The Dig Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Burke and Wills Expedition - Hardcover

Murgatroyd, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747556776 ISBN 13: 9780747556770

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2002

Synopsis

In 1860, Australia remained the truly dark continent. Although there were European settlements in its south, much of the north remained unknown and dangerous. But things were changing. On 20th August, 1860, The Victorian Exploring Expedition left Melbourne to make the journey into the Gulf of Carpentaria in the northern coast. The expedition was headed by an Irish policeman called Robert O' Hara Burke - a charmer, gambler, and a man infamous for taking long baths in his back garden. Burke and his team of eighteen men made a confident start. After leaving most of the group behind in Cooper Creek (in central Australia), three of the party, including Burke, reached the Carpentaria. They were the first ever to do so. But the journey back was riddled with mishap and bad luck. By the time the three had returned to Cooper Creek, exhausted and starving, they discovered that the rest of the party had retreated, leaving behind only a carved message on a coolibah tree. "The Dig Tree" is the tale of this tragic expedition. Sarah Murgatroyd brings the story vividly alive - the political events in the background, the colourful characters, the spectacular and, often, unforgiving landscape, and the awful desperation of the final days. It is an intelligent, evocative and above all, utterly gripping book.

About this title

Review

For Australians, the Burke and Wills Expedition of 1860-61 provides the great epic in the story of the European exploration of their continent. Like many epics of 19th-century European exploration across the world, it has taken on some of the elements of myth. The heroic struggle to achieve the aim of crossing the continent from north to south. The even more heroic deaths on the impossible return journey. The one survivor of the expedition staggering out of the wilderness months later, alive only because of the generosity of the aborigines. All of these elements possess a mythic quality in the imaginations of many Australians.

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

Review

"Sarah Murgatroyd tells an exciting story" -- The Historical Novels Review, Augsut 2002

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0747556776
• ISBN 13: 9780747556770
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384