Australian Explorers

The expedition of Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Charles Wentworth was unusual because it was the first successful European expedition to find a route across the Blue Mountains.

Instead of following the river gullies as all previous expeditions had done, the explorers sought a route over the ridges, and this was why they succeeded where all previous expeditions had failed. The route they traversed is essentially still the one used by travellers driving over the mountains today. Their exploration was significant because the discovery of a traversible route over the Blue Mountains meant that the colony of Sydney could now expand to the rich grasslands on the other side.

Burke and Wills did not actually discover any significant new land. Their claim to fame was crossing the continent from south to north on foot. However, much of the land they explored had already been traversed some decades earlier by explorers Ludwig Leichhardt and Major Thomas Mitchell.

Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth were the ones who virtually saved the early colony in New South Wales by finding a way across the Blue Mountains. They traversed previously unknown country, and so met with numerous problems due to the unfamiliarity of the countryside and the terrain.

The major problem that the three explorers had was continually confronting dead ends. When they followed river gullies, they ended up against impassable cliff faces. When they followed the mountain tops, they often found themselves on the edge of sheer cliffs too steep to take down their horses.

Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth were also going through countryside where there were no roads or tracks. They travelled through thick, impenetrable bushland which had to be hacked away with machetes.

Mosquitoes were a constant problem. Another fear was aboriginal attack: little was really known about the Aborigines, and it was not really understood that they were just as keen to avoid Europeans as Europeans were keen to avoid them.

Explorer of Australia Robert O'Hara Burke was not married. There are suggestions that he volunteered to lead the expedition to the north because he had proposed to a young acress named Julia Matthews. She responded that she would consider marriage if Burke was the triumphant winner of the race to the north and back.

John Oxley did not discover any country. He discovered good pasture land in New South Wales, he charted several rivers (but never really solved where they went) and he charted part of Queensland's coast, being credited with the discovery of the Brisbane River (which was really discovered by ticket-of-leave convicts, Pamphlett, Parsons and Finnegan).

When the South Australian government offered a reward of two thousand pounds to the first expedition to reach the northern coast, it started a chain of events that affected a Scottish explorer by the name of John McDowall/McDougall Stuart, a young Englishman by the name of William Wills, and an Irishman named Robert O'Hara Burke.

Due to the South Australian challenge, the Victorian Government decided to sponsor its own extremely well-funded and well-equipped expedition from south to north. The proposed expedition was widely publicised, and confidence in its success rode on the back of the new wealth being enjoyed by the young colony of Victoria in the wake of the goldrushes.

Wills had more bush experience than Burke. He was apparently a likeable young man with leadership potential. Originally, he was third in command, but because Burke (a rather fiery tempered chap who did not like his judgments being questioned) had a run-in with his original second-in-command, Landells, he was fired - and Wills was promoted to second-in-command.

The Burke and Wills expedition had the potential to be very important to the state of Victoria. Burke and Wills, like John McDouall Stuart in South Australia, were seeking a suitable route for a telegraph line from the southern regions of Australia to the north. A telegraph link to the rest of the world was available off Java, but it had to be linked to a centre in the north, then an overland telegraph line constructed to carry messages down to the main cities in the south.

This would provide a very important link for Australia to the rest of the world, and Victoria wanted to be the first state to receive overseas news, as this would be a psychological advantage for the state. It also could have been the winning card to tip the authorities in favour of making Melbourne Australia's national capital in the future, over the larger and older Sydney (as it was, neither Melbourne nor Sydney was chosen).

Both South Australia and Victoria were vying to be the first to make a successful crossing of the continent, and both states offered sizable rewards. Burke and Wills represented the Victorian bid to cross the continent. In the end, due to their premature deaths, the Burke and Wills expedition sadly had no lasting importance or significance for Australia, except in history books.

Eddie Mabo was famous for starting a court case to reclaim him land in Mer. ( the murry islands) Unfortunatly Eddie died of cancer before his case was setled in the High court. This is called Native tittle. Fortunatly it still went in Mabo's favour.

Burke and Wills did not actually find anything of value on their arduous trek across Australia's inland. They found no new rivers and no new pasture land. Their greatest claim to fame is the unfortunate fact that they embarked upon the biggest, most expensive expedition in Australia's history, and due to Burke's impatience, it ended up the most disastrous, with the loss of three lives.

John McDouall Stuart was one of only a few desert explorers who never took camels. He relued on small, easy-to-manage parties.

Stuart took horses, with bedrolls, minimal clothing, and pistols. Food included water supplies, dried meat, flour, salt, sugar and tea.

The main reason for Leichhardt's expedition was to find a new route from the Darling Downs to the tiny military outpost of Port Essington in the north, not far from where Darwin now stands. Leichhardt was also a keen botanist, and he was personally interested in studying the many new species of flora Australia had to offer, from what he was used to in his native Prussia. He collected hundreds and hundreds of specimens which, to his deep regret, had to be disposed of when his horses became too weak to carry any unnecessary loads.

Throughout his life, Blaxland was a very volatile personality, given to moods. It was, unfortunately, the nature of his personality, and in those days, there were no psychologists and psychiatrists to help.

John Oxley died on 26 May 1828 at Kirkham. He was buried in the Devonshire Street cemetery in Sydney.

Some sources say that Robert O'Hara Burke was born at St Clerans, County Galway, Ireland on 6 May 1821, others say 6 May 1820, while others cite February 1821. The real date remains unknown.

William Wills was born on 5 January 1834 at Totnes, Devon, England.

Yes. Explorers Burke and Wills did meet Aborigines. Initially,the indigenous people tried to assist the explorers by feeding them. However, Burke became suspicious of the Aborigines and fearful that they were stealing supplies, so he frightened them off with gunshots. As a result, the indigenous people abandoned Burke and Wills, although they did keep John King alive.

One of Sir Thomas Mitchell's primary motivations was pride. Mitchell was determined to prove Sturt was wrong when he said that the Darling River flowed into the Murray. He felt it was a great indignity that Sturt, whom he regarded as inexperienced, was sent on the important expedition of charting the NSW interior. Mitchell was also a very skilled surveyor and accurate map-maker. If the new country was going to be explored and charted, he wanted to be sure it was done accurately.

To cross from Sydney over the Blue Mountains is a car trip of just a couple of hours, depending on the time of day. However, it took the first explorers in Australia's history 25 years before they successfully penetrated the Blue Mountains.

Dampier initially stumbled across "New Holland" as part of his journeys as a pirate.

In January 1688, his ship the 'Cygnet' was beached on the northwest coast of Australia, at King Sound near Buccaneer Archipelago on the north-west coast of Australia. While the ship was being repaired Dampier made notes on the fauna and flora he found there. He was unimpressed by the dry, barren landscape, the lack of water and what he described as the "miserablest people in the world" - the native population.

Eleven years later, Dampier was back, after the British Admiralty commissioned him to chart the north-west coast, hoping to find a strategic use for 'New Holland. The expedition set out on 14 January 1699. In July, Dampier reached Dirk Hartog Island near Shark Bay in Western Australia. Searching for water, he followed the coast northwards, reaching the Dampier Archipelago and then Roebuck Bay. After finding no sign of water, he was forced to head north for Timor.

Dampier's negative reports on New Holland delayed British colonisation of the continent for many years, until Cook found the verdant eastern coast.

When the South Australian government offered a reward of two thousand pounds to the first expedition to reach the northern coast, it started a chain of events that affected a Scottish explorer by the name of John McDowall/McDougall Stuart, a young Englishman by the name of William Wills, and an Irishman named Robert O'Hara Burke. Due to the South Australian challenge, the Victorian Government decided to sponsor its own extremely well-funded and well-equipped expedition from south to north. The proposed expedition was widely publicised, and confidence in its success rode on the back of the new wealth being enjoyed by the young colony of Victoria in the wake of the goldrushes. Burke had absolutely no experience in exploring, and it remains a mystery as to why he was even chosen to lead the expedition. He was a police superintendent on the goldfields, and had a tendency towards quick impatience (which was his undoong, in the end). There is evidence to suggest that Burke offered to lead the expedition because he had proposed to a young acress named Julia Matthews, who responded that she would consider marriage if Burke was the triumphant winner of the race to the north and back.

Charles Sturt died of natural causes in England in 1869.

The main problems which these two explorers encountered involved the fact that they argued about almost everything.

Primarily, the men argued about who made which discoveries. They also argued about the naming of the Hume River (which Charles Sturt later named the Murray). Hovell said he named the river after Hume, while Hume claimed he named it after his father.

One of the major problems the men encountered was that several of the rivers they needed to cross were in flood that year. The men had a clever plan to cross the flooded rivers, which involved dismantling one of the carts and wrapping it in a tarpaulin, then using it as a punt, pulled by ropes across the river. As they cossed more and more rivers and were required to use the tarpaulin frequently, they argued about whether it would make each trip. After their journey was over, they even argued over whose idea it had been to make the punt.

Hume and Hovell also made miscalculations in distance and direction which resulted in them arriving at the wrong place. They were supposed to arrive at Westernport Bay, but they ended up on the wrong side of Port Phillip bay, and in fact arrived at Corio Bay.

The Burke and Wills expedition of 1860-61 is considered one of Australia's most tragic expeditions because of the explorers' unnecessary deaths.

Burke and Wills hoped to be the first explorers to cross overland from the south of Australia to the north. They departed from Melbourne and reached the Gulf of Carpentaria, but due to a series of misunderstandings and miscommunication, the relief party never reached Burke and Wills, and the men died out in the desert, on the banks of Cooper Creek.

The exact cause of Burke and Wills's death was not starvation or malnutrition, but inadvertent poisoning. The men knew that the Aborigines gathered nardoo which they had used to sustain Burke and Wills, until they were frightened off by Burke's defensiveness against the Aborigines. So, whilst awaiting the rescue that never came, Burke and Wills made their way to where they knew Aborigines collected Nardoo. Nardoo was an important bush food for Aborigines, who knew how to prepare its seedpods (or, strictly speaking, sporocaps) to make flour. The sporocarps contain poisons that must first be removed for them to be eaten safely. Studies of the explorers' journals indicate that they probably died of nardoo poisoning, after failing to follow precautions from the Aborigines of how to prepare it safely.

Ernest Giles made several expeditions into the Australian desert interior. His first expedition left from Chambers Pillar on 22 August 1872 and resulted in the discovery of an unusual oasis in the desert, the Glen of Palms, now called Palm Valley. Also on this journey, Giles named Gosse's Range, now called Gosse's Bluff. He discovered Lake Amadeus, a huge saltpan in central Australia, which he named after the King of Spain, and he first sighted Mount Olga, which he named after the king's wife. Giles arrived back at Charlotte Waters from his first expedition on 1 December 1872.

There is no such river as the Murray Darling River.

The two rivers are separate rivers, with their sources thousands of kilometres apart. The Darling River is a tributary of the Murray, and the Murray empties into the Southern Ocean. Together, the two rivers make up the Murray-Darling River System, which is a completely different feature, geographically, from just a river.

Major Thomas Mitchell recorded the aboriginal name for the Murray River as "Millewa". It is known today that they also called it Tongala. The aboriginal name for the Darling River was "Barka".

Yes. His party was made up of severn Europeans and two Aborigines. Some of Ludwig Leichhardt's exploration party included: John Gilbert, John Roper, James Calvert, John Murphy and Aborigines Harry Brown and Charley Fisher.