Explorations in Australia

Lake Torrens promised a passage inland; instead, it trapped Edward John Eyre’s party in six miles of salt-coated slime. Beyond it lay a wilderness so vast that even finding water could mean days of desperate searching.

In nineteenth-century Australia, settlements hugged the coasts while a telegraph line marked the edge of a harsh, little-known interior. John Forrest looks back at the explorers who tried to cross it—including Eyre and the vanished Dr. Leichhardt—before setting out on journeys of his own. His purpose is more than to draw routes across blank spaces: the search for Leichhardt’s lost party and the effort to connect distant colonies carry human lives into a country of salt marshes, barren hills and spinifex desert. What can an expedition discover when the land itself seems to bar the way?

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