke down, as required in his contract. He switched back to horses.

Broken Hill
From Menindee to Cooper’s Creek was the most straightforward leg of the entire journey, even though the route formed a wide arc. The weather was good, and the recent rains provided plenty of water and lush grass. Having left the cumbersome wagons behind, the party began to make good progress. Leaving George Landells behind had also greatly improved Burke’s frame of mind.
Determined to make the most of the favourable conditions, Burke set a brisk pace – he did not allow the customary rest days, and often did not order a halt until well into evening.

Burke set out for Cooper’s Creek in high spirits. He was fortunate. The wet season had been extremely wet, and there was plenty of fodder for the animals. The weather was mild, topping 90F only twice. He allowed no rest days, and pushed his men from dawn until as late as 11pm. After 23 days he and his entourage reached Cooper’s Creek, with the loss of only one camel.
Burke and Wills got along admirably, and their harmony filtered down through the rest of the crew. But while Burke wrote to the committee that he had discovered valuable new pastoral land with plenty of water, Wills noted that there had been no permanent water for some 36 miles. This discrepancy should have tipped them off, but did not.

Totoyna
Actual location. Some of the expedition party, HistoryHouse.com says, “had never seen a day of the backcountry in their lives; some had mates on the committee, another secured his position by purchasing the necessary camels. They were ‘pre-eminently ignorant of frontier … or bush life, and subsequently wholly unfit for an expedition of that kind’.”

Kokriega
Actual location. “Riding on camels is a much more pleasant process than I anticipated,” Wills wrote a friend, “and for my work I find it much better than riding on horseback. The saddles, as you are aware, are double, so I sit on the back portion behind the hump, and pack my instruments in front, I can thus ride on, keeping my journal and making calculations. The animals are very quiet, and easily managed, much more so than horses.”

Botoja Claypans
Actual location. Alexander McPherson signed on as blacksmith, and also new was Englishman William Oswald Hodgkinson, 25, a former sailor who’d come to Australia in ‘51, serving the government on the goldfields, then in the year before the expedition reporting for the Melbourne newspaper The Age. He later moved to the Etheridge and Palmer goldfields, and in 1888 was elected to the Queensland parliament. He died of influenza in 1900 in Western Australia.

Naudtherungee Creek
Actual location. As the VEE’s navigator, Wills relied on dead reckoning and observation to determine their position from day to day and filled his notebooks with copious astronomical observations. His real challenge came on the leg from Cooper’s Creek to Carpentaria – terra incognita.

Torowotto Swamp
Actual location. Struggling past Mootwingee, through thunderstorms yet with little water and animal feed to be found, Burke’s spent 10 days reaching the Torowotto Swamp. On October 30 Wright, accompanied by Aboriginal trackers, returned to Menindee to bring up the remainder of the men and supplies and Burke continued on to Cooper’s Creek.

Cannilta Waterhole
With Landells gone, the job of tending to the camels fell to Irishman John King, 21, who had come to Australia with Landells and the camels aboard the Chinsurah. He knew little about the dromedaries, but his time in India meant he could speak the language of the sepoys.

Bulloo River
The party travelled to the east of Tibooburra and 40 kilometres to the east of what was to become Olive Downs. No giant monoliths dominated the landscape; it varied constantly, with an air of surprise hidden around almost every bend in the road. Wide open vistas broken by gum-lined creeks. Salty lakes set among sand hills. Dunes and swales running at odds with the prevailing winds.

Burke and his seven men – Wills, John King, Charlie Gray, William Brahe, Dost Mahomet, William Patton and Thomas McDonough – camped at what they called the Bulla Waterhole by the Bulloo River. Confusion arises because this is today Koorliatto, while the “Koorliatto Waterhole” mentioned in two of the men’s journals is far to the south. At the same time, there is a Bullah Bullah Waterhole near east of Boulia, far to the north on the expeditions route. Bulla bulla is the Aboriginal term for “butterfly”. The party next crossed the Gray Range to the Wilson River.

On June 22, 1977, gold prospector Albert Smith noticed three lights in the sky moving down toward him and then nestling in a clump of trees near his camp by the Bulloo River. He saw figures emerge amid dazzling lights. He claimed he was visited by people from another world over the next two days.

Camp 53
Pictured here, a waterhole on the Bulloo River.

Camp 54
From Wills’ journal: “From Camp 54 to Camp 55 we were obliged to take a very circuitous route on account of the rugged and stony nature of the ranges, which were more extensive than we had anticipated. They stretch away far to the north and north-northwest.” They trekked considerably farther north, mapping the availability of water and possible grazing land, before turning around and linking up with Cooper’s Creek.

Reaching the Cooper
Burke arrived at the red clay bank of Cooper’s Creek about three weeks after leaving Menindee, on November 11. Beyond lay utterly unexplored territory. Cooper’s Creek marked the edge of the land that had been explored thus far by Europeans. Captain Charles Sturt was here in 1845 and Augustus Charles Gregory in 1858.

Camp 58
From Wills’ diary: “From Camp 57 we traced the creek in a west-northwesterly direction about six miles. It then runs out among the sand hills, the water flowing by various small channels in a southwesterly direction. The main channel, however, continues nearly south until it is lost on an extensive earthy plain covered with marshmallows and chrysanthemums.”

Camp 63
With the recent rains, the area around the Cooper was in bloom with fertile pasture lands as far as the eye could see, and the local Aboriginals were camped along the creek. A plague of rats forced the explorers to shift downstream from here on December 6.

The Depot Camp
Actual location. Camp 65, which Burke marked with an “LXV” on a tree, was the become the pivotal juncture for the entire expedition, and a legend in its own right. For now, the men regarded it as just another resting place, and almost immediately began searching the area beyond the creek for northerly routes that promised a ready supply of fresh water. Wills and McDonough almost perished on one of these forays when they allowed their camels to wander off and were forced to return to camp on foot, a 48-hour hike.

Burke had the option of waiting until March and avoiding the summer heat, but, still panicked that John McDougall Stuart might reach the distant coast first and steal his glory, he changed his mind about waiting for Wright to bring up the rest of the men and supplies from Menindee and announced that he, Wills, King and Gray would set off promptly.
Burke’s despatch to the planning commmittee in Melbourne: “I did not intend to start so soon, but we have had some severe thunderstorms lately, with every appearance of a heavy fall of rain to the north … I do not wish to lose so favourable an opportunity. We are all in good health, and the conduct of the men has been admirable.”

The party divides
Burke’s quartet selected six of the 12 camels on hand and drew supplies for three months – 150kg of flour, 55 of dried beef, 45 of dried pork, 25 of biscuit, six of tea, three of salt and tins of preserved vegetables.
Mahomet, Patton and McDonough were left behind under the command of William Brahe.
On December 16, Wills wrote, they “started at 6.40am for Eyre’s Creek [and]
followed down the creek to the point where the sandstone ranges cross the creek”.

The rival’s progress
December 17: “We continued at first in a direction west-northwest for about 12 miles, then about northwest.”
Was Burke’s dreaded rival, John McDouell Stuart, pictured belore, a genuine threat? Stuart was an experienced explorer who had backing from the South Australia government and was setting out to beat Burke to the finish line on the north coast. The newspapers did a lot to incite rivalry between the two expedition headquarters in Victoria and South Australia. One paper published a poem, which, rather prophetically as it happened, stated:
Oh, Mr Burke ‘Tis risky work
To see the northern coast,
Then have a care Or else prepare
To be a desert ghost.
‘Mid sand and stones
You’ll leave your bones
‘Tis said, if all be true,
For says report,
You’re not the sort,
To take the party through.

Stuart (1815-66) had set out in March 1860 and travelled deep into the north before being forced to turn back by short supplies and hostile Aborigines. He returned to Adelaide in October, and in marked contrast to proceedings in Melbourne, had organised and set out on his next expedition within a month. When news of Stuart’s promising first attempt reached Melbourne in October 1860, Burke was at Menindee, and the exploration committee actually debated whether to pass this information on him. Several members were in favour of keeping him in the dark. Did they fear – correctly as it turned out – that Burke would do something rash, stung by the closeness of his rival?
But Stuart was still northbound when Burke and Wills reached the Carpentaria mangroves, then was again blocked by impenetrable scrub. Stuart’s third attempt in October 1861 was successful, and he returned to a banquet in his honour in Adelaide on January 21, 1862, the day Burke and Wills’ bones were being buried in Melbourne.

Camp 68
Burke and his companions were lucky in their choice of route, and in the weather – the rains were good, and fresh water was abundant. Their encounters with Aborigines were benign, and the terrain was not difficult. Despite these good conditions, after six weeks’ march northward from this spot – their projected time of return – they would still be far short of the northern coast.

Camp 69
“Leaving what seemed to be the end of Cooper’s Creek,” Wills wrote, “we took a course a little to the north of west, intending to try and obtain water in some of the creeks that Sturt mentioned that he had crossed, and at the same time to see whether they were connected with Cooper’s Creek … We left on our right the flooded flats on which this branch of the creek runs out, and soon came to a series of sand ridges …
“Our attention had been attracted by some red-breasted cockatoos, pigeons, a crow and several other birds, whose presence made us feel sure that there was water not far off; but our hopes were soon destroyed by finding a claypan just drying up. It contained just sufficient liquid to make the clay boggy.”

Camp 71
Wills described this spot as “one of the most delightful camps we have had in the journey”. They proceeded northwest by north across high ridges of loose sand, “many of which were partially clothed with porcupine grass”, then struck out across the vast Sturt Stony Desert.

Christmas
“We took a day of rest on Gray’s Creek to celebrate Christmas,” Wills wrote in his journal at Camp 72.
“This was doubly pleasant, as we had never, in our most sanguine moments, anticipated finding such a delightful oasis in the desert. Our camp was really an agreeable place, for we had all the advantages of food and water, attending a position of a large creek or river, and were at the same time free from the annoyance of the numberless ants, flies, and mosquitoes that are invariably met with amongst timber or heavy scrub.”

Camp 73
Leaving Gray’s Creek at 4.30am on Christmas Day, the party “proceeded to cross the earthy rotten plains in the direction of Eyre’s Creek”. This they soon found, and spent the night of the 26th on its bank.

Diamantina River
Burke’s four-man echelon found the going here easier than they’d expected after reading Sturt’s account of his 1845 trek. The stones of the Stony Desert didn’t extend too far, and they crossed with ease until, just south of the present-day town of Birdsville, they came across a branch of the Diamantina River, which they believed would provide the perfect route to the north coast. There would indeed be a ready supply of water, but problems would mount over the food supply, sore feet, disease and sheer exhaustion.

Little more than a pub and few houses today, Birdsville sits on the edge of the 176,500-square-kilometre Simpson Desert, at the northern reach of the notorious and dangerous Birdsville Track, but its sheer isolation lures hundreds of visitors each year. The Birdsville Hotel, built in 1884, is listed by the National Trust. It’s a mandatory stopover, and roars anew each September when the town’s spring races are held.

The poet Douglas Stewart lamented that Birdsville had “shrunk between two deserts on a ridge in the sun”. The “other” desert is the 30,000-square-kilometre Sturt Stony Desert to the southeast, named for the first European here, the explorer Charles Sturt.
In the 1870s a series of large livestock stations spread across the area, and the droving track to the west coast was hugely important until 1904, when interstate trade became tax-free and the cattle and sheep could use cheaper routes to the markets.
Originally called Diamantina Crossing, the town was renamed by the owner of Pandie Pandie Station, who was amazed by the diversity of feathered creatures in the area, including seagulls!

Camp 77
The intermittently flowing Diamantina River was named in 1866 by the explorer William Landsborough, in honour of the wife of Queensland’s first governor, Diamantina Roma Bowen.

Wright at Menindee
Meanwhile William Wright, who’d taken Burke as far as the Torowotto Swamp and was then sent back to Menindee to bring up the remainder of the men and supplies, discovered that Beckler had moved his camp to a more suitable spot at the junction of the Darling River and Pamamaroo Creek. This spot is marked to this day as the “Burke and Wills Campsite”, though those two never used it.
Wright dawdled, awaiting confirmation of his appointment from Melbourne. He wanted money for additional animals and gear, more meat to replace the jerked meat and biscuit that had gone rancid and his family put on a steamer to Adelaide. Hodgkinson left for Melbourne on December 19 to collect the money, arriving there at Christmas. The Royal Society held a special meeting on New Year’s Eve and approved a £400 grant for Wright to buy horses and sheep. Hodgkinson was back in Menindee by January 9.

Brahe at the Depot
Meanwhile, back at the Cooper’s Creek Depot, the temperature was rising and Brahe and his waiting men were forced to take their horses and camels further and further away to find feed, all the while keeping watch for inquisitive natives who might wish to pilfer supplies.

A German, Brahe had come to Victoria in 1852 to work on the goldfields and was an experienced handler of cattle, horses and wagons. Burke’s precise orders to him upon his departure later became a matter of intense controversy. Burke was too slovenly to put a detailed order in writing, by one account, simply illiterate by another, and his verbal instructions were interpreted differently by several listeners. Brahe insisted he’d been told to wait three months or for as long as his own supplies lasted, and after that would be free to return to Melbourne.

Wright stalled at Menindee
In early January, Wright – still mustering relief supplies for Burke – was approached by a pair of mounted troopers sent from Melbourne to track down Burke. Given fresh directions, the troopers headed north to the Torowotto Swamp, accompanied by an Aboriginal guide named Dick. Five weeks later Dick staggered back into camp and told Beckler that the troopers were stranded at Torowotto, their horses dead. Beckler, the sepoy Belooch and an Aboriginal named Peter set out to rescue them, returning with the troopers safe on January 15. By this time much of the surface water around their campsite was rapidly drying up.

Roseberth Station
Burke et al were moving northeast along the Diamantina, past what is today Roseberth Station, but it was “trending considerably towards the east without much likelihood of altering its course”, Wills wrote, so they “struck off from it, taking a 10 days’ supply of water, as there were ranges visible to the north, which had the appearance of being stony.

A northeast by north course was first taken for about seven miles in order to avoid them.”
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The Historical Society
The Burke Wills Historical Society notes: “The actual route Burke and Wills followed once they left Camp 78 is unknown and one of the most intensely debated issues. Wills’ map and some of his journals containing astronomical observations have been lost. Because the journals have never been transcribed, it means the expedition’s track north of the Diamantina, through the gibber rises, confused sand dunes and extensive claypans, is a matter for conjecture.”
The BW expedition remains an inspiration for many Australians who actively pursue their enthusiasm, such as the Burke & Wills Historical Society Inc, some of whose members are pictured below. This organisation was founded in April 2005 after individuals who had separately been retracing the explorers’ steps and relocating specific sites mentioned in their accounts assembled several dozen authorities on the subject at a conference in Cloncurry.

With a membership hailing from across the country and including surveyors, historians, researchers and scientists, the society’s second annual gathering that year featured a two-day trek through the outback from Birdsville to Bedourie, along a section of the expedition route that remains a matter of conjecture since Wills’ maps and journals of the day were lost. Society members ruminated on the likely path during Happy Hour at the Birdsville Hotel and around campfires by the Diamantina River. The mayor of Diamantina Shire showed them the juts-discovered remains of a camel possibly old enough to be one of the six Burke and Wills used.
To see their own website, click here.

Camp 85
Encountering far less water than they’d hoped for, Burke and his men were relieved to come across “a creek of considerable dimensions” and stayed for the night. “I should have liked this camp to have been in a more prominent and easily recognisable position,” Wills noted, “as it happens to be almost exactly on the Tropic of Capricorn.”
They’d reached what became known as the Burke River (the Wills River is 14 kilometres upstream), near the present-day town of Boulia, and continued north along the 140th meridien of longitude.

A sign at the entrance to Boulia invites tourists to fill their waterbags at the spots where Burke and Wills once did. The town has been grazing territory almost since they departed, but the tourists supplement the local economy, lured not just by the legend and the rugged landscape but by the Min Min Encounter, a recently built attraction capitalising on the eerie phenomenon called the Min Min Lights, said to haunt travellers hereabouts.

Camp 88
On January 8, Wills recorded that they’d left camp “with a load of water, determined to be independent of all creeks and watercourses”. The next camp they left “without water, trusting to get a supply of water from the rain that fell during the thunderstorm”.

The roar of insects
“Last evening we had been nearly deafened by the noise of the cicadariae,
and but for our large fires should have been kept awake all night by the mosquitoes.” The explorers’ worries about dwindling water supplies eased the next day when, “in the excitement of exploring fine, well-watered country, [we] forgot all about the eclipse of the sun until the reduced temperature and peculiarly gloomy appearance of the sky drew our attention to the matter”.

Phosphate Hill Mine
January 14 found the explorers at Camp 94, just east of what is today Phosphate Hill Mine. King wrote in his journal of “picturesque and pastoral country. Extensive amphitheatres were richly carpeted with succulent grasses, while the hills which enclosed them were lightly timbered with the mallee scrub, as likewise with the native orange tree.”

But the group was now entering rugged hill country heading toward the mountains south of Cloncurry. On January 15, King wrote that they were “still threading our way among the ranges, creeping round their spurs wherever practicable”. The next day Wills climbed a mountain looking for gap “but the attempt was ineffectual”.
Australia gets all of its commercial phosphate from Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean and this one domestic mine.

Termite high-rises
Pushing mostly due north toward the Standish Ranges, the party crossed “a splendid flat” traversed by well-watered creeks lined with white gum trees. Large ant hills are very numerous; they vary in height from two and a half to four feet.”

Camp 98
“The plain became everywhere stony, being scattered over with quartz pebbles,” Wills wrote in his journal, “and a little further on we came to low quartz ranges. At about five miles we crossed a creek with a sandy bed, which has been named Green’s Creek. There were Blacks not far above where we crossed, but we did not disturb them … [Later again] we surprised some Blacks – a man who, with a young fellow apparently his son, was upon a tree, cutting out something; and a lubra with a piccaninny.
“The two former did not see me until I was nearly close to them, and then they were dreadfully frightened. Jumping down from the trees, they started off, shouting what sounded to us very like ‘Joe, Joe’. Thus disturbed, the lubra, who was at some distance from them, just then caught sight of the camels and the remainder of the party as they came over the hill into the creek, and this tended to hasten their flight over the stones and porcupine grass.”

Duchess
Burke’s party climbed the Selwyn Range at Ohara’s Gap, north of today’s town of Duchess, then descended to Turner’s Creek. It was precipitous terrain, and in one of his infrequent journal entries, Burke noted the “camels sweating profusely from fear”.

The hamlet of Duchess boomed with the copper rush of the late 1890s and by 1904 its mine far outproduced even neighbouring Cloncurry’s Great Australian Mine. Duchess was revitalised when phosphate was discovered to the south in the 1960s.

Camp 104
Burke’s stop on January 22 may well have been in the vicinity of the Cloncurry Mine, shown here. Cloncurry itself, just to the north, is today a quiet outback township, but this is where copper was first discovered, and it quickly became western Queensland’s most important transportation centre for the mineral, a distinction it held until the 1920s when the bottom fell out of the copper market. This is also where the first regular Qantas flight landed, and where John Flynn established his first Flying Doctor base.
Burke and Wills were the first Europeans seen here, their visit on January 22 marked by a monument at the side of the Flinders Highway between Cloncurry and Duchess. Burke named the Cloncurry River, by one account after his “cousin Lady Elizabeth Cloncurry”, by another “my old friend Lord Cloncurry”.

Cloncurry
The township took the name Cloncurry, from the river named by Burke, when it was surveyed and gazetted in 1876. Burke’s waterbottle is on display at the Mary Kathleen Memorial Park and Museum, located approximately here on McIlwraith Street. Mary Kathleen was a uranium-mining town nearby in the late 1950s that didn’t last long, its attributes being auctioned off.
The search for Burke brought explorer John McKinlay to the area. He noted traces of copper, but it was prospector Ernest Henry who, in 1867, discovered rich deposits. Visitors can tour the long-defunct Great Australian Mine south of Cloncurry, where the labourers included many Chinese and Afghans, as attested by theitr individual cemeteries within the town.

Wright gets moving
On January 26, after considerable delays and prevarication, William Wright’s party set out for Cooper’s Creek with fresh supplies for the expedition. Their progress was painfully slow, the animals freshly broken in and uncooperative and water hard to find. North of the Torowotto Swamp they had to follow Burke’s three-month-old tracks to the Cooper. Vermin, hostile natives and the heat influenced the camps’ names: Desolation Point, Mud Plain, Rat Point. By the time they reached the Koorliatto Waterhole on the Bulloo river, Becker, Charles Stone and William Purcell were desperately ill.

The Australian National Botanic Gardens takes some consolation from the men’s suffering in Beckler’s discovery here of the Barrier Range Wattle, Acacia beckleri, one of 475 items the botanist collected between Swan Hill and Koorliatto Creek. Compare that to the 40 specimens Beckler was able to gather beyond the 30th parallel after Beckler became too busy tending to sick companions.

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Camp 105
Wills wrote that the party set out from here on January 27 just past 2am, following the bends of the Cloncurry River by moonlight.

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It could have ended here
The expedition was stymied at leaving Camp 110 on January 30 when the camel named Golah couldn’t make it across the bed of the creek they were following. They tried several places, then decided to leave him behind – the struggling, Wills recorded, “had separated King from the party, which became a matter for very serious consideration when we found Blacks hiding in the box trees close to us”.

This day the group reached the east-west track marked by the explorer August Gregory in 1856, thereby fulfilling the VEE’s official responsibility – to find grazing land this far north of the Cooper. Burke could have very well headed straight home, honour intact and duty done. But despite the fact that this was the his point of no return – only enough food remained to get back to Cooper’s Creek if they turned around now – they continued on, Burke bent on heroism, though dependent on luck.

Camp 118
The broaching of yet another mountain range at a place the Burke party called King’s Gap ended at Corella Creek, which they followed northward from January 21 to February 9. Wills determined that they were approaching the Gulf of Carpentaria and announced they were “in the country that had been discovered by Mr Gregory and other previous explorers”.
But the wet season had arrived and the going was dreadful, the men frequently knee-deep in floodwaters and the camels floundering in mud.

At the Flinders
On February 9, Burke and Wills reached the juncton of the Bynoe and Flinders rivers. Misled by damaged equipment, Wills thought they were on the Albert River, 100 kilometres to the west, but regardless, the water was salty and showed a strong tidal rise and fall, so the explorers knew they were near the sea.

Camp 119 was officially the expedition’s northernmost. At this point Burke decided he and Wills would push alone to the coast with just his horse, named Billy, and three days’ provisions. King and Gray stayed behind with the five remaining camels, which “could scarcely be got along”, as Wills wrote.

A horse with no legs
“Our first difficulty was in crossing Billy’s Creek, which we had to do where it enters the river, a few hundred yards below the camp. In getting the horse in here, he got bogged in a quicksand bank so deeply as to be unable to stir, and we only succeeded in extricating him by undermining him on the creek’s side, and then lugging him into the water. Having got all the things in safety, we continued down the river bank, which bent about from east to west, but kept a general north course. A great deal of the land was so soft and rotten that the horse, with only a saddle and about 25 pounds on his back, could scarcely walk over it. At a distance of about five miles we again had him bogged in crossing a small creek, after which he seemed so weak that we had great doubts about getting him on. We, however, found some better ground close to the water’s edge, where the sandstone rock crops out, and we stuck to it as far as possible.”

A banquet of yams
Burke and Wills floundered across several miles of bogs before discovering an Aboriginal track by which “we got on much better, for the ground was well trodden and hard. At rather more than a mile, the path entered a forest through which flowed a nice watercourse, and we had not gone far before we found places where the Blacks had been camping.

“The forest was intersected by little pebbly rises, on which they had made their fires, and in the sandy ground adjoining some of the former had been digging yams, which seemed to be so numerous that they could afford to leave lots of them about, probably having only selected the very best. We were not so particular, but ate many of those that they had rejected, and found them very good.”

Surprised Aborigines
“About half a mile further we came close on a black fellow, who was coiling up by a camp fire, whilst his gin and piccaninny were yabbering alongside. We stopped for a short time to take out some of the pistols that were on the horse, and that they might see us before we were so near as to frighten them. Just after we stopped, the black got up to stretch his limbs, and after a few seconds looked in our direction. It was very amusing to see the way in which he stared, standing for some time as if he thought he must be dreaming, and then, having signalled to the others, they dropped on their haunches, and shuffled off in the quietest manner possible.
“Near their fire was a fine hut, the best I have ever seen, built on the same principle as those at Cooper’s Creek, but much larger and more complete: I should say a dozen Blacks might comfortably coil in it together. It is situated at the end of the forest towards the north, and looks out on an extensive marsh, which is at times flooded by the sea water. Hundreds of wild geese, plover and pelicans, were enjoying themselves in the watercourses on the marsh, all the water on which was too brackish to be drinkable, except some holes that are filled by the stream that flows through the forest. The neighbourhood of this encampment is one of the prettiest we have seen during the journey.”

Northernmost camp
Battling up the swamplands alongside the Flinders River, Wills wrote: “Proceeding on our course across the marsh, we came to a channel through which the sea water enters. Here we passed three Blacks, who, as is
universally their custom, pointed out to us, unasked, the best part down. This assisted us greatly, for the ground we were taking was very boggy. We moved slowly down about three miles and then camped for the night; the horse Billy being completely baked. Next morning we started at daybreak, leaving the horse short hobbled.”

The Flinders River is the longest in Queensland, rising in the Gregory Range and entering the Gulf of Carpentaria 520 miles through two mouths, the Bynoe being the other. It was named for the English navigator Matthew Flinders by Captain John Stokes of HMS Beagle.

Almost the sea
Burke and Wills advanced 15 miles in all from Camp 119 before admitting defeat. They scratched the letter “B” into a tree and turned around.
Burke wrote in his notebook during the trek back, “It would be well to say that we reached the sea but we could not obtain a view of the open ocean, although we made every endeavour to do so.”

By the time Burke and Wills had been as close to the coast as possible and returned, all four men were showing signs of dire privation. Flailing at clouds of mosquitoes, Burke ordered King to mark 15 trees around Camp 119 and they abandoned all non-essential items. They had enough food left for five weeks, but knew it would take them 10 weeks to get back to Cooper’s Creek.

A pair of GE forum co-browsers gave me a lift: LuciaM provided a camel (image) and an Aussie who goes bt the moniker Ozlingula came up with some fair dinkum navigating cause he’s, like, been there, right? The Google Earth post is here. Links for more information appear at the end of Part 2.