Down Under by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

Cooper’s Creek, just over the Queensland border, they had progressed only 400 miles. In exasperation Burke decided to take three men – Wills, Charles Gray and John King – and make a dash for the gulf. By travelling light he calculated that he could be there and back in two months. He left four men to maintain the base camp, with instructions to wait three months for them in case they were delayed.
    The going was much tougher than they had expected. Daytime temperatures regularly rose to over 140 degrees F. It took them two months rather than one to cross the interior, and their arrival, when at last it came, was something of an anticlimax: a belt of mangroves along the shore kept them from reaching, or even seeing, the sea. Still, they had successfully completed the first crossing of the continent. Unfortunately, they had also eaten two-thirds of their supplies.
    The upshot is that they ran out of food on the return trip and nearly starved. To their consternation, Charles Gray, the fittest of the party, abruptly dropped dead one day. Ragged and half delirious, the three remaining men pushed on. Finally, on the evening of 21 April 1861, they stumbled into base camp to discover that the men they had left behind, after waiting four months, had departed only that day. On a coolibah tree was carved the message:

    DIG
    3 FT. N.W.
    APR. 21 1861

    They dug and found some meagre rations and a message telling them what was already painfully evident – that the base party had given up and departed. Desolate and exhausted, they ate and turned in. In the morning they wrote a message announcing their safe return and carefully buried it in the cache – so carefully, in fact, that when a member of the base party returned that day to have one last look, he had no way of telling that they had made it back and had now gone again. Had he known, he would have found them not far away, plodding over rocky ground in the impossible hope of reaching a police outpost 150 miles away at a place called Mount Hopeless.
    Burke and Wills died in the desert, far short of Mount Hopeless. King was saved by Aborigines, who nursed him for two months until he was rescued by a search party.
    Back in Melbourne, meanwhile, everyone was still awaiting a triumphal return of the heroic band, so news of the fiasco struck like a thunderbolt. ‘The entire company of explorers has been dissipated out of being,’ the Age reported with frank astonishment. ‘Some are dead, some are on their way back, one has come to Melbourne, and another has made his way to Adelaide . . . The whole expedition appears to have been one prolonged blunder throughout.’
    When the final tally was taken, the cost of the entire undertaking, including the search to recover Burke’s and Wills’ bodies, came to almost £60,000, more than Stanley had spent in Africa to achieve far more.
    * * *
    Even now, the emptiness of so much of Australia is startling. The landscape we passed through was officially only ‘semi-desert’, but it was as barren an expanse as I had ever seen. Every twenty or twenty-five kilometres there would be a dirt track and a lonely mailbox signalling an unseen sheep or cattle station. Once a light truck flew past in a bouncing hell-for-leather fashion, spraying us with gravelly dinks and a coating of red dust, but the only other lively thing was the endless shaking flubbity-dubbing of the axles over the corduroy road. By the time we reached White Cliffs, in mid-afternoon, we felt as if we had spent the day in a cement mixer.
    Seeing it today, it is all but impossible to believe that White Cliffs, a small blotch of habitations under a hard clear sky, was once a boom town, with a population of nearly 4,500, a hospital, a newspaper, a library and a busy core of general stores, hotels, restaurants, brothels and gaming houses. Today central White Cliffs consists of a pub, a launderette, an opal shop, and a grocery/café/petrol station. The permanent population is about