Down Under by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

tried for days without success to hunt kangaroos before it occurred to them that they might stalk the creatures more effectively if they first removed their bright red jackets. In seven weeks they covered just 130 miles, an average of about one and a half miles a day.
    In expedition after expedition the leaders seemed wilfully, almost comically, unable to provision themselves sensibly. In 1817, John Oxley, the surveyor-general, led a five-month expedition to explore the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers, and took only 100 rounds of ammunition – less than one shot a day from a single gun – and hardly any spare horseshoes or nails. The incompetence of the early explorers was a matter of abiding fascination for the Aborigines, who often came to watch. ‘Our perplexities afforded them an inexhaustible fund of merriment and derision,’ wrote one chronicler glumly.
    It was into this tradition of haplessness that Burke and Wills improvidently stepped in 1860. They are far and away the most famous of Australian explorers, which is perhaps a little curious since their expedition accomplished almost nothing, cost a fortune and ended in tragedy.
    Their assignment was straightforward: to find a route from the south coast at Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north. Melbourne, at that time much larger than Sydney, was one of the most important cities in the British Empire, and yet one of the most isolated. To get a message to London and receive a reply took a third of a year, sometimes more. In the 1850s, the Philosophical Institute of Victoria decided to promote an expedition to find a way through the ‘ghastly blank’, as the interior was poetically known, which would allow the establishment ofa telegraph line to connect Australia first to the East Indies and then onward to the world.
    They chose as leader an Irish police officer named Robert O’Hara Burke, who had never seen real outback, was famous for his ability to get lost even in inhabited areas, and knew nothing of exploration or science. The surveyor was a young English doctor named William John Wills, whose principal qualifications seem to have been a respectable background and a willingness to go. A notable plus was that they both had outstanding facial hair.
    Although by this time expeditions into the interior were hardly a novelty, this one particularly caught the popular imagination. Tens of thousands of people lined the route out of Melbourne when, on 19 August 1860, the Great Northern Exploration Expedition set off. The party was so immense and unwieldy that it took from early morning until 4 p.m. just to get it moving. Among the items Burke had deemed necessary for the expedition were a Chinese gong, a stationery cabinet, a heavy wooden table with matching stools, and grooming equipment, in the words of the historian Glen McLaren, ‘of sufficient quality to prepare and present his horses and camels for an Agricultural Society show’.
    Almost at once the men began to squabble. Within days, six of the party had resigned, and the road to Menindee was littered with provisions they decided they didn’t need, including 1,500 pounds (let me just repeat that: 1,500 pounds) of sugar. They did almost everything wrong. Against advice, they timed the trip so that they would do most of the hardest travelling at the height of summer.
    With such a burden, it took them almost two months to traverse the 400 miles of well-trodden track to Menindee; a letter from Melbourne normally covered the sameground in two weeks. At Menindee, they availed themselves of the modest comforts of Maidens Hotel, rested their horses and reorganized their provisions, and on 19 October set off into a blank ghastlier than they could ever have imagined. Ahead of them lay 1,200 miles of murderous ground. It was the last time that anyone in the outside world would see Burke and Wills alive.
    Progress through the desert was difficult and slow. By December, when they arrived at a place called