Captain Charles Sturt Saga: With Ron Kandelaars in the Outback region of South Australia
Today, families arrive on the Town Common on the banks of the Cooper Creek at Innamincka in modern four-wheel drive. After a 1,000-kilometre trek north east of Adelaide through the vast South Australian outback the Cooper is the ideal place to kick back and relax.
Come at the right time and you might hook a big yellow belly callop for dinner. But come at the wrong time and you could encounter 50 degree temperatures, in a landscape as tough as any on the planet.
Travel southeast of here on the many tracks that criss cross this part of the Australian outback known as Corner Country and you'll come across strange granite rock formations the perfect setting for any sci-fi flick.
A space ship wouldn't seem out of place here but an upside-down whaleboat in one of the driest spots on earth. There's a sense of reverence about the Sturt monument at Tibooburra in far northwest new south wales. But this is also a very South Australian story, because it was through country like this that Captain Charles Sturt ventured on one of the great exploration sagas of all time.
The up-turned whaleboat at the Sturt Pioneer Park pays homage to a strange quest that began in 1844 in Adelaide and almost ended in tragedy in the Simpson Desert.
Sturt and his team of sixteen men with cattle, sheep and a whaleboat had set off in search of an Inland Sea. Sturt had studied the flight of birds heading inland from Adelaide and surmised that they must be making for a great expanse of water in the centre of the continent.
From the town of Menindie on the banks of the Darling River, the party struck out to the northwest only to confront searing temperatures and an unforgiving terrain. Eventually they were forced to stop and recuperate near what remains of the old ghost town of Milparinka.
Not far from here Sturt and his men camped on the banks of Evelyn Creek at a place the explorer called Depot Glen. It's also known today as Preservation Creek. By the time they got here, Sturt and his men were done in… having battled for more than five months in fierce heat.
Come when the rains set in and the yabbies fatten up and you'd think Depot Glen was a desert paradise. Sturt and his men hunkered down here for six months surviving on the spring fed waterholes. Although Sturt's Deputy, Harry Poole was desperately ill with scurvy.
The sun was so fierce that lead fell out of pencils and the men's nails became as brittle as glass. In such horrendous conditions Harry Poole finally succumbed to scurvy and was buried under a Beefwood tree with a blaze to mark his tragic death.
Now, you would have thought such a tragedy would make you to turn back. But Poole's death galvanised Sturt. In fact he wrote 'I would rather that my bones had been left to bleach in the desert than have yielded an inch of ground I had gained at so much expense'.
From Depot Glen Sturt sent nine of his men back to Adelaide while he pressed on into the centre of the country.
Poole's Grave is about 15 kilometres from the ghost town of Milparinka and about 280 kilometres from Broken Hill. Tri State Safaris run regular tours to this part of Corner Country. To book contact 8088 2389.
Published 27th April 2008
