Cooper's Creek by Alan Moorehead

Author:Alan Moorehead
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing (Perseus)

10

TOWARDS MOUNT HOPELESS

NOW IN POINT OF FACT ON MAY 8—THE DAY THAT BRAHE and Wright visited the depot on the Cooper—Burke, Wills and King were only about thirty miles away. They had intended, it will be recalled, to go back on their tracks down the creek for thirty or forty miles and then strike southwest to the homesteads which they believed existed near Mount Hopeless, about 150 miles away. That was the route Gregory had taken three years before and he had managed it, though admittedly in much better condition than Burke’s party, in about a week. From Mount Hopeless it would be relatively easy to continue on through the settled districts to Adelaide.

At the start they had made very little progress, intending, as Wills says in his diary, ‘to recruit themselves and the camels whilst sauntering slowly down the creek.’ And so when they left the depot on the morning of April 23 they marched only five miles and then camped at a place where there was good feed for the camels. Next day they had a windfall. As they were about to start a party of blacks appeared, and in exchange for some matches and bits of leather strap gave them about 12 lb. of freshly caught fish. They were greatly heartened by this, and again ‘sauntered’—it seems a strange word, more indicative of a stroll through the park than this weary trudging—for a few more miles. That night they slept soundly despite the bitter cold and the dew on the ground in the early morning, and once again the blacks appeared with a gift of fish. ‘They are,’ Wills wrote in his diary, ‘by far the most well-behaved blacks we have seen on Cooper’s Creek.’ He gave them some sugar which they ate with great delight. On this day, April 25, Burke called a halt after three hours on the banks of an immense waterhole several miles long. There were many birds feeding there, but they were shy and difficult to get at with a gun, and in any case none of the party had much energy for hunting. They had been a little shaken by a mishap that had occurred during the morning: one of the camels had fallen on a rocky stretch of path and had been cut and bruised before they had managed to get him up again. It was essential, as they all well knew, to keep the camels going since they themselves were quite unable to carry the food they had brought away from the cache in addition to their fire-arms and bed-rolls.

On the morning of April 26 they got up very early and the camels were loaded by the light of the moon. They followed a native path for a while, and then, after stopping for breakfast, continued on again through ‘the most splendid salt-bush country you could possibly wish to see’. By noon they were back at their old camp from which they had made their tremendous thirty-mile walk into the depot on April 21.

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