Eighteen
From Inertia to Overkill

‘The Aboriginals, within the limits set by their particular terms of inquiry, use and explanation, knew it all. We, in our quite different terms, can never finally know it.’

Ray Ericksen

By March 1861, nothing had been heard from Burke since his departure from Menindee five months earlier. In official circles, there was little concern. The Royal Society was still confident in its belief that the expedition was a self-sufficient enterprise, furnished with every conceivable luxury. In fact, having given Wright the money to purchase extra horses, the committee didn’t bother to meet at all in January of 1861. The members stirred themselves twice in February to audit their finances but otherwise they sat back and waited to hear of Burke’s victory over Stuart. It was a conquest they all saw as inevitable.

The press too seemed unperturbed. After the ructions in Menindee and Landells’ resignation, many journalists expected the expedition to break up completely. Some thought that crossing the continent ‘might as well be left to Stuart’ and the Argus ominously declared: ‘Unless a light serviceable party is formed out of the present unwieldy expedition, we shall see them in Melbourne shortly; or, perhaps, not at all.’ So reports that Burke had pushed on towards the Cooper with a lighter party were interpreted as good news. The papers assumed the intrepid Irishman was now too far north to send any further dispatches back to Melbourne.

But not everyone was so convinced of Burke’s safety. In March, William Wills’ father started calling for a rescue party to be sent out. Most people regarded Dr Wills senior as a meddling nuisance but his cause was taken up by William Lockhart-Morton, an amateur explorer who had been passed over for leadership of the expedition. Morton attacked the Royal Society remorselessly for its inactivity. In a letter to the Argus, he demanded to know: ‘What has become of the expedition? Surely the committee are not alive to the necessity of sending some one up? Burke has by this time crossed the continent, or is lost. What has become of Wright? What is he doing?’

Whispers began to circulate throughout Melbourne society that Julia Matthews (who continued to beguile Melbourne with her seductive theatre performances) had approached several newspaper editors to lobby for Burke’s rescue. The Argus responded in April by joining the call for a relief party, adding that the public was losing confidence in a Royal Society ‘yet to earn a name for skill in the management of its own or other affairs’. Georg Neumayer jumped to the Society’s defence. He admitted it was ‘rather strange’ that no one had heard from Burke, but he insisted that there was no need to send a rescue boat to the north coast.

In an age of mobile phones, satellite tracking and twenty-four-hour news bulletins, it is difficult to imagine just how remote the expedition was, but it might as well have been in another galaxy. No one in Melbourne could have known that the continent had been crossed at such a heavy price. As rumours and recriminations rumbled around Melbourne, Burke, Wills and King were drifting helplessly along the Cooper, wondering why no one had turned up to save them. It was June 1861 before the Royal Society took any action.

Of course nothing could happen before the establishment of a sub-committee. Just to be on the safe side, the Exploration Committee set up two—the first to organise an overland party, the second to investigate sending a vessel to the north coast. Another undignified squabble ensued about who should lead the relief expeditions. For the overland mission, some factions favoured Neumayer, while others resurrected the name of George Landells. The camel-trader was now ‘loafing about’ in Melbourne, ‘shunned by everyone’, but anxious as ever to claim the moral high ground by charging to Burke’s rescue. The wrangling continued for several days and then produced a surprising result—a highly suitable candidate.

Alfred Howitt had spent several years surveying and prospecting for gold as far afield as Lake Eyre, without ever losing a man. He was experienced, calm, practical, determined and, to the committee’s delight, he was also a Victorian and a gentleman. He was so well qualified that many people lamented the fact that he had not been around to lead the original expedition. The committee instructed Howitt to make his way to the Cooper to see if he could find any trace of the lost explorers. It hoped his journey would be ‘characterised by prudence, caution and energy’.

Howitt made meticulous preparations. ‘As to the difficulties and dangers,’ he wrote, ‘I feel so thoroughly up to my work and I have so carefully chosen and examined the quality—even the smallest article of our outfit…that I have my mind easy on that score.’ The public was fascinated with the rescue operation. Offers of help flooded in. One man suggested that he might supply a large tank mounted on a tower next to the Darling so water could be fed down a long hose out into the desert; another wanted to dispatch a hot air balloon to survey the land ahead. Howitt ignored these flights of fancy but he did avail himself of a less ambitious innovation. Amongst his supplies, a small basket of carrier pigeons settled themselves down for the journey to the Cooper.

There was no time to lose. ‘My last week had been occupied from morning to night,’ Howitt scribbled, ‘running about pushing on arrangements—from saddlers to ironmongers—from tinsmiths to tentmakers etc etc…’ In an astonishing feat of organisation, he left Melbourne on 26 June 1861, a week after the committee appointed him. There were no marching bands, no cheering crowds, no cavorting camels or prancing packhorses. Howitt caught a train at Spencer Street station, bound for Bendigo. From there he would take the coach to Swan Hill, where he would pick up horses and supplies.

Howitt took just three men: Edwin Welch, his surveyor, and two old hands from previous journeys, Alexander Aitken and William Vinning. They carried with them a satchel of letters for Burke. Most were official dispatches from the Exploration Committee, but one was more personal:

Dear Sir,

It is with fear I now address you but I hope my fears will soon be allayed by hearing of you safe and sound. Everything in Melbourne is very dull at present (except the parliament) which is all afire. The crisis has arrived. There is no ministry and Parliament is dissolved. Hoping my dear Sir that you and all your party are safe, that you met with a pleasant journey & good feed which is a great thing in travelling, my dear sir I dare say you almost forget me but if you scrape your various reminiscences of the past, you will recollect the laughing joyous &c.

Cupid

PS My sincere regards to you; all the citizens in Melbourne join in love to you, bless your little heart. C.

In this awkward letter, Julia Matthews attempted to send some comfort to her lover. He would never know that she had not forgotten him.

Three days after leaving Melbourne, Alfred Howitt stopped for refreshment at a coaching inn called the Durham Ox on the Loddon River. A few minutes later, a weatherbeaten young man entered the bar, looking for him. It was William Brahe.

The unflappable Howitt, an accomplished bushman, had often joked before the expedition, ‘I’ll have to rescue Burke yet.’

He poured out the saga of Burke’s dash north into the desert, his own retreat from the Dig Tree and Wright’s disastrous attempts to provide relief. Burke and his three companions were missing, presumed dead. Howitt was horrified. He abandoned his journey north and prepared to return to Melbourne.

A telegraph from Howitt forewarning the Royal Society of Brahe’s news reached John Macadam late on Saturday 29 June. For the rest of the weekend, reports of the expedition’s demise swept through the city. The press speculated on the ‘wildest rumours of death and disaster’, predicting that Burke’s entire party had been ‘dissipated out of being, like dewdrops before the sun’. Forced into crisis management, the Exploration Committee convened an emergency meeting on Sunday 30 June, after which it insisted that all was not lost. Sir William Stawell declared publicly that Burke’s disappearance could be ‘accounted for on many grounds…His men might be knocked up with scurvy, or he might be in some place which it was not advisable to leave until the rainy season set in.’

In the light of this optimistic assessment, it seemed sensible for Howitt to resume his rescue mission immediately, but yet again the Royal Society choked itself with unnecessary complications. As Wills lay dying on the Cooper waiting ‘like Mr Micawber for something to turn up’, the Exploration Committee was doing a fair impersonation of the Circumlocution Office down in Melbourne. Matters were referred up and down through committees and sub-committees. All the time, Howitt sat helpless while the days slid past. It was 4 July before he was authorised to rejoin his men in Swan Hill.

Recognising that so far their expeditions tended to return far smaller than they set out, the Exploration Committee ordered Howitt to take plenty of men in case of scurvy or attack by the Aborigines. Once more, Landells felt ‘honour bound’ to volunteer, ‘out of deep solicitude for the lost party’. Despite promising (or threatening) that he was the only man who could restore all the camels to full health, his offers were rebuffed. ‘If Mr Landells was the only man who could manage the camels,’ Sir William Stawell declared, ‘it was a singular thing…that he should leave Mr Burke to be sacrificed in the manner he had done.’

Once Howitt was on his way, attention returned to the oceangoing rescue mission. Neumayer stood by his promise and offered to sail to the Albert River at once. At first his proposal was welcomed. Politicians like William Stawell and Thomas Embling realised the voyage would also provide a crafty opportunity to survey a site for a northern port, thus strengthening Victoria’s claim to the land to the west of Queensland.

Aware of these ulterior motives, the Queensland government became unusually enthusiastic about looking for Victoria’s lost explorers. It was no coincidence that its candidate to lead a rescue mission was Frederick Walker, a bushman of renowned ruthlessness who, amid campaigns against the local Aboriginal population and drinking bouts of legendary proportions, had opened up huge areas of central Queensland for pastoralists. Neumayer was incensed at being sidelined and renewed his campaign to lead the rescue.

In a surprise intervention, it was Ferdinand Mueller who helped to sway the decision in Walker’s favour. The government botanist had ignored many of the fiascos of the past few months, attending just one committee meeting since the expedition had left Melbourne. Now he re-entered the fray ‘solely from a sense of duty’ and split the committee down the middle. The Victorian government was forced to intervene to break the deadlock. The politicians chose Walker—it was a curious move given their territorial ambitions but they probably wanted to save money more than anything else.

The Exploration Committee compounded its ineptitude by handing complete control of Walker’s expedition to the Queensland government. Realising that this was tantamount to giving ‘a bunch of sheep farmers’ a foothold in one of the most valuable portions of northern Australia, Sir William Stawell exploded. If the Exploration Committee ‘were not fit for the responsibilities of their position’, he thundered, ‘they should retire from that position at once’. With this one careless gesture, Victoria threw away its chance to secure a northern port and change the political map of Australia forever. After such a huge investment in the expedition, it was squandering its hard-won advantage in order to save money in the short term. Only Sir William Stawell seemed to recognise the magnitude of the mistake.

Seizing the chance to consolidate its territory, Queensland appointed not one but two parties. Walker would travel overland from Rockhampton towards the Gulf of Carpentaria. Pastoralist William Landsborough would sail north aboard the Victoria (supplied from Melbourne), then land in the Albert River region and travel south.

As the colonial governments clamoured to assist, the South Australians couldn’t contain their glee. They announced that £1200 would be made available for a rescue mission from Adelaide, with the Register adding that ‘where life was at stake, they felt obliged to do all in their power to relieve those who stood in need of help’. Nothing had been heard from their man, John McDouall Stuart, since he had left the Flinders Ranges in January 1861, but the South Australians were confident he would be nearing the north coast by now. In Stuart’s absence, they turned to another Scotsman to lead their rescue party. John McKinlay was a giant of a man with twenty years’ experience in the bush and an uncanny talent for self-preservation. He was given as his deputy William Hodgkinson, the journalist and former member of Burke’s party, along with five other men, twenty-four horses, four camels, several bullock carts and a flock of sheep. McKinlay was to travel to the east of Lake Eyre up to Cooper Creek and beyond, if circumstances permitted. He left from Gawler to the north of Adelaide on 16 August 1861 after a pigeon-shooting competition and a champagne lunch at the local pub.

After months of apathy, everyone was striving to outdo one another in the humanitarian stakes. There were now four rescue parties heading in Burke’s direction from all points of the compass. But the rampant incompetency and petty squabbling that had preceded their organisation left the public and the press disillusioned. The Leader concluded that the Royal Society ‘sheltered under the name of a learned society’ and yet it was ‘utterly incapable of managing the details of a foot-race in Richmond Paddock’ let alone an expedition to explore the interior.

As Howitt rode north to the Cooper to look for Burke in July 1861, John McDouall Stuart was six months into his second attempt to cross the continent. So far it had proved a difficult journey. After the loss of Toby the expedition dog from heat exhaustion in January, the weather continued unusually dry and hot. North of the MacDonnell Ranges, he found himself battling ‘very poor country indeed’, which forced him to abandon his usual ‘flying’ tactics. Instead he resorted to setting up base camps while scouting parties searched for water up ahead.

By the middle of May, Stuart had passed his previous northernmost point near Attack Creek but found himself entangled in bullwaddie and lancewood scrub, a nasty combination that has been described as nature’s attempt to grow a barbed wire fence. It was vicious terrain. Men and animals were cut to ribbons as they tried to find a way through. Stuart rode for hours at a time, until his horse tottered with thirst and he could barely keep his seat. On 20 May, just as the Scotsman began to think his journey was a ‘hopeless case’, he stumbled across a series of waterholes that he christened Newcastle Waters. Now at least, he had a base from which to explore further.

Each night, no matter how tired or sick he was, Stuart retired to his tent with his precious pipe to work on his charts and sketches. The overland telegraph was never far from his thoughts, and the discovery of Newcastle Waters convinced him that it was feasible to construct a line via the MacDonnell Ranges and through the waterless scrub towards the north coast. ‘For a telegraphic communication,’ he wrote, ‘I should think that three or four wells would overcome this difficulty.’ Later, R. R. Knuckey, a government surveyor who used Stuart’s maps, commented:

He was simply a marvel for horseback traverse. His map was so correct that we used simply to put a protractor and scale on it, get the bearings and distance and ride on with the same confidence as one would ride from Gawler to Adelaide. If we did not find the old JMDS tree we never thought Stuart was out but that we had made the mistake, and we always found it.

These meticulous efforts demonstrated just how different Stuart’s relationship to the land was from Burke’s. The Irishman relied on someone else to interpret and record his new environment for him and therefore he could never know it in any depth. Most of its danger and its potential passed him by.

In the lush oasis of Newcastle Waters, with ducks boiling in the pot and fish baking on the coals, Stuart’s men began to perk up. The respite was short. Further investigations revealed that beyond the waterholes, the scrub closed in once again. In five months, Stuart had travelled only 250 kilometres further than on his last journey north and he was loath to give up now. He made at least ten desperate forays to the north but, by early July 1861, he knew he must turn for home:

I must give up all hope of reaching the Victoria, and am unwillingly forced to return, my horses being nearly worn out…We have now run out of everything for that purpose, and are obliged to make all sorts of shifts. We are all nearly naked, the scrub has been so severe on our clothes; one can scarcely tell the original colour of a single garment, everything is so patched. Our boots are also gone.

In the midst of such adversity the race to the north coast seemed frivolous and parochial. On 5 July, a week after Burke’s death, Stuart named a small watercourse Burke’s Creek ‘after my brother explorer’.

Fifteen hundred kilometres away from Stuart’s party, on the banks of the Cooper, Robert O’Hara Burke’s body lay rotting in the sun. As requested, John King had left it unburied and set off down the creek in search of salvation. His survival hinged on small things, a patch of nardoo, a piece of fish or a place to shelter on a cold night. For two days, King lay in an abandoned gunyah recovering his strength and pondering his fate. As he did so, one thought kept surfacing through the despair. Was it possible that Wills had managed to cling on for just a few more days? King took his rifle and shot two crows. Perhaps some fresh meat might revive his dying companion?

On 1 July, King walked back to Tilka waterhole in trepidation. He arrived to find his friend:

lying dead in his gunyah…the natives had been there and had taken away some of his clothes. I buried the corpse with sand, and remained there some days but finding my supply of nardoo was running short…I tracked the natives who had been to the camp by their footprints in the sand.

Later that day, when John King stumbled into the Yandruwandha camp, the Aborigines seemed pleased to see their ‘old friend’. They cooked him some fish and pointed out a place in one of their own gunyahs for him to sleep. Several of the men indicated in sign language that they knew Wills was dead, but they kept asking where the third man was? When King signalled that he too was gone, several of the tribe began to cry. That night they brought extra food for the stricken survivor.

The Yandruwandha were bemused by their new visitor. Most of the time they kept him supplied with fish and nardoo but, every now and then, they grew frustrated and gestured that he should return south. Some of the tribe grew so angry that they threatened to kill King, but others felt sorry for him. One woman named Carrawaw took particular care of him, building him a shelter and preparing his meals. One day he found a way of repaying her generosity:

One of the women, to whom I had given part of a crow, came and gave me a ball of nardoo, saying that she would give me more only she had such a sore arm that she was unable to pound. She showed me a sore on her arm and the thought struck me that I would boil some water in the billy and wash her arm with a sponge. During the operation, the whole tribe sat round and were muttering to one another. Her husband sat down by her side, and she was crying all the time. After I had washed it, I touched it with some nitrate of silver, when she began to yell, and ran out crying, ‘Mokow! Mokow!’ (Fire! Fire!) From this time, she and her husband used to give me a small quantity of nardoo both night and morning, and whenever the tribe was about to go on a fishing expedition he used to give me notice to go with them. They also used to assist me in making a wurley or breakwind whenever they shifted camp…Every four or five days the tribe would surround me and ask whether I intended going up or down the creek; at last I made them understand that if they went up I should go up the creek, and if they went down I should also go down; and from this time they seemed to look upon me as one of themselves.

Carrawaw became King’s particular ngumbu or friend. Arran Patterson, who traces his ancestry back to Carrawaw’s family, believes that the woman was telling King she was Karrawa, which means she was from the eaglehawk totem group. Stories passed down through the generations tell of the Yandruwandha’s compassion for King’s predicament, stranded alone in the desert. Arran’s ancestors have told him that the tribe had always preferred him to the other men, especially Burke, who was hostile and arrogant. Sometimes they joked that King was more like a woman than an explorer because he did most of the work around the camp and because the others were always telling him what to do.

Skin groups, family names and totems are important in Aboriginal culture because they dictate so many aspects of life: a person’s custodial duty towards the land, their position in the tribe, their responsibilities towards others and their choice of ‘marriage’ partners. Any outsider must be given an identity by the elders in order to be integrated into daily life. Since King was with the Yandruwandha for more than a few days, it is likely that he too was assigned a ‘name’ and identity. In effect this meant he became part of a specific family, who then had a special responsibility to look after him. In theory it also gave him the right to consort with a certain woman in the tribe.

The Yandruwandha seemed anxious to know where Burke was, so King decided to show them. At the waterhole, he was touched by their grief and their respect for Burke’s body:

On seeing his remains, the whole party wept bitterly, and covered them with bushes. After this they were much kinder to me than before, and I always told them that the white men would be here before two moons; and in the evening when they came with nardoo and fish they used to talk about the ‘whitefellows’ coming, at the same time pointing to the moon.

But the moon waxed and waned and still no one came. King continued to deteriorate physically and mentally. As the weeks passed, he trudged up and down the creek, following his hosts and clinging to the hope of rescue.

Accompanied by William Brahe, Alfred Howitt collected the bulk of his party from Swan Hill and marched straight to Menindee on 30 July 1861. The whole enterprise was a model of efficiency. There were no stray animals, no splinter groups, no transport problems and no dissension in the ranks.

Menindee had changed even in the months since Burke had passed through. Speculators, prospectors and pastoralists in cabbage-tree hats now propped up the bar and Howitt realised that the tiny outpost was already ‘an explorer’s township’.

While he gathered information from the bushmen, his men were plundering the stores Burke had left behind. As they sorted through boxes containing everything from harnesses to hog’s lard, they were amazed to find that he had thrown out so many essentials including lime juice, medicines and fishing gear. Once Howitt was satisfied with his party, he spent the last evening, on 14 August, writing dispatches, telling his family:

Do not frighten yourselves about me—I am certainly going into a part of the country which has a very bad name…but we are starting at a good time and…besides I have a very great objection to run myself into a place when I cannot see my way out again…My hair and beard are ragged and my face is the colour of a boiled lobster!!…tomorrow morning into the desert. I feel a sort of presentiment that I shall come back alright.

Howitt’s journey from Menindee to the Cooper gave him every reason for confidence. He reached the creek with incredible ease in just twenty-five days, arriving on 8 September. Five days later, his men found camel tracks—the first signs of Burke’s expedition. Soon he and Brahe were following the trail of discarded tins, scraps of oilskin and abandoned saddlebags that led them to Depot Camp 65 by the old coolibah tree. The word ‘DIG’ stared out at them from its trunk. Yet again the instruction was ignored.

Brahe and Howitt could see no signs of any recent disturbance to the cache so they assumed no one had been back to the tree. Howitt admitted that the mass of conflicting clues in the area ‘puzzled me extremely, and led me into a hundred conjectures’. He left the depot, oblivious to the fact that all the answers lay just beneath his feet in an old camel trunk.

The rescue party continued downstream and set up camp at a place Howitt named Cullymurra, from the Aboriginal name Kaliumaru or ‘wide lake’. It is a splendid waterhole, alive with birds and circled with rocks carved with sacred Aboriginal symbols. These showed that it was an important place of ceremony for the Yandruwandha and other tribes such as the Wangkamurra and Yawarrawarrka.

On 15 September, Edwin Welch was out on a reconnaissance mission downstream from the depot camp. His horse Piggy was jittery, and the surveyor soon realised that he was being watched by a group of local Aborigines. As they scattered into the bush, Piggy shied. Welch regained his seat and saw that a scarecrowlike figure had remained in the clearing. It was a man wearing the remains of a cabbage-tree hat. As Welch rode closer, the man dropped to his knees and raised his hands skywards as if in prayer. Welch stared in astonishment. Beneath the grime was a white man. ‘Who in the name of wonder are you?’ Welch asked. ‘I am King, sir,’ the man replied. The name meant nothing to Welch who only knew the officers on Burke’s expedition. ‘King?’ he repeated. ‘Yes sir,’ croaked the figure, ‘the last man of the Exploring Expedition.’ And with that the scarecrow broke down and wept.

For the rest of his life, John King celebrated his birthday on 15 September. He believed it was the day that God had returned his life to him. It was a year and twenty-five days since he had ridden out of Royal Park.

Howitt’s Aboriginal guides, Sandy and Frank, ran back to Howitt’s camp with the amazing news: ‘Find ‘im whitefella; two fella dead boy and one fella live.’ A few hours later the ragged figure was carried back to Cullymurra—’a miserable object and hardly to be distinguished as a civilised being’. The Yandruwandha followed their charge back to Howitt’s camp. They were overjoyed he had been reunited with his companions and stood around the camp ‘with a most gratified and delighted expression’.

King was almost too weak to stand. Sunburnt, emaciated and clothed in the greasy vestiges of a pair of flannel trousers and a shirt, he wore a leather pouch around his neck. It contained Burke and Wills’ pocket watches and their last letters home. He had clung to them for two and a half months since their deaths.

Howitt’s physician Dr Wheeler took charge and prescribed his patient small meals of sugar and fat. King began to improve almost immediately but he found it difficult to tell his story without breaking down in tears, and it was often hard to understand him. With a growing sense of horror, Howitt pieced together the jigsaw of coincidence and lost opportunity that had led to the deaths of Burke and Wills.

Somehow the terrible news had to be conveyed to Melbourne. Howitt turned to the carrier pigeons but found their tail feathers had been worn away by their wicker baskets. Undeterred, he shot some wild pigeons and spliced new feathers onto the stubs with cobblers’ wax. After a successful trial flight within the main tent, the birds were released in the open. But it wasn’t just Howitt’s men who had been watching the experiment. Several hawks swooped and carried away the pigeons in their talons. Only one messenger survived the ordeal. It had wisely refused to take off at all.

On 18 September, King felt strong enough to return to Wills’ gunyah at Tilka waterhole. Howitt found the surveyor’s body in a sorry state. The sand was criss-crossed with dingo tracks and the corpse had been partially dismembered. Some grinding stones and a small supply of nardoo lay nearby, indicating that Wills had died before his food supply had run out. Howitt’s men dug a proper grave nearby and laid Wills to rest with a short Bible reading. The grisly ritual was repeated the next day with the discovery of Burke’s body lying intact under the coolibah tree at Yidniminckanie waterhole. He was clutching his rusting pistol in his right hand. It was loaded and cocked but had not been fired.

William Brahe dug Burke’s grave, a grim task for a man who knew he would surely be blamed for his leader’s death. The day was hot and oppressive. As sullen grey clouds piled up on the horizon, Burke’s body was wrapped in a Union Jack and interred while Howitt read from St John, Chapter 11.

Several men wept as shovelsful of red earth were thrown onto the flag. An inscription was carved into the tree nearby and the men returned in silence to their camp. Even Howitt, who was not easily moved, said later: ‘It is impossible to describe the feelings of sadness and awe that filled our minds as we gazed on the spectacle—the remains of brave Burke.’

Ernest Shackleton once declared, ‘the line between death and success in exploration is a fine one’. Through a combination of bad luck and bad management Burke’s expedition had collapsed. John McDouall Stuart’s party was still intact—but only just. When the Scotsman turned back on 12 July 1861, his men were weak, short of food and still faced a trek of nearly 2000 kilometres to reach Adelaide. Stuart knew he had pushed his resources to the limit:

The men are failing, and showing the effects of short rations. I only wish I had enough to carry me over until the rain will fall next March…I had no idea that the hills would terminate so soon in such extensive level country without water…they completely deceived me.

Stuart’s last comment was an acknowledgment that the Australian outback was inscrutable even for an experienced explorer like himself. It was an environment that could never be mastered.

The return journey was torture. Rations were low, winter had set in and the desert sparkled with frost. Stuart was suffering more than most of his men and, as the journey wore on, he became ever more reliant on his officers. The expedition staggered south, reaching Chambers’ Moolooloo station on 7 September 1861. A week later, as Howitt was rescuing King on the banks of the Cooper, Stuart was on his way back to Adelaide.

He slipped back into the city to present his findings to the Chambers brothers and South Australia’s governor, Sir Richard MacDonnell. He was surprised to find a gold medal waiting for him from the Royal Geographical Society. Stuart accepted it without ceremony. His mission to cross the continent was incomplete and, of course, he wanted to try again. Hiding the fact that his health was fragile and his eyesight wrecked, Stuart began to plan his next expedition. His backers were anxious that he should ‘finish the job’ as soon as possible. Money, men and horses were all procured with lightning speed.

Just over a month later, on 25 October 1861, Stuart left Adelaide with the beginnings of his third transcontinental party but, as the cavalcade stopped at an inn named The Heart and Hand, disaster struck. One of the horses panicked after catching its bridle in another harness. It reared high in the air and struck Stuart on the back of the head. He lay on the ground unconscious, the flailing hooves crushing his right hand and breaking several bones. Stuart returned to the city for six weeks of treatment but he never fully recovered the use of his hand.

On 24 September 1861, nine days after discovering King, Howitt was ready to leave Cooper Creek. A line of Aborigines waited patiently just outside the camp, summoned to receive their rewards for the compassion they had shown. One by one, they came forward. Each man collected a tomahawk, a knife or perhaps some rope or leather. The women received rations of sugar wrapped in Union Jack handkerchiefs and the children had pink ribbons tied in their hair. Carrawaw received an extra gift of twenty-five kilograms of flour. ‘I think,’ remarked Howitt, ‘they understood that these [presents] were given to them for their kindness to the white men, and especially to King.’

As Howitt handed out trinkets, his surveyor Edwin Welch was busy letting out John King’s trousers for the second time. The explorer continued to make good progress but his mind was still frail. The re-interment of Burke and Wills had disturbed him greatly. Often King stared into the distance, and when questioned he would burst into tears.

Having presented their gifts, the white men departed. Carrawaw and several other of the Yandruwandha sobbed as King was lifted onto his horse and led away. For now, life on the Cooper returned to normal but its secrets were exposed. The prospect of permanent water and large tracts of grazing land would soon bring the land speculators and the cattlemen in the explorers’ wake.

On his way back to Menindee, Howitt passed through Burke’s old depot camp once again. This time he took heed of the word carved into the trunk. The rescue party belatedly found the journals, letters and maps that would tell the Burke and Wills story. Over the next few days, Howitt read them with grim disbelief.

As the rescue party travelled south towards Menindee, King defended Brahe on several occasions. He also made numerous remarks about the ‘neglect and mismanagement’ of the expedition, which his companions interpreted as referring to the Exploration Committee.

Still apt to become hysterical, King suffered terribly on the journey home. Weak and self-absorbed, he was often strapped to his horse for hours on end. River crossings were especially traumatic. He refused to swim, so Howitt resorted to tying him to the tail of a quiet mare and towing him through the water. Afterwards the whole party halted while he was rubbed down with brandy inside and out. Progress was so slow that William Brahe rode on ahead. Someone had to break the news to the rest of the world.