Efforts to stir cultural outrage over the decision to “banish” a statue of the heroically failed explorers Burke and Wills from Melbourne’s City Square offers a welcome opportunity to reconsider the tragic folly of their 1860 expedition.
The 1865 statue – Victoria’s oldest public monument – was put in storage almost nine years ago, having been relocated four times previously without controversy. But now the monument has made modest news again, after the former Victorian Liberal premier Jeff Kennett and state MP David Davis described the decision to keep it mothballed as “not respectful’’ and a “politically correct’’ airbrushing of history.
If the scions of the Melbourne Club are harrumphing in their Chesterfields, genuine mainstream anger – let alone outrage – seems short on supply.
Construction of Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel was the initial reason for the statue’s removal. But focusing the redeveloped square on First Nations narratives ahead of colonialism seems a likely imperative not to put it back.
Even if the statue is eventually shifted to the Royal Society of Victoria (keen sponsors of the Burke and Wills expedition in 1860, but now perhaps tepidly enthused at rehoming them) on the city’s edge, it is likely to be supplemented with another Indigenous-themed monument. This seems fitting given that South Australia’s Yandruwandha people helped save John King, the only one of the expedition’s advance party to survive the poorly organised, chaotic jaunt through the unforgiving Australian interior.
There is certainly a compelling parallel Indigenous narrative, given Burke apparently shunned offers of help from numerous First Nations peoples (a constant occurrence in white continental exploration) as the expedition traversed the continent by foot 3,250km from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria and almost back again.
The official aim of the Victorian expedition was always opaque (beyond a quest to beat the South Australian explorer John Mcdouall Stuart to the far north). But later searches for the missing and dead men resulted in the “discovery’’ of new pastoral lands, and violent First Nations dispossession inevitably followed.
Still, the imposing Burke and Wills statue – created by Charles Summers in bronze and granite – symbolises a Victorian quest for exceptionalism that captured the imagination of the fledgling colony (established in 1851) and remains part of Australia’s foundation narrative.
‘Notorious for getting lost’
The dark, mysterious continental interior was the great foreboding unknown for white Australians who, even in the 1860s, were largely city-dwellers no matter how tightly colonial identity was becoming mythically tied to the bush. For 165 years the Burke and Wills debacle has been fondly recounted somewhat bafflingly as a heroic and glorious failure rivalled only by that other monumental debacle, Gallipoli.
In retrospect so much about the expedition – not least Robert O’Hara Burke’s leadership – presaged its chaotic failure.
Burke, of Irish Protestant gentry, was a cavalry officer in the Austrian army and later a commander of the Irish Mounted Constabulary before migrating in 1853 to Australia, where he joined the Victoria police. He became an inspector at Beechworth at the foothills of the Victorian alps.
He emerges as eccentric, reckless, charming, rakish and perhaps a somewhat indolent dilettante. The Burke Museum in Beechworth recounts how he would bathe in a tub in paddocks while reading police reports.
In 2023 a museum collections manager said: “But we also have stories where he would get lost as well. This was a man who was supposed to lead an expedition across Australia.”
Quite.
In her celebrated 2002 book The Dig Tree, the late historian Sarah Murgatroyd wrote of Burke’s poor sense of direction.
She portrayed a man who “had never travelled beyond the settled districts of Australia, who had no experience of exploration and who was notorious for getting lost on his way home from the pub’’. He possessed little bushcraft. In its 1969 entry on Burke the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) described him as “impulsive, quick-tempered, arbitrary, generous, tender-hearted and charming … recklessly brave, a daredevil with a thirst for distinction as yet unsatisfied’’.
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He apparently felt life and ambition were petering out in a backwater cop station. The then 39-year-old was also achingly lovestruck and eager to impress 18-year-old Julia Mathews, “a siren of the light theatre’’ but “unresponsive’’ to his charms.
“Leadership of the expedition was probably Burke’s last chance of achieving distinction in his own, the world’s and the divine Julia’s eyes,’’ his ADB entry reads. And, so, he assiduously lobbied to win it partly in hope that such an unburnished act of machismo that cost seven lives would make him irresistible to a teenage girl 21 years his junior.
A catalogue of disasters
On 20 August 1860, 15,000 people observed the expedition (none of whose members had any exploration experience) depart Melbourne’s Royal Park. It was equipped with six wagons and supplies of processed food to last 18 months. There were at least 24 camels and several horses. Provisions included six tons of firewood, 57 buckets, many skeins of green gossamer for veils, 50 gallons of rum (supposedly for the camels), a cedar-topped oak table and chairs, a piano and a Chinese gong.
Instructively, they did not take an Aboriginal guide. Burke’s one judicious decision was to invite, as recommended by the royal society, William Wills, a young English surveyor, meteorologist and astronomer whose job it was to navigate by the stars. Wills (originally third in charge, later promoted by Burke to 2IC) was a highly competent navigator and his diary indicates his occasional reliance on Aboriginal people as they progressed. (Burke, unusually for a leader, kept no journal.)
After a row with his second in charge George Landells (who quit at Menindee), Burke broke up the expedition and headed north to Cooper’s Creek, Queensland, his planned base camp, with an advance party.
He left the Menindee party in the charge of William Wright, ordering him to follow soon to Cooper’s Creek (incompetent Wright would wait three months, and then get lost).
At Cooper’s Creek Burke again divided the expedition, leaving four men in the command of William Brahe, whom he ordered to wait three months. Burke pushed north to the gulf with Wills, King and Charles Gray. They had 12 weeks’ provisions, six camels and a packhorse, Billy. They eventually reached unpassable mangroves near the mouth of the Flinders River, about 20km short of the coast. On half rations (they ate camel and eventually poor Billy), they headed back. Gray died first, of malnutrition and exhaustion.
Four months after their departure Burke, Wills and King – exhausted, ill and starving – arrived back at Cooper’s Creek on 21 April 1861, the same day Brahe and his men decamped, having left some meagre supplies buried under a coolabah tree carved with the instruction “DIG”. Had the three men stayed at Cooper’s Creek they would have been rescued, because Brahe returned briefly, fearing he had left too soon. But Burke had already insisted on trudging out for the fabled Mount Hopeless towards Adelaide.
They didn’t get far. Burke and Wills died of starvation. But local Aboriginal people saved King, who was found by a search party sent from Melbourne many months later.
In her ADB Burke biography, the historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes Burke and Wills might have survived “if they had lived with the Aboriginals and shared their food as King did’’.
“But Burke … had been born and bred a member of the ruling race in a conquered country [Ireland] and could not bring himself to associate with the natives. When they arrived in his camp bearing gifts of fish, he behaved like an officer of the Irish constabulary plagued by the peasantry, and fired at them.’’
Burke died with a pistol in his hand, soon to achieve the storied fame life mostly denied him.
Inspired by the 1863 official state funeral in Melbourne attended by 40,000, the Sydney Morning Herald pondered: “Mistakes there may have been, even on their side, perhaps faults, but who could look upon those poor remains of mortality and think of aught but their virtues?”
The obvious response to this question is: the subsequent royal commission, which censured Burke on numerous counts.
On the day of the funeral Julia Matthews, who twice rejected Burke’s marriage proposals, sang Rule, Britannia! in her spurned pursuer’s honour.
As Sarah Murgatroyd wrote: “Once Burke had been chosen as leader, the die was cast. The enterprise was doomed before the first camel was even saddled.”
The future of Melbourne’s increasingly inconvenient Burke and Wills statue may now be similarly uncertain.
