Into the Ghastly Blank with Burke and Wills

When John O'Hara Burke and William John Wills attempted to traverse Australia, the inland area of the continent was terra incognita known as the "ghastly blank." Learn what the expedition discovered in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Labor and I'm Sarah Doubt and we've gotten
a lot of requests for some Australian history, specifically the

(00:21):
Burke and Wills Expedition. I got emails from Seawan in
Liverpool and also Matt in Western Australia. And that might
make a little more sense to you when you hear
this quote from a writer named Sarah Murgatroyd who wrote
a book called The Dig Tree about the expedition, and
she said, the history of Australian exploration is littered with
the corpses of men who underestimated the power, the size

(00:44):
and the unpredictability of the outback. And the Victorian Exploring Expedition,
which was the original name of the expedition, aimed across
Australia from south to north and back again, so no
one really knew what was in the interior of the
Australian continent. In the early eighteen hundreds of people even
thought that there might be an inland sea. They had
explored the coastline, but they just didn't know what was

(01:06):
in the middle two thirds of the continent was unexplored,
and the big question everybody was asking was what was
in the ghastly blank? So the Victorian Exploring expedition left
too much fanfare and cheering crowds. But only one man
made the trip and survived, and he wasn't Burke or Wills.

(01:27):
So with that note of doom struck, let us continue.
So exploring the ghastly Blank seems like reason enough to
go into the outback, but the Royal Society of Victoria
had a few other good reasons for doing so, like
discovering new grazing land, maybe finding more gold, and some
minerals controlling a telegraph line that would link Australia to Asia,

(01:51):
finding Ludwig Leichhard and a different explorer who completely disappeared
in eighteen forty eight. And they also had the unstated
goal of being John mcdouell's stewart of South Australia who
was trying to do the same thing. The expedition was
going to be big and it was going to cost
a lot of money, so it took a while to
raise the money necessary to launch it, and some of

(02:13):
the funds came from private sources, as well as government sources,
and a lot of a lot of the reason why
it was so expensive is because they planned on importing
twenty four camels to make the trip with, because camels
go in the out back and I'm not sure. So
from the very beginning of this expedition, retrospectively, you can

(02:33):
see it's off to an odd start. Even in the
planning stages, we're spending massive amounts of money for things
like camels. We don't even know how camels will fare
in the outback because they've only really been there in exhibitions.
So why are we fixated on this idea? I can't
tell you. Yeah, it just lines up with the idea
of what an explorer ought to be. Reminded us both
kind of a lawrence of Arabia. And you're launching this

(02:55):
mission that seems like it's got everything covered and every
thing is how it ought to be. But really they
just don't know what they're getting into at all, and
they're horribly unprepared. But at the time, of course, no
one knows this, and they're all just very excited about
the whole thing. So on August eighteen sixty the expedition
left from Melbourne fifteen thousand people showed up to watch

(03:18):
them go, and almost immediately things go awry. A camel
breaks loose and a wagon breaks literally almost as they start,
and then two more breakdown within the next couple of miles.
So inauspicious beginnings, let's say so. In charge of the
party is Robert O'Hara Burke, who's a thirty three year
old Irish ex police officer and he has no surveying,

(03:41):
exploring or navigation experience. He's been voted to lead the
expedition because of political infighting among the society. He's the
acceptable candidate to everyone. George Landells is his second in command,
and he's the guy who brings all the camels from Karach,
So there you go. William John Wills is a five
year old English surveyor and he's third in command. Their

(04:04):
nineteen people all together starting out, and the Victorians have
twenty tons of stuff, which is a lot of stuff
for such a long journey over uncharted terrain, and some
of it just looks very strange when you're looking through
the list. Some makes sense. They've got a thousand pounds
of meat biscuits, a thousand pounds of oatmeal for the
camels eighteen thousand pounds of of hay. But they've also

(04:27):
got listed sixty gallons of rum for the camels and
forty pounds of pepper also for the camels, And supposedly
they thought the rum would keep the camels from getting
scurvy and the pepper would help wake them up if
they got tired. This, of course, is based on absolutely
no science whatsoever, but you know, it goes, just goes

(04:49):
along with that whole bumbling expedition thing. Oh yeah, and
on the on a side note about scurvy, they actually
get rid of all their lime juice pretty early on
when things are going bad, something that would be excellent
at preventing scurvy. So the camels are protected from scurvy
with pretend remedies, while actual remedies for the human beings
are left behind. So we have typical just this gross

(05:10):
ignorance compounded by mismanagement, right, And they find out as
they're going along there are other things they didn't know,
like it's not easy for camels to walk in mud,
and then conversely, it's not easy for wagons and horses
to make it through sand and scrub, so they start shedding.
Things like the lime, juice and sugar and other things
they actually need because they are going so incredibly slowly,

(05:34):
and Burke is being very fickle. He's hiring people and
firing them, and he especially doesn't like the two German
scientists who are on the trip and tells them that
they need to put down their instruments in their notebooks
and stop doing their experiments and become camel hands because
they really need help raining in these rather out of

(05:55):
control camels, and Burke is difficult to deal with and
his second in command and one of the scientists quickly resign,
which Sarah said she also would have done had she
been on the second I would have been somebody out
who was even before Minindi. But there's a guy who
offers to take their stuff up the Darling for a fee.

(06:16):
So think about that. They could be carrying all this
tons of stuff up the river and instead just making
it across basically on foot with some camels and some horses.
But because this guy had opposed Burke leading expedition in
the first place, Burke won't do it. Is that contentious election.
Oh no, we're not going to swallow our pride. Instead,
we're just going to keep hiring expensive wagons and carrying

(06:38):
this stuff over this ridiculous terrain for months and months,
and it's taking way too long. And Burke is even
getting frightened at this point that Stewart will beat him
to the north, at which point this is a useless expedition.
So he splits his party at Minindi, which is basically
the edge of civilization. That's where I'd cut out. There's

(06:59):
God at this point, and this is against his orders.
He was supposed to take the entire party up with him,
at least to Cooper's Creek, but he heads north with
the fittest men and for their guy, they have a
local guy named William Wright. And when they reached tour
a watt of swamp, Berkson's right back to Minindy, and
Wright's mission is to go back there and then come
back and meet him at Cooper's Creek with the rest

(07:20):
of the men and the supplies. So everyone's going to
be united at the end at Cooper's Creek, or so
Burke hopes. So meanwhile Burke is pressing on towards Cooper's
Creek from the swamp, and he gets tired of waiting
for right and you know. He waits there, and waits there,
and waits there for right to catch up with the
rest of the men and some of the supplies, and

(07:43):
finally decides that he's going to go break his party
yet again and take a smaller group um composed of himself, Wills,
John King, and Charles Gray, and they put William bray
He in charge of the group they're leaving behind at
Cooper's Creek and tell them to wait for them for
three months for their return. So burks group after two

(08:05):
months hits the Mangrove Swamps near the Gulf of Carpentaria
in February eleventh, eighteen sixty one, which makes them the
first white men to cross the continent. But it must
have been disappointing not even being able to get to
the gulf. The Mangrove Swamps were too hard to get to,
so they didn't even get you know, that view of
the sea, and thinking, oh, we've made it all across,

(08:27):
and there are other things that aren't going well, like
they've used two thirds of their rations and the wet
season is upon them, which means flooding and mosquitoes despite
not quite reaching the water, though it counts it's good enough.
They've met their goal, and they begin their trip back south.
They're met with rain, rain, and more rain, and it's

(08:49):
turning the ground into a giant bog. It's the summer,
so it is incredibly hot, and as we mentioned earlier,
their supplies are running low, and they start trying to
eat off the and in watching the Aborigines. So they
eat muscles, which doesn't sound bad, but they also kill
an eight foot long snake and eat that, which doesn't

(09:12):
sit well with them. Burke gets dysentery and uh moving
on to more domestic fair, probably deciding the snake doesn't
make for a very good dinner. They kill and eat
some of their camels and a horse, and their stuff
is too heavy, so they bury their equipment in instruments.
I don't know why they thought they would be coming
back to this spot eventually, but who knows. It seemed

(09:34):
like the thing to do on this trip back. Wills
catches Gray stealing flour from the rations, which of course
isn't something they can spare. Gray says that he's sick
and he's weak, but Burke thinks he's just shamming and
beats him. And there's some historical debate over what kind
of a beating this was, if it was just say,
a smack, or if it was something more serious. But

(09:56):
it appeared that Gray wasn't chamming about feeling weak, because
he dies within a few days and the other men
aren't feeling so great either. Yeah, they finally make it
to Cooper's Creek, though in April sixty one. This is
just Burke, Wills, and King at this point, and the
base party is not there. They'd waited for the three

(10:16):
months that Burke asked them to. They even waited longer
than that, nearly five months, and they had just left
that morning, which is so sad and frustrating even even
all this time after. But they've left supplies and they've
buried them, and they've noted them with blazes. So there's
a little help on the way, it seems, and Burke

(10:39):
knows that they're close, but the men are simply too
weak to try to follow the party that night. So
in the meantime, let's go back to our group at
Cooper's Creek. So things haven't been that great for the
guys who have been left behind at Cooper's Creek. The
Aborigines have been stealing some of their supplies. The who

(11:00):
were supposed to come up from Menindi with Right the
backup supplies never showed up, and the manner sick. One
has scurvy and a leg injury to or diseased, and
they've given up on Burke. You know, they must just
think at this point that the party of fours out
out there somewhere dead. Maybe they made it, maybe they didn't,

(11:21):
but they're not coming back to Cooper's Creek. So they
decide to leave in April. But on their trip out
they come across tracks from Right and the people coming
up from Nindi bringing them supplies. And Wright had had
his own difficulties. He'd run out of money, their meat
had gone rancid, their water poles had dried up. He

(11:41):
didn't have a surveyor, so he was just following Burke's,
you know, three month old tracks. Yeah. They're also attacked
all the time by rats, which long haired rats to
which makes it so much worse for some reason. And
they're bothered by the Aborigines. And you can get a
sense of what state they were in when they're making

(12:02):
this track by their camp names Desolation Point, mud Plane,
rat Point, so it's hot, they don't have good food,
they don't have good water. Three of the men died,
including Dr Ludwig Becker, and they're not doing well. But
Right and Bray, despite being plagued by problems, have now

(12:25):
met up. So we've got our two left behind parties
who have now become one group or MENINDI guys and
are Cooper's right. And they go back to the dig Tree,
which was that base camp on Cooper's Creek on May eighth,
but they don't see any signs of Burke. He hasn't
changed the blaze or left them a note or anything,
so they assume that no one's been there and they

(12:48):
leave again, and on the way another man dies, So
back to Burke, they decided not to follow a Bragy. Instead,
they're going to head towards Mount Hopeless, which sounds like
a terrible idea. It doesn't sound good at all. It is. However,
a police outpost and and explore A c Gregory had
made the trip just a few years before and said

(13:08):
it only took them about a week, so maybe it's
not such a bad idea after all. But unfortunately, our
party of three has a hard time navigating and can't
seem to find mount Hopeless, and while they're along the creek,
their two remaining camels die, so they eat the meat,
but now they have no way to carry water, and
they're in a place where they don't know where there's

(13:30):
any more water to be found anyways, so they're stuck
here on Cooper's Creek. They do get some food from
the Aborigines fish and nardiu cakes. And Nardiu cakes are
made from the nardou plant, which is kind of like
a four leaf clover, and it's actually made from the
spores which are ground and cooked, which is an important note,

(13:53):
and then made into a cake. Eventually, the men get
their own nardou seeds and they figure, well, we know
how to mcnardo cakes, and they just grind it up
and and fashion it into raw cakes, which is a problem.
This will be important later, but in the meantime, it's
getting cold there in rags. Will's at some point goes

(14:15):
back to the dig Tree to leave his journals and
a note. He's still writing letters at this point to
his people back home and time to be sad Rahe
and Wright had of course been back to the dig Tree,
but since they haven't seen any signs of the men.
They didn't leave any signs either, so Will goes back
and he doesn't know anyone's ever been so the lesson

(14:36):
of the stories always leave a note for you arrested
development fans. So, speaking of blazes, we have one too many.
At camp, Burke accidentally sets fire to all of their stuff. Seriously,
does this trip get any word it does? It does?
Apparently does. The men are getting weaker and weaker. They're

(14:57):
living exclusively off nardo, but it just seems to make
them feel worse. They're emaciated, they have very low pulses.
So Burke and King decide to go off and try
to find some aborigines for help, leaving Wills behind. But
Burke two weekends on this trip and can't go any further,

(15:18):
and he and King sit down, eat more nardo, shoot
and eat a crow, and by the next morning Burke
can't even get up, and he asked King to leave
his pistol in his hand and not bother burying him,
I guess, hoping to conserve King's own energy. King goes
back to find Wills, but Wills is dead. He'd written

(15:39):
a letter to his father that ended I think to
live about four or five days, spirits are excellent, which
just broke Sarah's and my heart. Um the Aborigines had
taken some of his clothes from his dead body, and
they'd covered him with some bows. So King Barry's wills
and then he goes looking for the Rwanda people who
had helped them before he realized is getting Aboriginal help

(16:02):
is his only option. But back home, several relief parties
have been put together and sent to different parts of Australia.
Because by this time they should have been back, they
should have heard something from them. And on September eight
sixty one, a surveyor and one party at Cooper's Creek

(16:23):
sees Aborigines yelling and waving and making signs at him.
So he goes to them and sees a figure in rags,
and he wrote, before I could pull up, I passed it.
And as I passed it tottered, threw up its hands
in an attitude of prayer, and fell on the sand.
When I turned back, the figure had partly risen, hastily dismounting.
I was soon beside it, excitedly asking who in the

(16:44):
name of wonder are you guess who it was? It was?
King he survived thanks to the Yonder Wanda who had
taken care of him. He had managed to find them
and they kept him alive. Um, and so now the
party united. They go to a cover the bodies of
Wills and Burke, and they find Wills. Most of his

(17:05):
skull is missing, but he's buried in a Bible versus read.
Burke has missing hands and feet, which is but his
gun is still there, which was in their hand. Um,
he's buried in a union jack and people are obsessed
with this story. John King is so harassed by women
on his way back to Melbourne that they actually have

(17:26):
to lock him in his bedroom. It becomes a sensational story.
The more the details leaked to the media and then
filter out to the press, the more interested people get.
The bodies of Burke and Wills actually insisted on bringing
back to Melbourne for a state funeral. Statues of them
were built and they were heroes. A hundred thousand people
came to see the remains at the Royal Society headquarters.

(17:48):
And you know, if you were just important enough, they
might let you even touch the bones. And it's interesting
that the perspective at that time was that these men
were heroes, and it was a story of daring, but
it changed over time and it became more what it
really was, which was just a disastrous trip and um
Burke and the and the rest of the party just

(18:09):
didn't understand the outback or the Aborigines or how to
survive their right. The blame game has never quite ended
with that. Some people blame Burke because of his arrogance
and just complete lack of knowledge about anything he was doing.
The Royal Commission blamed people like Right, who they said
was just sitting around with his feet up, not doing anything,
and why did it take him so long to leave

(18:31):
Menindi Right and the writer we'd mentioned earlier, Sarah Murgatroyd,
says we should actually blame the Royal Society, who had
an evil sort of plot to take over a large
piece of what is now Queensland. But we have a
little mystery tied up in this story, and that is
how did they die? And people thought for a long
time that it was starvation and exhaustion, but it seems

(18:53):
that it was actually berry berry or the lack of
vitamin B. And the main culprit here be that Nardo
that we kept mentioning that looks, you know, like a
four leaf clover. It looks so sweet, but it's full
of viaminase, which breaks down vitamin B in your body.
It's a toxin, and when you cook it it gets

(19:13):
rid of the toxins aborigines, But if you eat it raw,
like Burke and Wills decided they were so much smarter
than the aborigines, the toxin is still there and it
robs your body of that desperately needed viamine. The flower
that Gray stole actually has lots of vitamin BE in it,
so perhaps his body was telling him what he needed,
and they actually may have been suffering from very very

(19:34):
long before they even started eating the nardo because of
those fresh water muscles which can also have the same
toxin in them. So we're left with a question with
this disastrous mission, did anything good come out of it?
And a little bit did? The German scientists Ludwig Becker
and Herman Beckler actually did some pretty awesome research on
the trip, even though Burke wouldn't let them do much

(19:56):
and would rather them work with camel hands. Um Back
gathered hundreds of specimens of plants and birds, and Becker
made lots of drawings and paintings. Even when he was dying,
he drew the long haired rat that was eating his feet.
I cannot get over this jail. I probably never will.
Too horrible, but the relief parties that were sent out

(20:18):
actually explored a lot of new area in Australia, much
more than the actual expedition, and because of what they learned,
it opened up huge pieces of land for grazing, and
they also brought back a lot of aboriginal stuff. This
kind of reminded me of the podcast we did on
Frank Cranklin in the Northwest Passage Trip, because you have
the first rounds of explorers being lost, and then it's

(20:42):
the follow up guys, the search parties, who actually end
up charting a lot of territory and learning a lot.
And it's funny because if Burke and Wills had survived,
they probably would have gotten some of the blame for
things going horribly wrong, but since they died, they got
that romanticized sort of gloss and became these legendary figures

(21:05):
that people are just fascinated with. At a November two
thousand five auction, Burke's leather water bottle went for two
hundred and eighty six thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars
for a water bottle. That's completely insane. Yeah, they were
immortalized by this failed mission. And before we sign off,
we have one more little mystery for you. During one

(21:27):
of the relief party excursions, a guy named John McKinley
found a white man's grave at a place called Lake Massacre.
He thought it was gray, but it wasn't, and no
one to this day knows whose body it is or
where grays is varied. But that, you know, brings us
to one of our favorite themes, which of course is
exclamation that we had to mention that one. So the

(21:49):
consequences of this are the opening of the outback. We've
talked about the death of a few explorers here, but
we also have to consider the untold side of which
is the story of the Aborigines. And by opening up
all this vast, unexplored area of Australia, it's the beginning
of the exploitation of the Aborigines. So if you want

(22:13):
to hear more about the Aborigines side of the story,
go to our homepage and search for Stolen Generation at
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