The Australian Expedition That Was the First to Cross the Continent South-to-North in 1861 and Whose Two Senior Leaders Both Died at the Depot Their Support Party Had Left Nine Hours Earlier

The Victorian Exploring Expedition of 1860–1861 was funded by the Royal Society of Victoria and the colonial government with a budget of approximately £12,000 to make the first European south-to-north crossing of the Australian continent. The geographical interior of Australia north of Cooper’s Creek (now in southwest Queensland) was, in 1860, the largest single unmapped area on any continent except Antarctica.

The expedition was the most heavily-supplied land exploration in Australian history to that date. It departed Melbourne on 20 August 1860 with 19 men, 26 camels (newly imported from the Indian subcontinent for desert use), 23 horses, 6 wagons, 21 tons of equipment, and provisions for two years. The convoy was led by Robert O’Hara Burke — a 39-year-old Irish-born former Crimean War officer, then serving as a senior police inspector at the Victorian frontier town of Castlemaine, with no previous Australian inland experience.

Cooper’s Creek

The convoy reached Cooper’s Creek on the northern edge of the South Australian semi-arid zone on 11 November 1860. The convoy had taken three months to cover approximately 1,200 km — a rate of about 12 km per day. Burke had been impatient with the convoy’s slow pace since departure.

At Cooper’s Creek Burke divided the expedition. The main party stayed at the creek under William Brahe as the depot party, with the brief to maintain a supply base for four months. Burke and three companions — William John Wills (a 26-year-old Devon-born surveyor, the senior scientist on the expedition), the Irish soldier John King, and a former sailor named Charles Gray — would push north to the Gulf of Carpentaria with two horses, six camels, and three months of stripped-down supplies.

To the Gulf

Burke and Wills left Cooper’s Creek on 16 December 1860. The push north covered approximately 1,500 km of unmapped country in 57 days. They reached a mangrove swamp on the western coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria — the Bynoe River estuary, near modern Karumba — on 9 February 1861. The tidal mangroves prevented them from physically reaching the open salt water of the Gulf itself. Burke recorded the achievement in his journal and turned south the same day.

The southern return march was significantly worse than the northward push. The wet season had begun. They had not budgeted for monsoon rains. Their supplies were exhausted. They began to slaughter and eat the camels.

Charles Gray died on 17 April 1861 approximately 30 miles north of Cooper’s Creek of dysentery and starvation. The other three — Burke, Wills, and King — buried him and pushed on.

21 April 1861

The depot party at Cooper’s Creek under William Brahe had been instructed to wait four months. By 21 April 1861 they had been waiting four months and four days. They had lost one man to illness, the rest were showing scurvy, and Brahe — who had no information about whether Burke and Wills were alive or dead — decided to break camp and march south to meet the expected support column that had been promised from Melbourne months earlier.

Brahe and the depot party left Cooper’s Creek at 10:30 a.m. on 21 April 1861. Before leaving they buried a small cache of provisions — flour, sugar, and meat — at the base of a coolibah tree, which they marked with the inscription “DIG UNDER” and the date. The cache was meant to be findable by any survivors of Burke’s party who might still arrive.

Burke, Wills, and King reached the depot at approximately 7:30 p.m. on 21 April 1861, nine hours after Brahe had left.

The tent was gone. The horses and camels were gone. The men were gone. The fire was cold but the ashes were still soft. They were within hours of each other and they had missed.

The men found the Dig Tree, recovered the cache, and read Brahe’s note. They had food again — enough for several weeks. They could either pursue Brahe south (Brahe’s tracks were three days old, the convoy was faster than the three exhausted men with two dying camels) or wait at the depot for the inevitable rescue that would come once Brahe reached Melbourne and reported.

Burke chose neither. His chosen plan — communicated to Wills and King in subsequent journal entries — was to march westward across what he believed (incorrectly) was a passable route to the South Australian settlement of Mount Hopeless, approximately 250 km southwest. The plan was geographically impossible. The country between Cooper’s Creek and Mount Hopeless was the Strzelecki Desert, which Burke had no information about and which his exhausted men could not have crossed in their condition.

They left the Cooper’s Creek depot for the second time on 23 April 1861.

Late June 1861

The three men were not able to reach Mount Hopeless. They were turned back by waterless country within approximately 100 km of leaving the depot. They returned to Cooper’s Creek, where they survived for approximately seven more weeks on nardoo — the seed of an aquatic fern that the local Yandruwandha people had taught them to prepare.

The nardoo preparation requires careful washing to remove an enzyme (thiaminase) that destroys vitamin B1 in the consumer. The Yandruwandha had given Burke, Wills, and King the recipe but the three men did not consistently follow the washing protocol. They were progressively poisoned by thiaminase-induced beriberi in addition to general starvation.

Wills died at the Cooper’s Creek camp on approximately 28 June 1861. He was 26. His last journal entry is dated 26 June.

Burke died approximately the same week — the exact date is unrecorded but probably late June. He was 39. King — the youngest, the most physically resilient, and the most consistent in following the Yandruwandha nardoo recipe — survived. The Yandruwandha cared for King for approximately three months after Burke and Wills died. He was found by the rescue expedition under Alfred Howitt in September 1861 and brought back to Melbourne in November.

The Royal Commission of Enquiry of 1861–1862 produced extensive findings on the expedition’s failures. Burke’s appointment as expedition leader — over the available qualified candidates — was identified as the foundational error. Brahe’s decision to break camp at Cooper’s Creek nine hours before Burke arrived was, in the Commission’s report, defended as a reasonable decision given the information available.

The Dig Tree on Cooper’s Creek is now a Queensland national monument. The “DIG UNDER” inscription is still legible.