Australian Explorers

Although the interior of the continent of Australia is singularly deficient in the more picturesque elements of romance, it was, for nearly two-thirds of a century, a most attractive lure to men of adventurous character. Oxley, Sturt, Mitchell, Kennedy, and Stuart have left deathless names on the roll of Australian explorers, but the unknown fate of Ludwig Leichhardt has always centered most of the romance of story about his memory.

A lively collection of extraordinary stories of adventure and discovery, The Explorers tells the epic saga of the conquest and settlement of Australia. Editor Tim Flannery selects sixty-seven accounts that convey the sense of wonder and discovery, along with the human dimensions of struggle and deprivation, which occurred in the exploration of the last continent to be fully mapped by Europeans. Beginning with the story of Dutch captain Willem Janz's 1606 expedition at Cape York – the bloody outcome of which would sadly foreshadow future relations between colonists and Aboriginal peoples – and running through Robyn Davidson's 1977 camelback ride through the desolate Outback deserts, The Explorers bristles with the enterprise that Flannery explains as "heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such an obdurate country."

Australia's history is one of epic journeys, intrepid explorers, and mysterious disappearances in far flung places. From perilous sea voyages to the distant south land, to forays across vast deserts on horseback, they are stories of endurance and misadventure, survival and loss.