Burke And Wills Views
Yes, in 1860 Burke and Wills might have blazed a trail across Australia opening up the outback for settlement by pastorilists, cattlemen, farmers and miners but now 150 years later they are lending their famous 0– household - names to repairing the damage done to the outback by our overuse of this land. In fact the Burke and Wills Environmental Expedition is using the household names of these great explorers and their 150th anniversary to mount a fact-finding tour of the outback to find out from local stakeholders what the environmental problems are and what needs to be done to repair any environmental damage they may have been done.
But this time we want Aboriginal people to lead us, tell us about their outback so we can learn from them before it is too late; because of the greatest ironies of the epic 1860 Burke and Wills expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria was the utter contempt with which the explorers regarded the Aborigines, without whom they could not have reached their destination nor survived as long as they did in the inhospitable outback.
In the end, by repeatedly refusing to reframe their attitudes towards Aborigines, the explorers sealed their own fate. Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills died of malnutrition beside Cooper Creek in this Aboriginal land of plenty where the Yandruwandha people had lived for thousands of years. Only one member of the party, John King, who joined the Aborigines, survived to tell the tale.
Thompson and his team will also be going out of their way to consult local indigenous rangers such as Birdsville's Don Rowland, manager of Simpson Desert National Park, who is already engaged in repairing some of the damage and is happy to share his inherited indigenous knowledge. Burke and Wills would have survived if they had allowed Aboriginals like Don Rowlands helping them as his letter below confirms.
Burke And Wills Images
