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A couple of Bendigo blokes decided to finish the doomed journey of Burke and Wills
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And so, Mick Ellis and John Esnouf walked 1600 kms in 50 days, from the infamous Dig Tree in Queensland to Port Melbourne, all in the name of “unfinished business”.
The Mad Bastards are a group of Bendigo friends who walk together, not just your round the Kennington Reservoir-type walk, but long tramps that usually take a week.
Their first such escapade was from Robe to Bendigo 10 years ago, a kind of re-enactment of the treks made by Chinese in the 1850s to South Australian ports then overland to the goldfields, in order to escape the racist tax on Chinese arrivals.
Up to 22 people can set off on these walks, although it’s more often a dozen or so and sometimes it’s a mere couple of hundred kilometres, like the Melbourne-to-Bendigo stroll, covering about 30 kms a day. John and Mick, however, are now officially the maddest bastards of the group.
The idea first came to John about three or four years ago. He would get enthused, then cool off, thinking it was all a little too mad.
“I’d put it on the backburner,” he says, “then last November, I decided to get serious about it.”
This year is the 150th anniversary of the ill-fated attempt by Robert Burke and William Wills to cross Australia from south to north. Setting off from Menindee near Broken Hill in August 1860, it was April 21, 1861, when they arrived back at a designated meeting point near Coopers Creek, where supplies had been left under a tree, on which was carved the word “dig”.
John says he has always been fascinated by this tragic story.
“Everything that could go wrong, did,” he says.
“I didn’t want to re-enact it, that’s the whole thing. I wanted to finish it off for them. It was only out 1500 kilometres or so to get back to Melbourne. What if they had made the decision to head back to Menindee instead of attempting to travel along the Coopers and Strezlecki Creeks to return via Adelaide instead?”
It’s not just the history that fascinates John but the idea that these men set off, making rash decisions, travelling in outback that, still today, is tough and dangerous.
“You go along a track in the middle of nowhere and it’s easy to imagine having to do it without support, and when it is so hot.
“We were there in good times, when there had been good rains, so while it was very cold, we also had brilliant days.
“Some of the sections of our walk were so desolate, you wouldn’t believe it, but the wildlife at the moment is just amazing.”
There’s a day-by-day blog detailing this epic walk, put together by one of Mick and John’s helpers. Snakes and spiders, a mammoth trail of caterpillars, and various locals and passers-by intrigued by the sight of these two blokes trudging along back roads in the middle of nowhere, all feature on the blog.
It details how Mick had a minor injury (a “nasty ankle”), which meant he had to put his feet up for a few days while John soldiered on, and also enforced rest stops, when they came up against flooded areas that, despite their determined efforts, they had to let subside before they continued on.
The winds were cold, and some mornings the tent flaps were frozen solid, but John says nothing major got in the way.
He had done a reconaissance trip in his car last November, asking property owners for permission to traverse their land (the woman whose gate told passers-by to “bugger off” turned out quite charming). And his maps were nothing more than ordinary road maps –
John is an engineer with VicRoads so he has had plenty of practice with those.
“There are little things I’d do differently,” he says, “but essentially, our rough plan worked well.
“I certainly wouldn’t do it in summer, and we did have those cold southerly winds, and the days were short so that limited our walking, but that was probably a good thing too as it kept us rested.
“I know it’s a bit loopy.”
For much of the time, it was just two men, on the road, a flat horizon, not much to look at and just the consciousness of one foot in front of the other, and time passing.
“One of the ladies asked what we did all day, what do you have to talk about?,” John says.
“Well, in the first 20 days, we got through all the character assassinations, then we had nothing.
“Gradually, we found other things, like, Mick said one day, how many chains in a mile? That took us about 10 kms to work out.
“What I didn’t expect is how long it would take me to unwind. Without newspapers, without computers, and even telephones for a lot of the way, we were totally out of it and that took a bit of getting used to.”
The one thing that was omnipresent, however, was the duo’s sense of time passing.
“You are very aware of time, when you have to judge the distance, keep the pace, working out when to stop for a rest,” he says.
“And it goes so quick!”
Now the Dig Tree unfinished business trek is done, John says he’s not in a rush, but he does have another similar walk in mind.
“It’s such a concentrated thing, to walk for such a long way,” he says. “We don’t do much these days that lasts over time, we tend to be very fickle, dropping in and out of the things we do.
“We’ll probably do more explorers, they’re creeping into our mad bastard walks.
“They’re interesting people, and besides it gives us an excuse to head off walking.”
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