Day 451 | Another waterhole: somewhere on the Wills Development Road

84 km | zzOz total: 13,872 km

Camp 119 last night is a fitting memorial to the Burke and Wills 1860-61 expedition that attempted the first south to north crossing the Australian continent. There’s a few trees around which were vandalised by the travelling party, weird that there’s still living trees, pretty straggly really, that were hacked about 150 years ago.

They are the one set of explorers that an Aussie school kid is likely to know, primarily because they had some bad luck and Burke, Wills and Gray ended up, well, basically being poisoned by wrongly preparing the abundant native food.

Camp 119 is their second most northerly camp, Burke and Wills left the two other members of the party there while they went further north to try to get to the sea. Unfortunately the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria is an enormous mangrove swamp and they failed to even get a glimpse of open water.

Then the sad story is they returned to their base camp in Central Australia to discover the main party had given up on them and left that morning. They were 9 hours late. One of the reasons for their slowness was one of the four, Gray, had died from the lack of proper food and the other 3 were by that stage so weak that they’d spent a whole day to bury him.

It had started as a hugely well equipped expedition, unlike mine, and all the members were highly qualified, problem is none of the adventurers had been born in Australia and none had expertise in Australian conditions. At the time they were travelling there was in fact abundant food and water but due to inexperience they hadn’t recognised it.

After reminding myself of their story I’ve decided to add another kilo of spag to the larder, can never have too much pasta aboard.