The Burke and Wills Expedition - Part 2 - Preparation and Departure

The Explorers Podcast

Matt Breen

Society & Culture, History, Education

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2020

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In part 2 of our series, Robert Burke and the Exploration Committee hire men for the Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE), including William Wills - who will serve the expedition's surveyor, meteorologist, and astronomer. The VEE, consisting of 19 men, 26 camels, 23 horse, six wagons, and 200 tons of supplies, then prepares to depart Melbourne in August of 1860. The goal is to be the first men to cross the Australian continent. Key People and Places Robert O’Hara Burke – Leader of the Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE). George Landells – Horse trader who brought 25 camels to Australia, and second-in-command of the VEE. William Wills – British surveyor and astronomer who was named as third-in-command of the VEE. Victoria Exploring Expedition (VEE) – The official name of the expedition led by Robert Burke to cross the Australian continent. John McDouall Stuart – Scottish explorer who is the chief competitor with the VEE to blaze a route across Australia. Hermann Beckler - German doctor and botanist. Ludwig Becker - German geologist and naturalist. Captain Francis Cadell - Steamship owner and member of the Exploration Committee. Offered to take the company's supplies by boat to Menindee. Julia Matthews - 18 year old actress Burke had fallen in love with. Cooper’s Creek – River in central Australia. It is about halfway across the continent if someone is traveling between Melbourne and Gulf of Carpentaria in the north. About 750 miles from Melbourne. Menindee - Most northerly outpost on the route of the VEE in their trek across Australia. About 400 miles from Melbourne. Gulf of Carpentaria - The most direct route from Victoria to the northern coast of Australia - roughly a 1500 mile journey across the continent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the Explorers Podcast. Today is part two in our series on the
0:21.4	Birken Wheels Expedition. A couple of items before we start.
0:26.0	First in our last episode I play some information about this podcast in our show notes.
0:30.9	This included names and brief descriptions of people and places important to the episode.
0:35.0	Since the episode had a lot of information, I thought it might help that you could quickly reference the list if you got confused about something.
0:42.0	The notes, to be honest, came out pretty nice, at least
0:45.0	on some podcast apps. On my iPhone, the notes looked really good using Apple's podcast
0:50.2	application, and it was really nice looking on my son's Google Podcast app he used on
0:54.8	his phone. However on my Spotify app the nice list of names and places turned
0:59.7	into one long never-ending stream of information as all the formatting was lost.
1:04.9	So that experiment, I think, went okay.
1:07.5	You will just have to look to see if the notes work or not in your podcast app, but I will continue
1:12.0	to add them for future episodes.
1:14.0	Second item, I had some very nice friends from Australia.
1:17.0	Let me know about the proper pronunciation of some locations in our podcast.
1:21.0	Did you know that Brisbane is Brisbane and Melbourne is Melbourne? Things
1:25.8	like that. So who knows? Maybe I'll tweak some pronunciations in today's
1:29.5	episode so long as it doesn't sound too dorky. Thank you so much to everyone who dropped me a line about this subject.
1:35.0	I love to learn stuff like that.
1:37.0	Final item, if you like this show and experiment it,
1:40.0	I would love to get more online reviews and ratings for the podcast. It really does help improve the profile of the show and that's something I'm working on. Also it makes my day when people say nice things about the podcast. So go to wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, wherever, and give the show a nice review. That would be awesome. Thank you in advance and thanks to everyone who have already done so. I appreciate it. So with that, on with the show.
2:06.4	Today we will pick up in the summer of 1860, the Exploration Committee of the Royal Society
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