Cooper Creek

So it's, um, it's kind of on the inside.

It's five hours west of Charleville, so if you know the right angle of the Queensland border, we're on the, uh, the vertical bit essentially just on the Cooper Creek as it flows into Lake Eyre.

Was your family well-to-do at that stage or was it kind of living in a kind of rough, rough sort of place? What, what do you think of that?

Uh, no, I mean we, we weren't well-to-do in the sense that, um, Dad didn't have any of the, you know, he didn't have his own station.

We didn't sail on Lake Eyre.

We sailed on Lake Kilpapunya, which is on the Cooper Creek, just as it flows, just prior to flowing into the Lake Eyre.

Hopefully one day we will get to sail on Lake Eyre.

But we had one of the vice commodore, David, he was actually the first person to sail a yacht on Lake Eyre some 50 years ago.

It's like...

It's like this sort of lesson of Australia because, you know, there's Cooper's Creek, there's Simpson's Desert, there's Lake Eyre.

And everything is the biggest or the lowest or highest or the broadest, not just necessarily in Australia but the world.

And a wonderful moment when the pilot described this property so big.

The distinctly Australian pictures partake of the same character.

The great painting representing the return of the explorers Burke and Wills to the deserted camp at Cooper's Creek, and Mr. MacHubben's famous picture of The Pioneer, are among the most saddening things that one could wish to see.

At Sydney it is just the same.

Sir Luke Fildes' masterpiece, The Widower, in which the unhappy man is shown with his sick child on his knee and a look of inexpressible helplessness on his face, is typical of many more.

Never surely did men go to their deaths in the desert more gaily than did these." Two, Burke was accompanied by Wills, Brahe Gray, and King, and it was with King that my part of the story is concerned.

These five men made up the first detachment of the expedition.

The second part was to follow later and join the leaders at Cooper's Creek.

All were then to proceed together on their march across the continent.

I was trying to get back to Sydney, and I thought, you know what? I'm going to stay out here and listen to the funeral on the ABC, and we were parked up near the...

where the Birdsville track crosses Cooper's Creek.

Yeah.

We planned to listen to it on the radio, but I saw there was a station down the road...

At just about the time that James Chalmers was born in Scotland, Captain Stuart led his famous expedition into the hot and dusty heart of Australia.

When he reached Cooper's Creek on the return journey, he found that he had more horses than he would be able to feed.

So he turned one of them out on the banks of the creek and left it there.

When Burke and Wills reached Cooper's Creek twenty years later, the horse was still grazing peacefully on the side of the stream, and looked up at the explorers with no more surprise or excitement than it would have shown if but twenty hours had passed since it last saw human faces.

It had found air to breathe and water to drink and grass to nibble.

What did it care about the world? But with man it is otherwise.