The Burke and Wills Expedition - Part 7 - The Mount Hopeless Gamble

The Explorers Podcast

Matt Breen

Society & Culture, History, Education

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 June 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Part 7 of our series, Burke, Wills and King make a desperate stab at making for Mount Hopeless. While much closer than Menindee, the three men do not know the way or have accurate directions. Meanwhile, Wright and Brahe meet up, and make for the depot at Cooper's Creek. In Melbourne, the calls for a search party grown louder and louder with each passing week. People and Places Robert O’Hara Burke – Leader of the Victorian Exploring Expedition (VEE) William Wills – British surveyor and astronomer. 2nd-in-command of the expedition. Victoria Exploring Expedition (VEE) – The official name of the expedition led by Robert Burke to cross the Australian continent. Hermann Beckler – German doctor and botanist. Ludwig Becker – German geologist and naturalist. William Wright – Bushman who joined the VEE at Menindee. Now leading the relief column to Cooper’s Creek. John King – 22-year old ex-soldier. Selected by Burke to be part of the contingent going to the north coast. 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. Mount Hopeless - a cattle station about 150 miles southwest of the depot at Cooper's Creek. Alfred Howitt - English explorer and naturalist who will be hired by the Royal Society of Victoria to head north and find out what has happened to Robert Burke and his men. Links, resources and maps: https://explorerspodcast.com/ Map: https://explorerspodcast.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/map-part7.png 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. Let us
0:17.0	Hello and welcome to the Explorers' Podcast. Hello and welcome to the Explorers Podcast.
0:20.0	Today is Part 7 of the Burke and Wills Expedition.
0:23.0	Holy Cats, Part 7.
0:25.0	I have to say when I first contemplated covering this topic,
0:28.0	I never imagined it would go this long.
0:31.0	But it has been a great tale,
0:32.0	and today we will discover the fates of the men of the Victorian exploring expedition, including Robert Burke and William Wills. Now in this episode we really have three different threads to cover. The first will be Robert Burke and the surviving members of the golf company, and the second will be the two different contingents led by William Bra and William Wright. These groups will quickly converge and we will cover them together.
0:54.0	The third thread will take us back to Melbourne, where everyone is wondering what has happened to Robert Burke.
1:00.0	A reminder on our website, Explorers Podcast.com, you can get a map of all of this,
1:05.0	plus a listing of all the key players in our story.
1:07.5	I have posted much of this info in the show notes of the podcast as well.
1:11.0	And with that, let's get going. We will start with William Wright and the Relief
1:15.5	Expedition, which had reached the Boulou Lakes. The date was April 22, 1861.
1:22.0	William Wright didn't know it, but Robert Burke was now at the
1:24.5	Cooper's Greek Depot, and William Bra was on his way south with the men who had spent the past
1:29.1	few months at the very same Depot. Wright was at the Bolu Lakes, trying to determine how he was going to get the Cooper's Creek.
1:36.0	But even before he figured that out, he had two major concerns.
1:40.0	First, there was the health of his men.
1:43.0	Ludwig Becker and William Purcell were sick, likely the result of scurvy.
1:47.2	And another of the men, Charles Stone, was even worse.
1:50.4	He had stabbing pains in his legs, seizures, and fits.
	...

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