On Friday 20th August, the Burke and Wills Environmental Expedition set off from Royal Park in Melbourne to re-trace the steps of the original 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition:
- Robyn Parkes Wise speaks about the Burke and Wills Environmental Expedition at its departure from Royal Park on 20 August, 2010, 150 years to the day after the departure of the 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition. Dr Jonathan King, on the right, is leading the Enviornmental Expedition.
- Jack Thompson speaks at the departure of the Burke and Wills Environmental Expedition
Our new Burke and Wills stories focus less on the past and more on the present. They attempt to bridge the 150 year gap between the two expeditions by presenting historical material next to current material to be uploaded as the Environmental Expedition progresses… we hope their powers stretch to recreating a meteorite to compare with this one captured by Ludwig Becker during the original expedition:
- Meteor, seen October 11, 1860, at 10.35. Painted by Ludwig Becker.
Whilst we were thinking about the past and the present the future came to mind, as well as a quote from William Gibson’s book Pattern Recognition: “The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”
What will the land look like in 50 years when the 200th anniversary of the original expedition is being celebrated? Or in 100 years time? What will the people who live on the track then think about us, when we have become part of their past?
The 150th anniversary of the 1860 expedition has brought about a re-imagining of the past: the terms of success and failure are being re-evaluated, the scientific documentation is being re-examined and, more broadly, the stories that are put forward as our cultural myths are being questioned (eg. Gallipoli vs Burke and Wills).
It is ‘history’ that allows us to do this re-imagining: the documents and objects (in the absence of an oral tradition) give us something tangible to work with (and demonstrate the gaps in history-keeping as well). This is the stuff of our cultural collections; they are our collective memory, and just like our personal memories, our collections hold a multitude of stories, and various incarnations. In Culture Victoria, we hope to present a taste of the versatility of our collections.
So, if you’d like to delve into worlds past, present, and possibly future, to think about art, science, beauty and wonder, make sure to check back into the Burke and Wills stories to see what’s been uploaded by the Environmental Expedition as they progress across this extraordinary continent.
Welcome to the expedition!
Thanks Marie. We’ll do a post on the upcoming locations, and hopefully have some photos from the track.
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The Royal Society of Victoria s project to publish the scientific findings of the Expedition has reached a major milestone. Ballarat University has been awarded an ARC Linkage Project Grant of 102 000 over three years for their research into Aboriginal associations with the Burke and Wills expedition. When the Victorian Exploring Expedition crossed the Murray 150 years agoand headed into the far west of NSW they were leaving the settled districts .
The Royal Society of Victoria will commemorate their ill-fated expedition with events over the sesquicentennial year and on the anniversary including an environmental audit along the historic route… But a casual observer could be forgiven for asking why anyone would want to remember – let alone commemorate – a disastrous outback expedition on which the main two leaders died unnecessarily because of a string of avoidable mistakes…