Australian Explorers - Their Labours, Perils, and Achievements

The vast, sun-baked interior of Australia claimed many lives. Before the railways, the towns, the farms that feed a nation, there were men who walked into the unknown with little more than determination and a desperate hope. This book is their story. George Grimm chronicles the expeditions that mapped a continent: the desperate searches for inland rivers, the futile quests for inland seas that never existed, the terrible journeys across deserts that offered no mercy. These were not gentlemen adventurers. They were surveyors, bushrangers, ex-convicts, and visionaries, many of whom walked out of the bush never to return. Grimm writes with unflinching detail about the thirst, the betrayal, the cannibalism, the bodies left beside dry waterholes. But he also captures what drove them forward, that peculiar quality of the explorer who must know what lies beyond the next ridge, even when that ridge offers only more red earth. This is essential reading for understanding how Australia came to exist as we know it, and the blood price paid by those who walked into the blank spaces on the map.