Burke and Wills — A lavish expedition that starved at a stocked depot

The Victorian Exploring Expedition set out from Melbourne on 20 August 1860 to make the first south-to-north crossing of Australia, from the southern colonies to the Gulf of Carpentaria, under Robert O’Hara Burke, a police superintendent with no exploration experience, and the surveyor and astronomer William John Wills. It was the most lavishly equipped expedition Australia had then mounted — roughly £57,000, nineteen men, twenty-six camels, twenty-three horses, and tonnes of supplies — and it failed not for want of provisions but through command, judgement and a fatal indifference to the people who knew the country.

Burke drove the party forward by repeatedly splitting it and stripping it down for speed. A four-man forward team — Burke, Wills, John King and Charley Gray — reached the Gulf country in February 1861 and turned back. Gray died on the return. The three survivors staggered into the Cooper Creek depot on the evening of 21 April 1861 to find it abandoned; the depot party under William Brahe, after waiting more than four months, had ridden out that same day, missing them by roughly nine hours. The cached supplies left at the marked “Dig Tree” were not enough to save them.

Burke and Wills died near Cooper Creek around late June or early July 1861 of starvation and exhaustion, their decline hastened by eating nardoo, an aquatic fern whose seed is toxic unless processed. Only John King lived, because the Yandruwandha people — on whose Country the men died — fed him fish and properly prepared nardoo, sheltered him, and kept him alive for some three months until a relief party reached him on 15 September 1861. The expedition is remembered in Australia as a heroic tragedy; the more accurate account is of preventable mismanagement survived only through Aboriginal generosity that the colonial mythology long erased.