The Dig Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Ill-fated Burke and Wills 1860 Expedition (Paperback)

Sarah Murgatroyd's book looks beneath the myths to find the truth about the ill-fated expedition. Some of the truths are not very flattering, particularly to the expedition's leader, Robert O'Hara Burke. Burke was "a man who had never travelled beyond the settled districts of Australia, who had no experience of exploration and who was notorious for getting lost on his way home from the pub." Unsurprisingly, he made a series of disastrous decisions that, effectively, doomed all but one of the men who accompanied him on the last leg of the journey to death in the desert. By his blinkered refusal to accept the help offered by the aborigines of the region he turned his back on the one remote hope of survival. Yet The Dig Tree is not a simple de-bunking of a heroic myth. Murgatroyd, in a compelling, page-turning narrative, reconstructs the expedition in such a way that the genuine heroism of men striving against impossible odds and against their own limitations emerges. Her descriptions of the last days of Burke and Wills, as they realise that they cannot survive, are very moving. Her clear-sighted view of the follies and farce of much of the expedition, in the end, does more justice to those involved than any amount of mythologising.--Nick Rennison --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review
'Remarkable. Murgatroyd has an eye for the drama her skill in story-telling and immaculate research, means that there is barely a dull moment' Scotland on Sunday 'A beautifully told story' Sunday Telegraph 'Murgatroyd demonstrates a profound understanding of topography and climate in this gripping tale' Sunday Times

This is the story of the most tragic of the many attempts made to cross the arid and largely uninhabited interior of Australia in the middle of the 19th century. In the 1840s, expeditions had set out to discover the whereabouts of 'the inland sea' which was widely believed to be the source of many of south Australia's big rivers like the Murray and the Darling. In fact, no such sea existed. By the 1860s another priority dominated exploration: that of crossing the continent from south to north. This was driven more by the needs of politics and business than by the cartographers' urge to fill in empty spaces on the map. The state governments of Australia wanted to establish a transcontinental telegraph to link up Australia with India and the rest of the world, and to this end, in 1860, the government of South Australia offered a ?2000 prize to the first expedition to complete the crossing of the continent. Two attempts were made by James MacDougall Stuart, both of them destined to fail. In the meantime, in the hope of forestalling Stuart's attempts, the government of Victoria equipped an expedition fitted out with the best and most advanced aids, ample stores and, above all, camels brought from India. But its flaw lay in the choice of leaders: Robert O' Hara Burke, a 40-year-old Irish mercenary soldier and Victorian police inspector and William John Willis, a 27-year-old meteorological officer turned medical student who acted as the expedition's surveyor. The 15-man expedition left on the 20th August 1860 but by mid-October it had spilt into two groups, largely as a result of Burke's lack of leadership. Without waiting for the trailing group to turn up, Burke pushed on to Cooper's Creek, deep in the interior, where he established a base camp under the supervision of the expedition's foreman William Brake. From there he and Willis made a bid to reach the Gulf of Carpentaria. In February 1861 they came in sight of the sea and only deep swamps prevented them actually reaching it. But their return journey was one of the most nightmarish in the annals of Australian exploration. Held up by perpetual rains and mud, their rations fell so low they had to kill a camel and then Burke's horse. They reached Cooper's Creek on 21st April to find that Brake, giving them up for lost, had left only eight hours previously, though not before carving onto the back of a nearby tree (the Dig Tree of the title) the words 'dig 3 feet northwest', guiding them to a place where food and letters were found. Burke and Wills never caught up with Brake; wandering in circles, they soon had to kill their remaining camels and finally succumbed to hunger and exhaustion on 30th June. A third member of the party, John King, survived, kept alive by aboriginals until he was found, wasted to a shadow, 'hardly to be distinguished as a human being but for the remnants of the clothes upon him.' Journalist Sarah Murgatroyd has done a workmanlike job in retelling this tragic story which, despite the warnings it contains about the perils of arrogance and impetuosity in the hazardous business of expeditioning, is testimony to a certain kind of courage and fortitude. (Kirkus UK)

A shimmering reconstruction of the 1860 Victorian Exploring Expedition, which sought to traverse Australia south to north and needed no clairvoyance to predict its end in disaster. The age of exploration was ending, but there remained great swaths of land outside the ken of Europeans, and one of these was interior Australia. The Royal Society deemed it time to finance an expedition through the uncharted landscape. Journalist Murgatroyd, however, notes that the expedition, while allowing for feints toward the heroism of exploration and the desire for scientific knowledge, may have been motivated primarily by economic considerations: control of the future telegraph cable and the possibility of overland trade with Southeast Asia. The leader of the expedition, Robert Burke, was a bit of a loose cannon with a reputation for spending "hours lying in his outdoor bathtub, wearing nothing but his police helmet, reading a book, and cursing the mosquitoes." Without any background in exploration, little regard for the scientists among his company, less for the aborigines he met en route ("he had come to conquer, not to learn"), and an overburden of fruitless supplies-he had packed a goodly supply of dandruff brushes-Burke made numerous logistical blunders in his drive to secure his patron's wishes, ultimately finding himself with three men pushing his way to the north coast, amid "a continuous mass of mangroves, mosquitoes, mud, and mosquitoes." He made it, but he wouldn't make it back, nor would many of his men. Little of practical nature was made of his discoveries, yet he is remembered in Australia as a hero. By Murgatroyd's lights, he was lucky to make it as far as he did before, inevitably, his luck wore out. A sorry, if Herculean, chapter in Australian history, albeit venal and murderously inept, told by Murgatroyd with verve and a gathering sense of doom. (Photographs and maps) (Kirkus Reviews)

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• Books > History > Other Historical Subjects > Discovery & Exploration
• Books > Science & Nature
• Books > Travel & Holiday > Countries & Regions > Australia & New Zealand > Australia

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