The Explorers of Australia and Their Life-Work

The Australian interior was once the greatest unknown on Earth. In the nineteenth century, men walked into a landscape that had swallowed countless expeditions, driven by ambition, scientific curiosity, and an almost reckless courage. Ernest Favenc, himself an explorer and journalist who had walked parts of the continent these men first charted, tells their stories with an intimacy no later historian can match. This book captures the final age of Australian discovery: the expeditions that mapped the red center, the desperate searches for the missing, the extraordinary journeys of Burke and Wills, Stuart and Sturt. Favenc devotes particular attention to Ludwig Leichhardt, the German explorer whose disappearance in 1848 spawned decades of fruitless searches and endless speculation. Here is the Victorian age of exploration rendered not as distant chronicle but as urgent, human drama, complete with the political rivalries, the scientific rivalries, and the private demons that drove men into the void.