Burke and Wills crossed the continent. South to north, Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, in 1860, the first Europeans to do it. Heroes. Tough bushmen, the right men for the job, undone by sheer rotten luck on the way home. Coopers Creek and the Dig Tree are the proof: arrived back at the depot just hours after their relief party had given up and left. Brave. Capable. Cursed by timing.
Burke had never run an expedition before. He was a Castlemaine police inspector with a moustache and a temper, picked partly for being a Catholic in a Protestant-led colony, partly because he could be controlled. Wills was 26, an English surveyor, capable but junior. They had the most lavishly funded expedition in colonial Australian history, twenty-six camels imported from Karachi, six wagons, twenty-three horses, and a budget of around £60,000 in 1860 pounds. They reached the Gulf area but not the open sea, then died of starvation on the return at Coopers Creek, surrounded by Yandruwandha country, refusing in classic colonial-era fashion to learn the local food sources their Aboriginal hosts repeatedly demonstrated. King, the survivor, lived on nardoo cake the Yandruwandha shared with him. The expedition succeeded as a route. As bushcraft, it was a disaster, and the Royal Commission afterward said so. Camels in the bush. No flour ration. Refused to eat with the locals. Heroic, only because they died.