Musings on the myth

Why is the story of Burke and Wills so important in the Australian psyche? Manning Clark, one of our most notable historians, had this to say:

The story of Burke and Wills could be told to illustrate many things about life. Like all great stories it had everything. It had a mighty spirit, Robert O’Hara Burke, destroyed by a ‘fatal flaw’. It could told to show that when chance conspires with a man who suffers from attacks of the ‘sillies’, then all the inventions of science, all the material progress of mankind is powerless to save him from the fruits of his folly. It could be told as a story about the evils of snobbery, with a special glance at ‘poor Charlie Gray’ as a victim of such snobbery. It could be told as a story of how the great bond between Burke and Wills, the affection they felt for each other, contributed to their deaths. It could also be told as a story of a man who was trying to prove something to a woman who, in turn, was never going to be impressed by Robert O’Hara Burke even if he had raised the dead once again into the land of the living.

To feel the full force of that tragedy one has to stand on the banks of Cooper’s Creek at the spot where Wills died. Right to the very end Wills had believed, like Mr Micawber, that something might turn up. Then, when he knew his death was very near he had the courage to tell his father his religious opinions had not changed. Like Hamlet he believed: the rest is silence. On that same spot a few months later the man who led the expedition to find his remains, A. W. Howitt, an agnostic, read the words of St Paul: ‘For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised.’ The most difficult thing of all for a historian is to learn how to tell his story so that something is added to the facts, something about the mystery at the heart of things.

Manning Clark Manning Clark: Occasional Writings and Speeches Fontana Books 1980 pp 69-70. Originally presented in 1976 in a series of Boyer lectures. One wonders whether, if Clark had been speaking in (say) 1996 or later, he might have added: ‘It could be told to show what white Australia can lose by treating the ‘natives’ with disdain or contempt.’