National Geographic 1979. (nem teljes évfolyam) [antikvár]

T ^HERE IS NOTHING quite like it in the history of exploration, this story of the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860. What began as a comic-opera cavalcade, hoping to be the first to cross Australia, became an epic of endurance and ended in haunting tragedy. Some see in it a parable of the Australian's relationship with the vast, forbidding Centre of the continent. That stark, stony land lies like Lazarus through years of drought but springs to tumultuous life with the miracle of a passing rain or sudden flood. Just so, it is unfeeling death that gives the Burke and Wills drama its special quality— and transforms the actors into legend. As photographer Joe Scherschel and I followed the explorers' track from one end of Australia to the other, from Melbourne by its shining southern sea to the tropical Gulf of Carpentaria, we found the legend still alive in the back of beyond. Much has changed in the century since Burke and Wills played out the famous last scene. The Centre now holds cattle and sheep stations of thousands of square miles. Four-wheel-drive tourist vehicles find their way up the dirt tracks amid a maze of seismic lines where crews look for oil and gas. The most remote habitations are now linked to the world by plane and radio. (See the supplement map Australia with this issue.) But much remains the same. There the weary traveler still finds the dreamlike water hole in the immense desert, its "old man" gum trees decked with screaming cockatoos and whirling parrots. There small hamlets adrift on the stony plains offer the shade of a pub, and men sit in the long shadows of afternoon, remembering. And there one can still look out over S,000 square miles and find it empty but for dancing cyclones and mirages rimming the horizon with orange fire. Out there, it is a truly lonely man who does not meet his soul. It began, as do so many of men's dramas, with the cry of gold . . . Gold! Lying there on the surface, in the gullies and washes of the rough country around Ballarat and Bendigo. Gold in such quantity as men only dreamed of. They came by the thousands— from Europe's battlefields and the California goldfields to this strange, southern land where Orion and Pegasus hung upside down in the sky, and a strange people seemed to exist still in the dawn of time. Gold brought prosperity to the new State of Victoria, and with it rose an optimistic class of burghers—merchants and lawyers, landowners and professors—whose spirits turned to great schemes. They formed the Royal Society of Victoria. An exploration committee was appointed, and that committee raised a large sum to finance an expedition that it hoped would be the first ever to cross the mysterious continent. By ten votes to five, the committee elected Robert O'Hara Burke to command. He had the not unusual combination of Galway traits—a robust, direct, brave exterior and a somewhat eccentric, somewhat dreamy interior. Well educated, he had served with the Austrian cavalry and the Irish constabulary before coming out to Australia to keep order on the raw gold frontier as a Victorian police officer. He did well at it, but had already been disappointed in both love and war—arriving too late for the action in the Crimea, where his brother James was killed, and being spurned by Julia Matthews, a handsome actress making a triumphal sweep of the gold camps. His second was George James Landells, who had already performed a difficult service for the committee. He traveled all the way to Peshawar, in India, thence to Afghanistan, and returned with 25 camels and John King, an Irish soldier who had been through the Sepoy Rebellion and was looking for whatever else life had to offer. Landells's notion of proper camel tending was to feed them remedial rations of rum. Other important members were Dr. Herman Beckler, botanist and medical officer. By JOSEPH JUDGE ASSOCIATE EDITOR Photographs by JOSEPH J. SCHERSCHEL ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY