The Sun SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1928. OUT IN THE NEVER-NEVER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 358, 19 May 1928, Page 8

The Sun SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1928. OUT IN THE NEVER-NEVER

ANOTHER of those pathetic stories of the Never-Never which even in these days of comparative settlement, mark the way of the wanderer in the vast spaces of Australia, comes from Port Darwin. Two travellers, on the lonely trek to the North, failed to locate water, their bodies being found at a distance of seven miles apart. In the strange irony of fate, both were within easy reach of the precious fluid—had they but known it. The delirium of the traveller so terribly lost was vividly depicted in the finding of these unfortunate adventurers. One, who had stripped himself of his clothing, had eaten grass in a last desperate struggle to maintain life. This desert tragedy recalls the fate of the explorers, Burke and Wills, in 1862. Burke was the leader—Robert O’Hara Burke, an Irishman who had been educated in Belgium and served in the Austrian Army, where he gained the rank of captain. Returning to Ireland, he joined the Royal Irish Constabulary, but the wanderlust was in his blood, and he emigrated to Australia, where he was made an inspector of police. When an expedition was being organised to cross Australia from South to North and explore the great unknown hinterland, the call to wander came again, and Burke obtained command of the expedition. He arrived at Cooper’s Creek, which flows into the gigantic Lake Ewe, on November 11, 1861. Lake Eyre, which covers an area of 4,000 square miles, but which in dry seasons is merely a salt marsh, had been discovered twenty years previously by Edward John Eyre, but beyond that the surrounding country was practically unknown. Resting on the Cooper for a while, Burke, with his companion, Wills, pushed on across the Continent to the country of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Though not quite at the sea, they reached the tidal waters of Flinders River, named after Matthew Flinders, the British sailor who had sailed the coast of North Australia and charted the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria as far back as 1801. Burke and Wills were thus the first two white men to cross Australia. They returned to Cooper’s Creek, which their records showed them to have reached on April 21, 1861. The travellers carried on, in an attempt to reach the stations in the most northerly settled parts of South Australia, but they were forced by the absence of water to return to Cooper’s Creek. There Burke died of starvation, on June 21, his companion, Wills, surviving him by only a few days. All too late, a relief force was dispatched in search of the missing explorers; it was not until the following September that their bodies were discovered, along with the melancholy journal of their fate. There was intense public indignation at the time which had been allowed to elapse before a relief expedition was organised. The bodies of Burke and Wills were brought to Melbourne and were given a public funeral on January 21, 1862, the city afterwards erecting a magnicent monument to the explorers. In the vast spaces of Australia, which has an area of nbarly 3,000,000 square miles, there are the skeletons of many men who have perished of thirst or starvation. People who have merely visited Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, or Adelaide, travelling perhaps by rail between these capitals, along settled country, have little conception of the great Never-Never, the outback areas in which even the hardy blackfellow has sometimes starved, a tribe, at a time. There are thousands of miles of such country, offering no hospitality to those who venture into it. There are immense areas, also, which in good seasons are passable and offer food and drink for man and. beast, but which, during rainless periods, are barren of vegetation, with dried waterholes, and rivers and creeks marked only by cracks in the earth, deserted even by the birds. Lost in these wastes, Heaven help the traveller, for he would be safer in the jungles of Malaya or the wilds of Africa. Yet how wonderful the recuperative powers of much of this apparently worthless earth ! A few days heavy rain, and the rivers are running, the waterholes filled, and the dusty face of the desert is covered by the green of grass, grown like magic. It is then that the interior is a wonderland ; safe and beautiful. But when drought holds sway, the traveller who sojourns off the beaten track walks hand in hand with death.