Innamincka, the Cooper and the Burke and Wills Saga: In the Outback region of South Australia
After a couple of days constant driving through the awesome stretches of the outback that isolate Innamincka from all but the lovers of the vast and often daunting, at last the Cooper Creek gleams ahead, safe and serene. Up the rise from the floodplain, a good 1000 kilometres up the Strzelecki Track from Adelaide, stands the supply depot and unique outback town, Innamincka. Come the cool months, and the great dusty oval of a car park in front of the hotel and general store next door fills with four wheel drives as the sun sinks below the river red gums lining the creek. They are among the 40,000 who come each year to experience Innamincka.
These urban adventures follow in famous footsteps. Captain Charles Sturt camped near here on the lifesaving Cooper in 1845, and as he retreated from the harsh north, he named it after Adelaide’s sole judge. The aborigines were in numbers along the abundant watercourse that fills a dry stony channel when it floods to create the Strzelecki Creek. Snaking down towards the Flinders Ranges, it was used by young Harry Redford to bring a mob of cattle - complete with white bull - down from Queensland. He’d pinched them, and so the bushranger-to-be, Captain Starlight, pioneered the Strzelecki Track.
The first version of Innamincka, a pub and police station just up from the ford over the Cooper, took shape in the 1880’s as station supplies and workers came up the track. The Cooper came up in flood, too, lapping the doorstep of the first hotel as it spread for miles and miles. Depression and sand drifts saw the Strzelecki Track close and so the pub and police station closed, too, in 1952. Innamincka was no more.
Twenty years later, a new town rose from the rubble. Twelve blocks of land were brought to build a hotel/motel. They were the first land sales since the 1890’s. Moomba, the gas and oil plant to the south, had been built in 1968, and the exploration company, Santos, had started improving long stretches of roads. The tourists were on their way. And a lot of them return just for the sheer joy of camping on the nearby “common” along the Cooper below the outpost. The livin’ is easy by the Queerbiddie Waterhole.
Many come with a pilgrimage in mind as well. It takes them on a surprisingly varied 70 kilometre journey to the best known of several historic sites that still pose the question about the country’s well known explorers, Burke and Wills. Were they tragic heroes or out-of-place idiot gentlemen? One thing becomes obvious as soon as you approach their famous base camp on the Cooper. They did not die of thirst.
A magnificent sprawling ancient coolibah is probably the famous tree in Australia. The “Dig” Tree was supposed to be their springboard to glory as they became the first to cross the continent from south to north, but instead “Dig” could be as much about Burke digging his own grave. With his main party far behind, why did his four man team push to the northern sea in summer? While a group from Oscar’s Outback Tours wandered the campsite, he pointed out there was a contest.
“It was a race between South Australia and Victoria”, Oscar Rogers reminds us. “The Melbourne Club knew about John McDouall Stuart’s expedition from Adelaide and so they insisted on urgency. But it was also sheer bad luck too”.
Some of that misfortune befell them on this attractive waterhole. The tree bears blazes, or carvings, that record the Shakespearian self wrought tragedy. Brian Hall often brings Santos guests to see them.
“This is the camp number on this side. You can just see the roman numerals - XLV, and so this was Camp 65”, he explained.
The four men left here waited four months instead of the three recommended by Burke, and they left because of serious illness. They left buried supplies and carved the “dig” message, with added details. That blaze is now grown over, and the bark of the coolibah has also swallowed the date carved on the day they left. It told the leader that he had missed them by only seven or eight hours.
“He realized they were on horses, and so there was no chance of catching up with them”.
On another magnificent stretch of water downstream, Police Inspector Robert O’Hara Burke died some nine weeks later. Incredibly, he had left good supplies, insisted there be no sign left of their return to Camp 65, and headed across more desert towards the Flinders Ranges and been forced back. They had missed a rescue party and so, with Gray lost on the return from the Gulf of Carpentaria and Wills dead down the Cooper, that left one emaciated survivor.
The young soldier, John King, was found two-and-a-half months later on another idyllic waterhole. National Parks Ranger, Tony Agnew, tells visitors it is a natural larder, and he survived because he did what Burke would not. He accepted the help of the aborigines. What, then, is the verdict on the explorer?
“There’s a saying round that he died of arrogance”, observed Tony.
Far away from the sites of fatal decisions on the colourful Cooper, Burke and Wills were eventually buried with mass grieving and acclaim in Melbourne. It was on the same day, as it happens, as John McDouall Stuart rode in triumph into adoring crowds in Adelaide. He had crossed the continent, too, but all of his party returned.
“Is it hard to be fair, given it happened in different times?” I asked the ranger.
“The distance that we’re away from it means that there are real uncertainties about why things happened”, Tony observed. “But plenty of others did it successfully out here, and one party did everything wrong. Were they up to the task? It’s questionable”.
The Burke and Wills saga only adds to the intrigue of outback…and to the allure of the long journey up the Strzelecki Track to Innamincka and the sublime beauty of the Cooper Creek.
