My "King of Cooper Creek" is John King who in 1861 survived being stranded for over five months at Cooper Creek which is in the dead heart of the outback.

He lived because the aboriginals had showed him how to harvest local plants.

On multiple levels, King's survival says a lot about how the land and people can be one, and how different peoples can be one.

In 1861 John King of Cooper Creek was the first known person to trek overland from Melbourne to the north coast of Australia and survive the return journey. His leaders (Burke and Wills) died at Cooper Creek on the way back. Burke and Wills are famous in Australia and John King is a forgotten man.

You can find the exact spot in google maps by typing in "Burke and Wills Dig Tree". In 1861, Coopers Creek was 500km away from the expedition's main base at Menindee.

Why King survived and the others died is a long story.....fundamentally a story of missed opportunities....they missed immediate rescue by mere hours......The Burke and Wills expedition was a complete stuff up in logistics, communication and leadership.

The Cooper Creek at the time was just a string of isolated waterholes. In every direction the waterholes stopped and then there hundreds of kilometres of very dry land, which to the European eye contained no visible water. Fundamentally, John King ended up being trapped at an oasis.

King was an Irish soldier who was caught up in the Indian "Mutiny" of 1857, By 1860 he was out of the army and looking for a way out of India. The Burke and Wills expedition had decided to use camels to cross the arid outback. A member of the expedition came to India and bought 24 camels and employed Afghan camel drivers to take them across the Australian outback. John King knew how to communicate with Afghan camel drivers and this was his ticket out of India.

Unfortunately, there was no Australian Thomas Jefferson to pick a Mereweather Lewis. Instead a committee chose, Robert O'Hara Burke, an Irish policeman with no outback experience. Wills was an English surveyor who became deputy leader by default. In my cynical opinion, the expedition was Melbourne's attempt to become the first Australian city to connected to the rest of the world by telegraph. Adelaide won in 1872 when the sea cable from Java to Darwin was joined to a land line that went across central australia.

Cooper Creek was the advanced base camp and a return journey to the north coast was close to 1750 km. Because of logistic failures, there were only enough supplies at Cooper Creek for a four man party to make a quick dash for the coast. King became the camel driver.

Burke Wills and King were five weeks late and arrived back to an empty camp on 21 April 1861 (one week after General P.G.T Beauregard's bombardment of Fort Sumtner). Burke and Wills found a message cut into a tree that that instructed them to "dig three feet" to the north west from the tree. The tree is still alive and is known as the DIG tree. They dug up a letter and a few supplies. They were devastated to find they had missed extraction by only a few hours. ~~~~~~ Burke and Wills decided to start an impossible 250km walk to a cattle ranch at Mt Hopeless in South Australia and while they were away from Cooper Creek, a small part of the support party returned for a final quick look. ~~~~~ Tragically, while Burke and Wills did bury a message detailing their return and their crazy plan to walk to Mount Hopeless, but they failed to carve a new message on the Dig Tree itself. So the information that would have saved Burke and Wills remained unread under the feet of the returning support party. ~~~~~~ Frustratingly Burke and Wills heard gunshoots fired by the returning support party but could not get back before the support party left. ~~~~~~~ Only King lived to be rescued on 15 September 1861 by befriending the local aboriginal people, the Yandruwandha who taught him survival skills. He survived by learning how the Yandruwandha made a plant called Nardoo safe to eat.

kingofcoopercreek