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journey from Cooper's Creek to the Gulf of Carpentaria, which Burke and Wills (almost)
reached in February 1861. They were prevented from crossing the continent and obtaining their
goal, the sea, by impenetrable mangrove swamps. "It would have been well to say that we
reached the sea,' wrote Burke, 'but we could not obtain a view of the open ocean, although we
made every endeavour to do so.'
William Wills was 27, the son of a surgeon and born in Devon; the expedition's surveyor, he
eventually became its second-in-command. Robert O'Hara Burke, born in Galway in 1821, had
been a captain in the Australian army and a police superintendent in the Castlemaine district. He
was described by a contemporary as a 'careless dare-devil sort of Irishman of very ordinary
physique. He wore a long beard, over which he dribbled his saliva.' It was Burke who named
one of the rivers the foursome found on the journey north after a female Irish cousin, Lady
Elizabeth Cloncurry.
When he, Wills, King and Gray failed to return to Melbourne, several relief expeditions set out
to find them. The only survivor was the former soldier from India, John King. The other three
had died of heat exposure and starvation towards the end of June.
William Wills, dying at the deserted depot at Cooper's Creek, scrawled a farewell letter to his
father in Devon, which ended: 'I think to live about four or five days. My religious views are not
the least changed and I have not the least fear of their being so. My spirits are excellent.' The
last entry in his diary two days later ends: 'My pulse is at forty-eight, and very weak, and my
legs and arms are nearly skin and bone. I can only look out, like Mr Micawber, "for
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carried by horse. Now their coaches came monthly to Cloncurry, the five or seven-horse
conveyances taking two days and a night to travel the 278km from Richmond, picking up and
delivering both passengers and mail. As demand grew with the population, the service became
more frequent, until the coaches were running twice-weekly.
But up to 1908, bullock teams and long camel-trains remained the main carriers of equipment,
supplies and ore. At one time there were about 500 camels in harness in the Cloncurry district,
controlled by about 40 so-called Afghan drivers, most of whom were not from Afghanistan but
from neighbouring Baluchistan. They had their own camp and mosque at Cloncurry, beside the
Chinatown section of Coppermine Creek.
'The grand Australian bush' was described by the writer, Henry Lawson, in his short story, The
Bush Undertaker, as 'the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird, and of
much that is different from things in other lands.'
This could well have applied to the Cloncurry region in 1896, the year that story was published
and the year in which Henry Lawson married in Sydney; he was 29.
The year before, another popular writer and a visitor to Queensland, had sat by a waterhole
near Winton, south of Hughenden, and composed new words for an old tune that became
Australia's anthem. He was Andrew Paterson, and the first collection of his poems, The Man
from Snowy River and Other Verses, had been published earlier that year. Writing in
magazines, he used the pseudonym The Banjo." The song he wrote in Winton, where it was first
sung in public, was Waltzing Matilda.
In 1900, the year that Henry Lawson and his wife sailed to London to improve his literary
standing, Cloncurry, according to a much later writer, Geoffrey Blainey, was 'the scene of more
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