Outback

by Derek Parker

In 1800, while the coast of Australia had finally been charted, the vast interior of the continent from north to south and east to west lay undiscovered. This book is a collection of stories of those explorers who beat starvation, inadequate information, disease and loss, to forge a route which would enable the country's development.

Genres: History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Derek Parker (27 May 1932 – 2 January 2025) was a British writer and broadcaster. He was the author of numerous works on literature, ballet, and opera, and with his wife Julia of several books about astrology.

Reviews

[SteveDave · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of Australia's explorers is 30% courage, 30% resilience, 10% success and 90% stupidity. A seemingly endless procession of untrained and unskilled men wandering off into Australia's desert interior, equipped with boats and office furniture.

For example, George Grey's first expedition was manned (and led) by a group of men, none of whom had even set foot in Australia. They landed their boat on the coast of WA, grabbed a couple of water bottles and set out int the interior. Within hours they were lost and at serious risk of dying from heat exhaustion and dehydration. The famous Burke and Wills are famous not so much for what they achieved, but because they were led by a complete novice who had no experience or training in outback exploration and whose decision making led to his and his second in command's deaths. Leichhardt's 3rd expedition into the interior vanished without a trace. The intrepid explorers who did survive usually only did so by the skin of their teeth. You would have thought they all would have learnt from each other's experiences.

Although, of course I am deliberately being a bit facetious. The interior of the Australian continent is forbidding to say the least, and for a time the evidence did indeed point to an inland sea. Today's travellers can reach most destination in the air-conditioned comfort of a luxury car driven on sealed roads. But to venture into the unmapped unknown would have been a seriously difficult undertaking.

The stories in here are interesting and well-told. They would have benefited from more maps and I think the placement of the maps at the end of the book instead of the beginning of each chapter was a bit of a mistake. Likewise, the short italicised sections at the end of some chapters that told in brief the stories of other explorers seemed a little jammed in; they often didn't seem to fit in with the chapter they were attached to and were short enough that they didn't really add a huge amount. A couple more fully developed chapters might have been a better way to include some of these stories. But this is nitpicking. Overall, an enjoyable book that tells the stories of some of Australia's earliest adventurers.

[Benson · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

This is an interesting title, the subject of the ‘Inland sea’ has interested me since I’d heard it in a Year 7 social science class. I fondly remember somewhere reading that (though paraphrasing), “They were right to acknowledge the concept of an Inland Sea, only they were a few million years too late.” Of course, enterprise, social standing, influence, and money were promising for some, for a few a the love of the game seemed just enough.
In regard to the size of the book, it really is a condensed effort for each of the expeditions outlined. As such, this book should and would be an introductory note toward interest in early colonial Australian exploration into the interior. And whilst the journey doesn’t seem long (from chapter to chapter), the conditions noted are harrowing, and as someone who lives in Darwin (a former jettisoned land of South Australia), I’m glad people no longer make the great treks inland with stores and poor beasts who have no say in their masters dreams as well as the disturbances to indigenous communities. On that last note, the book does make mention of Aboriginal help along the way of many of these expeditions, one can’t help but imagine what it would have been like for some of these interior indigenous groups who had never seen white men, horses, or camels before! One cannot argue against their hostility or paranoia towards the intruders.
I think the quote from an Indigenous man named Imbat sums up the gist of reading most of these journeys.

“What for do you who have plenty to eat, and much money, walk so far away in the bush? You had plenty to eat at home, why did you not stop there?”