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What Was the Burke and Wills Expedition?
The Burke and Wills expedition, formally the Victorian Exploring Expedition, was the 1860 to 1861 attempt to cross the Australian continent from south to north. Robert O’Hara Burke (1821-1861), an Irish-born police superintendent, led nineteen men out of Melbourne’s Royal Park on 20 August 1860 with twenty-three horses, twenty-six camels, and roughly twenty tons of supplies. By February 1861 a forward party of four had reached the mangroves near the Gulf of Carpentaria. One died on the way back, and two more died on Cooper Creek about ten weeks after returning there. The fourth, John King (1838-1872), survived because the Yandruwandha people of Cooper Creek fed and sheltered him until a relief party found him in September 1861.
The expedition survives in two intersecting archives. On one side sit the official papers held in the Royal Society of Victoria’s Burke and Wills collection at the State Library of Victoria, William John Wills‘s field notebook, and the parliamentary commission of inquiry that reported in 1862. On the other sits the oral and ethnographic record of the Yandruwandha and Yawarrawarrka peoples whose Country the expedition crossed and whose generosity is the reason the journey produced any survivor at all. The story below traces the chronology as the evidence allows, within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries.
The Royal Society of Victoria and the 20 August 1860 Departure
The expedition was a colonial-scientific commission. The Royal Society of Victoria, founded in 1854, established an Exploration Committee in 1857 to organise a transcontinental crossing. Public subscription, a Victorian government grant, and a £1,000 contribution from the businessman Ambrose Kyte raised the budget. Camels were imported from British India, an experiment in arid-zone transport that arrived in 1860 with the camel-master George Landells. The committee selected Burke as leader by ballot in June 1860, over candidates with more bush experience. He had served in the Victorian police since 1853, latterly as a superintendent, but had no record of inland exploration. William John Wills (1834-1861), an English-born surveyor trained at the Melbourne Magnetic Observatory, was appointed third-in-command, surveyor, and astronomical observer.
Royal Park on the afternoon of 20 August 1860 was watched by an estimated fifteen thousand spectators. Its stores ran from a cedar-topped oak camp table and a Chinese gong to 57 buckets and 45 yards of green gossamer for veils. One wagon broke down as soon as it started. By the time the expedition reached Menindee on the Darling River on 12 October 1860, Burke had already lost his second-in-command, George Landells, who resigned after a quarrel, had dismissed many of the original men, and had left equipment and provisions behind at Balranald.
Menindee, the Cooper Creek Depot, and the Forward Push
Burke split the expedition at Menindee on 19 October 1860. He took seven men, fifteen horses, and sixteen camels and pushed ahead to establish an advance depot at Cooper Creek. William Wright, who had been working at nearby Kinchega Station, guided the party as far as Torowoto Swamp, where Burke made him third-in-command and sent him back to Menindee to bring up the rest of the men and stores. Burke feared that the South Australian explorer John McDouall Stuart would beat him to the north coast. But the Exploration Committee’s instructions had told him to form his depot at Cooper Creek, and the royal commission later censured him for dividing his party at Menindee and for trusting Wright with an important command without knowing his character.[1]
The advance party reached Cooper Creek on 11 November 1860. They established Camp LXV, the depot the world would later know as the Dig Tree camp, on the southern bank of the Bullah Bullah Waterhole on 6 December 1860. Burke, Wills, John King, and Charles Gray (a sailor Burke had hired at Swan Hill) departed for the Gulf of Carpentaria from this depot on 16 December 1860. Burke left William Brahe in charge of Camp 65 with verbal instructions to wait three months. As they parted, Wills asked the depot party to stay four.
To the Gulf of Carpentaria, February 1861
The forward party of four left the depot with six camels, one horse, and provisions for three months. They moved north across Sturt’s Stony Desert and up the Diamantina, then over the Selwyn Range to the Cloncurry. Wills’s field notes, now in the State Library of Victoria’s collection of expedition records, show that after a season of heavy rain the going was easier than they had feared. Crossing the Stony Desert they camped beside water every night but one, and at Christmas Wills wrote of “such a delightful oasis in the desert.”[2]
Around 9 February 1861 Burke and Wills pushed forward from Camp CXIX (119), their northernmost camp, near the Bynoe River, in an attempt to reach the open Gulf coast. The mangroves and tidal flats defeated them. They tasted the brackish tidal water; they did not see the open sea. The Australian transcontinental crossing had been functionally completed without ever being visually confirmed. The two men returned to Camp 119, the four-man party turned south, and the slow death of the return march began.
The Return: Gray’s Death and the Missed Depot
By late March the party was on starvation rations. Charles Gray, weak from dysentery and what later sources have read as scurvy, was caught taking flour from the common store; Burke beat him for it. Gray died on 17 April 1861 at Polygonum Swamp, four days short of the Cooper Creek depot. Burke, Wills, and King spent the day digging a shallow grave for him, then continued south with their two remaining camels. The decision to bury Gray rather than push on cost them roughly twenty-four hours of marching time.
They reached Camp 65 on the evening of Sunday, 21 April 1861. The depot was deserted. William Brahe, after waiting eighteen weeks rather than the thirteen Burke had ordered, with one of his men (William Patton) injured and the supply column from Menindee nowhere in sight, had ridden out that morning. The forward party had missed him by approximately nine hours. Brahe had blazed the coolibah at the camp with the inscriptions “B / LXV” on the creek-side trunk, “DEC 6.60 APR 21.61” on an upstream limb, and “DIG 3 FT NW” on the landward side, marking the position of a small cache of food buried for the returning party. Brahe’s journal lists what he buried: 50 pounds each of flour, oatmeal and sugar, and 30 pounds of rice.[3]
Why the Depot Was Empty
The simultaneous failure of two timetables produced the empty depot. Burke had taken longer to reach the Gulf and return than he had budgeted; Brahe had waited five weeks longer than Burke had ordered, then left the day Burke was nine hours away. Behind both men stood William Wright, who had not departed Menindee with the supply column until the end of January 1861, and whose progress north toward Cooper Creek had stalled at the Bulloo River, where three of his men, including the artist and naturalist Ludwig Becker, died in late April. The Royal Commission of Inquiry, which reported in January 1862, spread the blame. It called Wright’s conduct “reprehensible in the highest degree”; it criticised Burke for dividing his party, for giving Wright authority and for not writing down his instructions; it said Brahe’s retreat “may be deserving of considerable censure” but that he acted from a sense of duty; and it faulted the Exploration Committee for its inaction in Melbourne.[4]
The Yandruwandha and the Survival of John King
Burke, Wills, and King rested at the Dig Tree on 21 to 22 April 1861, ate the cache, and argued about what to do next. Burke chose to push southwest toward a cattle station near Mount Hopeless in South Australia, about 150 miles away, although Wills and King wanted to go back down their old track toward Menindee. They left a buried message in the cache pit reporting their arrival and direction. Brahe and Wright actually returned to Camp 65 on 8 May, about two and a half weeks later, found the pit apparently undisturbed (the men had reburied it carefully), and rode away again without realising the survivors were alive within forty miles of the depot.
The Mount Hopeless attempt failed. Both camels died, and without them the men could not carry enough water to leave Cooper Creek. The Yandruwandha gave them fish and cakes of nardoo, made from the ground spore-cases of a water fern (Marsilea drummondii), but gathering and preparing it was women’s work, and they were unlikely to have shown the strangers how it was done. King found the plant himself on 17 May, and the men began grinding it once they came across a pounding stone. Nardoo contains thiaminase, an enzyme that destroys vitamin B1, and some researchers have argued that the men developed beriberi because they prepared it wrongly. The State Library of Victoria’s review of the evidence is more cautious: Wills saw the Yandruwandha eat nardoo both as baked cake and as porridge, and the explorers used both methods. Beriberi probably hastened their deaths, alongside scurvy, exhaustion, too few calories and the cold of a Cooper Creek winter.[5]
Wills’s last journal entry is dated 29 June 1861. Burke and King left him in a gunyah with nardoo, water and firewood and went up the creek to look for the Yandruwandha. On the second evening Burke could go no further. He asked King to put his pistol in his right hand and leave him unburied, and he died at about eight the next morning. King found a store of nardoo in a deserted camp, went back to find Wills dead in his gunyah, and then tracked the Yandruwandha by their footprints until they took him into their camp.
What the Yandruwandha Did
The Yandruwandha kept John King alive until the relief party arrived in mid-September. In his narrative to the royal commission, King said they “appeared to feel great compassion for me when they understood that I was alone on the creek, and gave me plenty to eat.” They supplied him with nardoo and fish, and he shot crows and hawks for the camp in return. He washed a sore on one woman’s arm and dressed it with nitrate of silver, after which she and her husband gave him nardoo night and morning. When Howitt later handed out gifts, he singled out an old woman, Carrawaw, “who had been particularly kind to King.” The Burke, Wills, King and Yandruwandha National Heritage Place, inscribed on the National Heritage List in 2016, recognises this care.[6]
Howitt’s Relief Expedition and the 15 September Recovery
By mid-June 1861 the lack of news had the Melbourne press speculating about the expedition’s fate, and the Exploration Committee appointed Alfred William Howitt (1830-1908), an experienced bushman who would later become one of Australia’s first systematic ethnographers, to lead a Victorian Contingent Party. Howitt, with the surveyor Edwin Welch as second in command, left Melbourne on 26 June 1861. On the way he met Brahe, returned to Melbourne for a larger party, and reached Cooper Creek on 8 September.
Welch was riding ahead of the main column on 15 September 1861 when he saw a group of Yandruwandha shouting and gesturing on the far bank of the creek. He rode toward them, and they scattered, leaving behind a figure in rags who tottered, raised his hands and fell on the sand. It was King. Howitt buried Wills on 18 September and Burke soon after, near where they had died. He returned in 1862 to exhume the remains for Victoria’s first state funeral, held in Melbourne on 21 January 1863, and on that second journey he presented three brass breastplates, made for the Exploration Committee, to the Yandruwandha “for the Humanity shewn to the Explorers Burke, Wills and King.” One is now in the National Museum of Australia.[7]
Was It Leadership Failure, Supply Failure, or Climate Misjudgment?
The 1862 Royal Commission did not pick one cause and the modern historiography has not picked one either. Burke’s command decisions are easy to itemise: the Menindee split, the speed of the northern push, the choice of Mount Hopeless over the depot, the beating of Gray. The supply line failed at two nodes simultaneously: Wright at Menindee did not move with adequate urgency, and the Royal Society of Victoria’s Exploration Committee did not impose a timetable that would have detected his delay. Modern accounts also stress what the explorers ignored. The National Museum of Australia notes that the Yandruwandha had been generous with food since the party reached Cooper Creek, overtures that the explorers “met with suspicion and sometimes hostility.” The Australian Dictionary of Biography suggests Burke and Wills “might also have survived if they had lived with the Aboriginals and shared their food as King did.”[8] King’s survival, by that reading, was the only outcome consistent with the evidence the country itself supplied.
What the Record Will Not Tell Us
Several questions remain genuinely open. Wills’s last letter to his father, dated 27 June 1861, says they “had every right to expect” to be followed up from Menindee and, at Burke’s prompting, mentions his “great claims on the committee for their neglect.” Burke’s last verbal instructions to King, reproduced after the rescue, contain a request that his body be left unburied with a pistol in his hand; whether sincere wish or hallucination cannot now be settled. The exact dates of Burke’s and Wills’s deaths are not known. They died in the last days of June or the first days of July 1861; the date often given, 28 June, cannot be right for Wills, whose last journal entry is dated 29 June. The Dig Tree, listed on the Queensland Heritage Register since 28 February 2003, still stands at Nappa Merrie Station. Much of the lettering Brahe carved is now obscured by overgrowing bark, but the tree still marks the nine hours that decided the rest.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Burke and Wills expedition take place?
The Victorian Exploring Expedition departed Melbourne’s Royal Park on 20 August 1860 and the relief party recovered its sole survivor on 15 September 1861. Major waypoints were the Menindee split (19 October 1860), the establishment of the Cooper Creek depot at Camp 65 (6 December 1860), the forward party’s departure for the Gulf (16 December 1860), the Bynoe River turnaround (around 9 February 1861), the missed depot at Cooper Creek (21 April 1861), and the rescue of John King by Edwin Welch and Alfred Howitt (15 September 1861).
Who led the expedition and what were their backgrounds?
Robert O’Hara Burke (1821-1861), an Irish-born Victorian police superintendent with no exploring experience, was selected by Royal Society of Victoria ballot. William John Wills (1834-1861), an English-born surveyor trained at the Melbourne Magnetic Observatory, was appointed third-in-command and astronomical observer. The forward party of four also included John King (1838-1872), an Irish ex-soldier in charge of the camels, and Charles Gray, a sailor hired at Swan Hill in September 1860.
What is the Dig Tree and what was carved on it?
The Dig Tree is a coolibah (Eucalyptus coolibah, formerly E. microtheca) on the Bullah Bullah Waterhole of Cooper Creek at Nappa Merrie Station in southwestern Queensland. William Brahe blazed it on 21 April 1861 with three inscriptions: “B / LXV” marking Camp 65, “DEC 6.60 APR 21.61” recording the camp’s establishment and his departure, and “DIG 3 FT NW” directing returning men to a buried cache of supplies. The tree is estimated at two hundred to two hundred and fifty years old and has been on the Queensland Heritage Register since 28 February 2003.
Why did Burke, Wills, and King miss the depot?
Two timetables failed at the same moment. The forward party arrived on the evening of 21 April 1861, approximately nine hours after William Brahe rode out for Menindee. Brahe had waited eighteen weeks rather than the thirteen Burke had ordered, with one of his men injured and the supply column from Menindee, under William Wright, having stalled at the Bulloo River. The cache Brahe buried at the foot of the tree held about a month of food. Burke chose to push southwest toward Mount Hopeless rather than wait at the depot. Brahe and Wright, returning briefly weeks later, did not realise the survivors were alive within forty miles.
How did the Yandruwandha keep John King alive?
The Yandruwandha, on whose Country the explorers were stranded, took King in after Burke and Wills died at the end of June 1861 and fed him nardoo and fish until the relief party arrived on 15 September. King shot crows and hawks for the camp in return and treated a woman’s sore arm. The names that survive come from the explorers’ records: Pitchery fed Wills in early June, and Howitt thanked an old woman, Carrawaw, who had been particularly kind to King. The Burke, Wills, King and Yandruwandha National Heritage Place, inscribed on the National Heritage List in 2016, recognises this care.
What killed Burke and Wills?
Hunger and exhaustion, probably hastened by beriberi. Nardoo contains thiaminase, an enzyme that destroys vitamin B1, and some researchers have argued that the explorers prepared it wrongly. The State Library of Victoria’s review notes that the explorers, like the Yandruwandha, ate nardoo both as cake and as porridge, and treats beriberi as one factor alongside scurvy, too few calories and the cold. Wills’s last journal entry, dated 29 June 1861, reads in part: “I am weaker than ever… my legs and arms are nearly skin and bone.” Burke died a few days later, up the creek, with King beside him. The exact dates of both deaths are not known.
Who was William Brahe and what did he do wrong?
William Brahe was a German-born member of the expedition left in charge of Camp 65 when Burke departed for the Gulf on 16 December 1860. Burke ordered him to wait three months; Wills privately asked for four. Brahe waited eighteen weeks (about four months and one week) before riding out on the morning of 21 April 1861, the day the forward party returned. His decision was made with an injured man, William Patton, and with the supply column from Menindee nowhere in sight. The royal commission said his retreat “may be deserving of considerable censure,” but added that he acted from “a conscientious desire to discharge his duty.”
What does Sarah Murgatroyd’s “The Dig Tree” argue?
Sarah Murgatroyd’s The Dig Tree: The Story of Burke and Wills (Text Publishing, 2002) is a widely read narrative of the expedition. To research it, Murgatroyd retraced the explorers’ route three times while enduring chronic pain. She died in March 2002, a few weeks after the book was published. The book does not reference its sources, and a State Library of Victoria expert who recommends it as a starting point warns that it draws heavily on Tom Bergin’s 1982 thesis and contains numerous errors.
What does Tim Bonyhady’s “From Melbourne to Myth” argue?
Tim Bonyhady’s Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth (David Ell Press, 1991) covers the political and social background to the expedition, its progress and its aftermath, and how it became part of Australian folklore. It dwells less on the journey itself than on the expedition’s social impact, and a State Library of Victoria expert calls it the most comprehensive book on the subject.
Where can the expedition be studied today?
The State Library of Victoria holds the records of the Royal Society of Victoria’s Exploration Committee and of the expedition (MS 13071), including correspondence, despatches, Wills’s field notes and Howitt’s diaries. The Burke and Wills Web (burkeandwills.net.au) provides digital access to expedition records. The Dig Tree itself is preserved on the Queensland Heritage Register at Nappa Merrie Station. The Burke, Wills, King and Yandruwandha National Heritage Place at Innamincka, inscribed on the National Heritage List in 2016, commemorates both the expedition and the Yandruwandha care of King.
Sources
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Burke, Robert O’Hara (1821–1861), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 3, Melbourne University Press, 1969. adb.anu.edu.au; Dave Phoenix, A Brief History of the Burke & Wills Expedition, chapters 7–8, Burke & Wills Web. burkeandwills.net.au
- William Wills (ed.), Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia, from the Journals and Letters of William John Wills, Richard Bentley, London, 1863 (Project Gutenberg eBook 5816). gutenberg.org; Dave Phoenix, A Brief History of the Burke & Wills Expedition, chapter 9, Burke & Wills Web. burkeandwills.net.au
- Queensland Heritage Register, Burke and Wills Dig Tree (entry 601073), entered 28 February 2003. apps.des.qld.gov.au
- Dave Phoenix, A Brief History of the Burke & Wills Expedition, chapter 17: The Aftermath (quoting the Commission of Enquiry report, 1862), Burke & Wills Web. burkeandwills.net.au; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Burke, Robert O’Hara (1821–1861), Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1969. adb.anu.edu.au
- State Library of Victoria, Did Burke and Wills die because they ate nardoo?, Dig: The Burke & Wills Research Gateway (archived 27 June 2022). web.archive.org
- John King, narrative delivered to the Royal Commission, and Alfred Howitt, diary, September 1861, both printed in William Wills (ed.), Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia, Richard Bentley, London, 1863. gutenberg.org; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, The Burke, Wills, King and Yandruwandha National Heritage Place. dcceew.gov.au
- National Museum of Australia, Victorian expedition breastplate, collection highlights. nma.gov.au; Dave Phoenix, A Brief History of the Burke & Wills Expedition, chapter 16: Relief Expeditions (quoting Edwin Welch), Burke & Wills Web. burkeandwills.net.au; Ian F. McLaren, Wills, William John (1834–1861), Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 6, 1976. adb.anu.edu.au
- National Museum of Australia, Burke and Wills, Defining Moments. nma.gov.au; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Burke, Robert O’Hara (1821–1861), Australian Dictionary of Biography, 1969. adb.anu.edu.au