ROBERT O’HARA BURKE
While Livingstone and then Stanley fought their way through the uncharted geography of the African continent, a comparable blankness of interior stared back at European cartographers of Australia. Though the heartland was yet unmapped, coastal colonization was booming. The 1850s were the gold-rush years of Australia: multiple discoveries of goldfields in Victoria drew huge numbers of migrants to the region, swiftly making Melbourne Australia’s largest city, growing from 29,000 inhabitants in 1851 to 139,916 in 1861. Melbourne’s new wealth stimulated not only great municipal growth but also ambition for international prestige. By 1855 the Australian Overland Telegraph Line was a national project in development, intended to connect Australia to the new telegraph cable in Java and on to Europe. The network would most likely run through the centre of the Australian continent, but this was an interior almost completely unexplored by Europeans, though not for lack of effort. A four-man exploration of the northern territory led by Prussian explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt had disappeared along with their two Aborigine guides in 1848 (a mystery that remains unsolved), and in the same year Edmund Kennedy was speared to death by Aborigines near the banks of the Escape River, 20 miles (32km) from the Cape York Peninsula he had been sent to investigate.
The Explorer Robert O’Hara Burke, by William Strutt (c.1860), an artist who accompanied Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills on part of their exploration.
To succeed where these had failed, in 1859 the Royal Victorian Society drew up plans for the ‘Victorian Exploring Expedition’, with £9,000 of the budget contributed by the public. The selection of Irishman Robert O’Hara Burke to lead the expedition was an unusual choice as he had no experience in exploration or bushcraft, but he charmed the equally inexperienced committee, and likely it was thought that the appointment of the surveyor and navigator William John Wills as third-in-command would compensate. The decision would prove catastrophic.
Waved off by a 15,000-strong crowd, Burke embarked with his expedition of fifteen men and twenty-five Karachi camels from Melbourne on 20 August 1860, heading for the Gulf of Carpentaria on the north coast. Arguments broke out almost immediately. On top of the wretched weather, difficult roads and failing wagons, there was William Landells, Burke’s second-in-command, to deal with, who refused to stop giving rum to the cameleers (and the camels, in equal measure). Landells soon quit, Wills was promoted, and the party marched on to camp on the Darling river at Menindee in October after 400 miles (644km). It had taken them two months to make a journey regularly done by the mail coach in little more than a week. Burke had heard about a rival effort to make a south–north overland crossing, led by John McDouall Stuart and so decided to split his party into an advance group with the stronger horses and fittest men, and a slower rearguard to follow them to Cooper’s Creek, the appointed halfway mark in central Australia. Aided by unseasonably mild weather, Burke’s advance party reached the camp on 11 November, swiftly relocating to nearby Bullah Bullah Waterhole after they were plagued by rats.
This was as far as Europeans had ever reached. Initially the plan was to wait out the scorching summer and leave in autumn (March) the next year, but Stuart’s rivalry was ever on Burke’s mind, and in a rash move he decided to strike out with his advance group for the north coast on 16 December, ordering the rest of the men to remain behind at Cooper’s Creek to wait three months for their return. Burke, Wills, John King and Charles Gray went on ahead with six camels, one horse and supplies for three months, plunging into the northern summer temperatures that regularly hit 122°F (50°C) in the shade. They followed waterholes and reached the modern settlement of Boulia, continuing on to cross the Tropic of Capricorn. ‘The frame of man’, wrote Burke in his journal at this point, ‘never was more severely taxed.’ After fighting through ‘soft and rotten’ country, two months after their departure from Cooper’s Creek they found their way blocked by marshes and mangrove swamps. They had no boat to navigate these, and with supplies running low, in frustration they decided to turn back.
Gradually the group began to disintegrate. Three of the camels were shot and eaten, and by 4 April Billy the horse was also killed for his meat. They shed their equipment piece by piece along the way, and resorted to eating portulaca (moss roses) for nourishment. When Gray was discovered stealing group rations, he was badly beaten by Burke. Gray died just under a month later from dysentery. Severely weakened, the remaining three managed to reach Cooper’s Creek on the evening of 21 April 1861, only to discover the rear party, led by William Brahe, had abandoned the camp after waiting a month longer than ordered. Burke and his men found a blaze (marking) left on a tree for them, in which Brahe recorded the date of their departure: 21 April 1861. (They had missed them by only nine hours.)
Wills and King proposed heading south, retracing their path from Menindee in the hope of catching up with Brahe, but Burke overruled them and made the extraordinary decision to instead head southwest through 150 miles (240km) of desert to a remote police outstation near Mount Hopeless. Unbeknown to them Brahe had been struggling with guilt over abandoning his post, and hurried back to Cooper Creek to check for signs of the Burke party – tragically Burke hadn’t left his own blaze on the tree, and so Brahe left again.
Meanwhile, in the Strzelecki Desert, Burke, Wills and King had run out of supplies and had shot their last camel. Aboriginal tribesmen came to their aid, but Burke took a shot at one he thought was stealing, and the group fled. Soon, Wills could no longer walk. Burke and King left him with some food, and continued along the Cooper. After two days, Burke succumbed, and King returned to Wills but found he had also died. King survived with the help of Aborigines, and was eventually rescued by the anthropologist Alfred William Howitt, who also buried Burke and Wills before returning to Melbourne.
Though the shambolic mission had ended in tragedy, much detail of the Australian interior was added to the map as a result. The theory of an inland sea was proved false, and in fact the mangroves that had blocked their way to the north coast were found to be tidal, meaning they had technically succeeded in their mission. Howitt was sent back to recover the bodies, and on 21 January 1863 Burke and Wills were celebrated with a state funeral in Melbourne attended by 40,000 people.
