The Burke and Wills expedition: my epic fail

How to follow in the footsteps of Burke and Wills – and arrive without your toenails.

Every now and then I have this horrible dream. It is the day before my final school exams and I’ve barely studied, the tales of Chaucer as elusive as the formulas of physics, or was it chemistry? Anyway, I wake in a terrible panic. It is not simply a nightmare, more an accurate recollection. As Triple J’s The Sandman used to say, “failure requires no preparation” – a gag surely pilfered.

A new variation on this old theme is being played out as a busload of beaming trekkers and I bump cheerily across the Strzelecki Desert from Birdsville, Queensland, to Innamincka, South Australia – about as outback as you can get – at the start of an odyssey to retrace some of the footsteps of the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, who set out to cross the continent from south to north for the first time. There’s not a cloud in the sky; unsurprising, really, because it hasn’t rained here for two years. As expedition leader Bobby Burke probably remarked to his loyal sidekick, Willy Wills, as they departed from Royal Park, Melbourne, in 1860: “What could possibly go wrong?”

On our 4WD bus, talk turns to trekking and training. Among my companions are a couple of whippet-thin ultra-marathoners. Some have taken the Kokoda Challenge. Others are extolling the beauty of the Camino de Santiago, the Milford Track or the Larapinta. A woman next to me, a retiree, says she’s been training eight hours a day for the past few months. Others casually mention the Annapurna Circuit, Kilimanjaro and Everest Base Camp as if taking a stroll from Bondi to Bronte. One of the guys we are meeting, someone relays reverentially, did the Simpson Desert, alone, pulling a cart with 160kg of water and supplies, up and over the 1200 sand hills for 400km – like Cliffy Young on ice with a freaking billycart in the desert.

It is at this stage I wonder if the 75 minutes it took me to walk to the office those three times in the past few weeks – I caught the train home – is going to cut it. Been super-busy at work, I say, when asked about my training regime. Couple of young kids, you know. Crook ankle too, I add gravely, old footy injury. Surgery! Screws! I’ll see how I go. The Sandman wasn’t entirely right – preparing for failure requires a degree of preparation.

We are here because of a bloke called Greg Donovan, who has a son with Type 1 Diabetes. Donovan is a former insurance executive who figured there was more to life than selling industrial special risk packages. A few years ago he set up a charity, the Born to Run Foundation, to raise money for diabetes research. It puts on events, such as the Big Red Run, a gruelling ordeal where runners pay for the privilege of galloping the equivalent of six marathons on six consecutive days in the sand hills around Birdsville. For a sadist, he seems a nice enough bloke.

Donovan came to realise there are a lot more trekkers out there than marathoners, people he could torture and fleece in the good name of charity. “I was in the Birdsville pub having a beer in 2012, while organising the Big Red Run, and we had this map laid out on the bar,” he tells me. On the map were the markings for the Burke and Wills expedition. The squiggle that interested him ran from the Dig Tree near Innamincka to Birdsville – some 330km across the desert. The beer took hold. The idea stuck. This is the inaugural event. “We want to make it a bucket list event,” Donovan says. “An event that people who are into trekking think, ‘I just have to do that one day’.”

It was a thought that appealed to my editor. But, of course, she is sitting in an office overlooking a tree-lined street with the smell of freshly ground coffee and Thai food wafting along it. And here I am, approaching the famous Dig Tree, completely unprepared, about to emulate an expedition in which seven explorers perished. As Chaucer would say, if he was tweeting today, WTF!

The basic outline of the Burke and Wills expedition is well known, but the minutiae, and the reputations of both men, are still hotly contested. The nub is that Burke set off from Melbourne on August 20, 1860, with 18 other men, 26 camels, 23 horses and 20 tonnes of provisions, enough to support them for two years. No white man had been through the interior of the continent and this was to be a grand expedition of discovery, to open it up for grazing, mining and a telegraph line. It was also a chance for uppity Victorians to flip the bird to the other colonies.

Trouble beset them almost immediately. It took almost two months to reach the outpost of Menindee in far south-western NSW, some 650km as the crow flies, by which time two officers had resigned, 13 other men had been fired and eight new ones brought on. From Menindee, Burke pushed on with seven men 550km north to the Bullah Bullah water hole on Cooper Creek, then waited for the others to catch up.

After establishing a depot at the creek – the site of the famous Dig Tree – Burke decided a party would make a “dash” for the Gulf of Carpentaria, more than 1000km to the north, leaving four men at the depot, with instructions for them to wait for three months (cautious Wills secretly told them to wait for four). And so in mid-December, 1860, Burke and Wills and two other men, Charlie Gray and John King, set off with six camels, one horse and supplies in an attempt to be the first men to cross the continent. On February 11, 1861, they did it! Well, almost. They pulled up five kilometres shy of the Gulf coast, halted by mud and mangroves. They’d walked more than 3500km from Melbourne.

It was an incredible achievement, but, as with scaling Everest, returning is often more treacherous. On that harrowing journey, Gray became ill and died (there is conjecture that he was murdered, as he was slowing the others down, putting their lives at risk). On the evening of April 21, 1861, exhausted and emaciated, Burke, Wills and King stumbled back to the depot at Cooper Creek.

Wealth and fame awaited them. They’d be heroes throughout the colonies – indeed the Empire. But it wasn’t to be. The party who’d waited more than four months for their return had left. On a coolabah tree by the waterhole they found a message carved into the trunk that instructed them to dig. They did so and found a note telling them they’d missed their rendezvous by nine hours. The three men were too weak to pursue the other party. There were some supplies, but not enough. Both Burke and Wills died of malnutrition and exhaustion on the banks of Cooper Creek about 10 weeks later, having failed to navigate an alternative route through South Australia. Miraculously, King survived, having been befriended and cared for by the local Yandruwandha people.

In his book, Starvation in a Land of Plenty, Michael Cathcart argues that the Royal Society of Victoria had chosen Burke to lead the expedition not because of his skills as a bushman or explorer, but because he was “clubbable – a chap who is good company and knows how to conduct himself in a gentleman’s club… the Melbourne Club.”

Cathcart argues that Burke’s refusal to “go native” and accept the help of the Yandruwandha caused his own death and that of his navigator, Wills. “The legend of Burke and Wills has been used to stand for many things,” Cathcart writes. “They have been hailed as a pair of British heroes and mocked as a pair of audacious fools. But William Wills deserves to be unshackled from the reckless amateur who drove him to his death.”

To portray Burke as a hero is wrong, says Dave Phoenix, but so is dismissing him as a fool. Phoenix, a historian, teacher and president of the Burke and Wills Historical Society, is accompanying us on our expedition. Obsession is a strong word, but probably not strong enough to explain Phoenix’s fixation with the Burke and Wills story. In 2005 he retraced, on foot, the last 10 weeks of Burke’s life, from the Dig Tree to Mount Hopeless in South Australia then back to where Burke and Wills both died at Cooper Creek. And then, in 2008, he spent five months walking from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, mapping the Burke and Wills route, marrying the journals and the historical evidence with the landscape.

Until Gallipoli, Phoenix explains, Burke and Wills were held up as imperial heroes, men who’d done a great service opening up the frontiers. It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s that Burke began to be portrayed as a “blunderer and an idiot and that Wills was lumped in with that as well – that Burke and Wills were seen as a pair of dills”.

“I am not an apologist for Burke,” Phoenix says. “And yes, he made mistakes and should be criticised and questioned, but to say he was a fool because he took a top hat and wore a tie is not actually part of the story.” Many of the key things we thought we knew about the expedition are false, he says. “Wills’ grave is not Wills’ grave, he is buried somewhere else. Charlie Gray’s memorial out at Lake Massacre is nowhere near where he died. And, the Dig Tree is not the Dig Tree.”

Not the Dig Tree? We are camped only a couple of hundred metres away from it, on the banks of Cooper Creek, the night before we head off on our expedition. There’s a protective wooden walkway around a grand old coolabah tree that appears to have changed little in the past 150 years. Tens of thousands of photos have been taken of this tree. It is listed as a national treasure. But Phoenix has done years of painstaking research. He’s convinced the actual tree under which the note was buried is the one next to it – the one that people lean on when taking in the majesty of (Not) The Dig Tree. It’s like finding out that Phar Lap’s heart in the National Museum came from some knacker that ran seventh at the Birdsville Cup. The history wars are brutal.

And so we set off at dawn from (Not) The Dig Tree to Burke’s Grave (Really!) – a distance of some 42km, a 10-hour walk. The morning is mild and the company is terrific; the joy of this walk is that people’s stories unfold slowly. There are no distractions like mobile phones. Earlier, motorcyclists had gone out with GPSs and marked the route with pink tape.

I am walking with Paul Tully, a Brisbane lawyer, and his wife Trisha, and their mate Vlad Fodor, a former champion Czechoslovakian water polo player who now manages a pool complex in Brisbane. Tully grew up on Cluny Station, a vast cattle run north of Birdsville. We chat about his life growing up in this isolation, halting occasionally to tend to our blisters. We cross an enormous plain and come across a flock of corellas, thousands of them. They rise as one, a great squawking mass of brilliant white.

And then, just before lunch, disaster strikes. One of my shoes falls apart. The sole comes away from the upper and flops mockingly, like a thong put on backwards. Vlad pulls some electrical tape from his bag and renders assistance. We stop for lunch. Beef and salad sandwiches never tasted so good.

A few more kilometres down the track my other shoe fails. More repairs. And then I start to fall apart. My ankle is swelling badly. The pain in my little toe is immense. I have blisters on my blisters. I put on headphones and listen to music and plough on. About seven kilometres from the finish I stop to attend to my blisters. Then a support vehicle trundles past to pick up another walker in trouble, and I get in, defeated. Deflated. I’m on what becomes known as the Sad Bus. It’s going to be a long week, I think.

When he arrives at camp, Vlad offers me a rum. It is a very generous measure in a large tin mug – four parts rum, one part coke, I learn later. I am asleep by 7.30pm. Vlad regrets his generosity. We are in the same tent. Allegedly, I snore.

After an 11-hour sleep, I wake reinvigorated. I can do this thing, I tell myself, as though Vlad’s rum was the fixer elixir. I bandage up my toes with a wonder tape called Hypafix (developed for burns victims) and lace up my

spare shoes. They feel good. I gobble

a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory for the swelling in my ankle, and am ready to face the challenge ahead. Yo, respect, Big Pharma.

Before setting off for the day I wander down to Burke’s grave beside Cooper Creek. Ancient river red gums line the banks here at one of the permanent water holes, long and deep. Nailed to one of the trees about five metres up is a sign that says “2010 flood level”. Burke’s grave is in a sandy, tranquil spot beneath a coolabah tree. And this is the great irony of the expedition. He died next to a permanent water hole, brimming with fish and yabbies and clams. There was food aplenty; he just couldn’t access it and he couldn’t relate to the people who could.

It’s a 30km stroll today, and I’m walking with three guys, old mates who are doing the trek together – John Bradridge, Ian Brooks and Adam “Lax by name, lax by nature” Laxman. They are in a book club, a book club that once took a trip to Vegas. The three have an easy humour that helps them through the pain of the day, deadpanning across the clay pans. A team of camels accompanies us and the humour that can be wrung from the toes of camels is seemingly endless. They also appear to be about as ill prepared as I am.

Also in our group today is Joshua Haynes, from Newcastle. He is a director of the Yandruwandha Yawarrawarrka Traditional Land Owners Aboriginal Corporation. Haynes tells me that Burke and Wills’ story is a painful one for his people – it was the beginning of the end. “It opened up the way for the pastoralists,” he says, “and the moment someone took up ownership of the land we could be moved on, or disposed of, just like a kangaroo.” His people, he said, had been kind to the explorers, giving them food and showing them how to make nardoo, a dough made by grinding the seed of a native fern and mixing it with water.

“There is a dual story here,” Haynes explains as we trudge across a vast gibber plain. “And the story of my people is often the one that misses out.” Burke and Wills died, but John King survived because of the kindness of Haynes’ forebears. King was taken in and looked after until the arrival of a search party. It is believed he fathered a child. “King got up at the inquest in Melbourne and told with great pride how the Aboriginal people had shown him great humanity,” Haynes says. It was unheard of in those days, he says, that Aborigines could show humanity. King is the unsung hero – he crossed the continent and made it back but there are no monuments to him.

We walk along a bit further and Haynes points to something in a clay pan. “Look at this,” he says. Sitting on top of the clay is a grinding stone and rock plate. This is what his ancestors used to grind nardoo. He picks up the stone and the plate, his fingers fitting into the ancient grooves on the rock, like a hand in a glove. He holds them reverentially for a minute or two, absorbing something from them. And then he places them down carefully, exactly where they had been.

We power on. I make it into camp, avoiding the Sad Bus. I am morphing into The Little Engine That Could. The following days pass with relative ease. We walk through incredibly diverse landscapes of dried lakes, gibber plains, along the banks of the Cooper and across red sand hills. Each evening one of the stronger walkers, a kindly federal police officer, Megan White, attends to people’s blisters. “You’ll probably lose four or five toenails,” she tells me. “No wonder your little toe is so sore,” she adds as she peels off some tape. “There’s a blister under your toenail.”

On our last night, sitting around the campfire, I chat with Sally Duncan, who lives on a wheat farm near Walgett, NSW. Having done the walk, she has enormous respect for the achievements of Burke and Wills – we are doing it in winter when daytime temperatures rise to 30 degrees; they did it in summer when it reached 50 degrees. Most satisfying has been meeting her fellow trekkers, hearing about their lives. “I love this isolation,” she says. “There are no iPhones, no distractions. People talk and tell you about their lives – I’ve made good friends. In a way it is going to be hard for anyone who isn’t here to understand what we have done.”

Seven of us are only doing half the trip. I’ve walked 163km (out of 170km) in five days. I feel a great sense of achievement, but wish I could go back and walk those missing seven. In the morning we wave off our fellow walkers. They have 160km to go. They head off across an enormous gibber plain that will take them two days to traverse. We head to the Birdsville Pub. As we bump along, I think that Greg Donovan is on to something – this could become the great Australian walk.

Entry fees are $3950 for the full 11-day trek and $2750 for a five-day trek. burkeandwillstrek.com.au