Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills lead a-well provisioned fifteen hundred mile (twenty-four hundred kilometer) four-man expedition using camels from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpenteria in 1860, crossing the continent from south to north in six months.

On the mismanaged return journey, both Burke, an Irish immigrant and Wills, a British astronomer, surveyor, and explorer, die of starvation at the abandoned Cooper Creek station in Central Australia in 1861.

Only one of the ill-fated expedition’s members, John King, survives.