Desert Ray Mears Goes Walkabout

The more I see of Australia, the more fascinated I become by this vast continent.

In this series I'm gonna look at stories, people, places and events

as I travel in the traditional Aboriginal style by going walkabout.

This is the Stuart Highway.

It runs almost 3,000km from Darwin in the north of Australia

to Port Augusta in the South, dissecting the very heart of this vast land.

It takes its name from a little known explorer

who was the first European to successfully cross the continent in 1862.

Well, I know this series is all about walking

but the story that I want to look at on this particular episode requires a lot of driving

because I want to look at one of the greats of Australian exploration,

the first man who walked from south to north and back again,

a man called John McDouall Stuart.

But it's not his big expedition I want to look at, it's the little ones that led up to it.

The little expeditions that taught him how to conquer this country

in terms of finding water and finding his way and being alive here.

Very little was known then about the interior of the country.

No maps existed.

It is said that the early European settlers knew more about the surface of the moon

than the interior of Australia.

There's no doubt that Australia is vast and arid,

but, you know, when you travel in air-conditioned luxury

on tarmac roads you're lulled into a false sense of security.

It's only when you come off of the hard top, that you begin to realise

that yes, you are travelling across a desert and it still has teeth.

Stuart felt the bite of those teeth many times on his explorations, almost costing him his life.

One of six children born in the small village of Dysart, Scotland,

he came to Australia in 1839 and worked out of Adelaide as a surveyor.

He thrived in the desert, the quiet and the desolation appealing to his nature as a loner.

He became obsessed in his desire to map out the centre of this uncharted territory,

pushing himself and his men to the very limits of endurance.

During these early expeditions he developed his own approach to conquering this land,

and one that in my mind made him one of the greatest explorers of this arid terrain.

It's really good to be back in the bush and I'm looking forward to the first night's camp

as we've chosen a very special place, Gregory Creek.

This is one of the campsites Stuart stayed in on his early journeys

and it starts to give me a sense of the terrain he was working in.

He was employed here as a surveyor,

looking for valuable grazing land, copper and gold deposits.

It was these years spent in the bush that taught him how to survive and travel out here.

As the crew set up for the night my first priority, like Stuart, is to brew some billy-tea.

There are a few things you can take with you in desert trips that can be very useful,

particularly in Australia. One of those is a head net.

The flies can be very irritating and having a net that you can throw over your hat...

you may look ridiculous but I have to tell you it's brilliant because you can now concentrate.

It was a major problem for some of the expeditions were the flies,

and the flies constantly harassing the men.

They used to get into their eyes and eventually cause serious infections.

So having some means to protect yourself is a very good idea.

The other thing that's good to take with you is one of these,

which is a solar fire starter, it's a parabolic mirror.

What I've got here is a little bit of dung,

pop that on to the spikes at the end of this.

Find the sun,

and now this...

Bit like a magnifying glass, but using a mirror instead of a lens,

I can focus the power of the sun on the dung.

And you can see immediately it starts to catch.

Once that's going I can take it off and it'll glow

like a little ember and I can use that for starting the fire.

In all my travels across Australia I've found that the fibrous texture of kangaroo dung

is particularly good for lighting fires.

Once lit it will smoulder away quite happily.

Rick Moore, the president of the McDouall Stuart Society, joins me around the campfire.

I wonder about his motivation.

I mean, when you leave civilisation and head into this country,

you gradually lose more and more resources until you come to this landscape which looks like Mars.

I think NASA even sent some vehicles here for testing, it's so like it.

What encouraged him to keep pressing on into such a barren environment?

He must have had a bit of a burning personal goal.

He was good at surveying and perhaps, being inclined to like the bush,

he might have by then worked out he was perhaps better in the bush than in the city.

One of the things I find intriguing

is the way his expeditions were backed.

He was working for somebody else who seemed to have taken most of the benefits of his work.

Yeah, his first backer was a gentleman named Fink

and then two brothers joined him,

and the Chambers brothers and these guys were leading entrepreneurs.

They were into mining, pastoralism, and they befriended him and they took him under his wing.

But he worked for them for years.

So the treasures are the knowledge, the judgement of the land,

the maps, the waters, can anyone else go there?

Very valuable for a new colony.

Do you know whether he had any real pals, friends,

people who weren't just interested in him in some sort of financial way?

There's no record of that.

-He's quite a lonely character, isn't he?

-Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, probably pretty tough guy to be around. Only a little bloke,

tough, but all his men respected him.

It was a very difficult thing to keep pushing his men

into this incredibly tough environment. I think they all went way beyond the call.

And the physical hardship they endured...

Way beyond the call and that goes back to your question, you know, why did he do it? What was in it for him?

Yeah, way beyond the call of most men, and he was successful.

The night skies here in the desert are simply beautiful.

They lend everything a timeless quality that somehow brings Stuart much closer.

BIRDS TWITTER

You wake early in the desert, the sun and the galahs see to that.

You also want to get up and washed

before the flies become too much of a nuisance.

I like to make time in the morning to get myself organised

and to prepare for the day ahead.

As I said, my aim isn't to follow Stuart's crossing of the country but to visit some of the places

that were key to him gaining his bush knowledge and experience that allowed him to make that journey.

One of the things I really like to do is to look at my route on a survey map.

At the beginning of each day I'll check where I'm going

so that when I'm driving along I've a better understanding of what I'm passing by.

I'm very lucky because most of Australia is extremely well mapped

but, of course, back in Stuart's day it was largely a blank sheet of paper.

You can see here how I've got my maps organised.

I've numbered each sheet that I'm gonna need for the whole journey

so I can find my way to them very easily.

It also means that I won't lose track of them.

I know that if number five's not there, I have to look for it cos I don't want to lose anything.

I can't suddenly pop into the shops, and that's exactly how it was for Stuart.

He was an absolute stickler for having his whole equipment really well organised -

his bags were numbered, and every piece of equipment had its place.

Of course, it wasn't just about being able to find the equipment he needed when he needed it.

It was about not losing them, because this man was travelling very light.

Virtually every piece of equipment he had was essential.

Before departing on my trip, Rick arranged for me to spend some time

looking at Stuart's personal belongings, kept here at the History Trust's store in Adelaide.

This is the kit he built up and refined over his many early explorations

and would have been with him on his eventual crossing of the country.

I feel honoured to be granted permission

and hope it will shed some light on Stuart's method of exploration.

This is a real privilege.

On the table here I've got some of the items that are held in collections here in Australia

from Stuart's expeditions and it's fascinating to have a look at them.

One of Stuart's men was a man called Kekwick and this was his mug.

When I travel I have one mug I take everywhere with me,

and I'm sure it was the same for him,

It becomes a very personal item, it's in use every day.

That mug would have been designed -

if I'm very careful, that folds in -

and that was designed to fit inside a billycan for cooking.

Amazing.

But perhaps most interesting of these personal items

is this scarf ring made of red coral.

That was John McDouall Stuart's

and it's in the shape of a dragon.

I wonder what Aboriginal people thought of when they saw that.

This is John McDouall Stuart's belt.

This tells us a lot about the man.

He was very slim and...

I could barely get that round my thigh, it's quite astonishing!

Fascinating.

Navigation was of course critical on these expeditions,

and it's interesting to know the quality of his navigational equipment.

The compass was a tool he was completely happy and comfortable with.

His first expedition was carried out merely by dead reckoning,

knowing his distance and bearings.

And so to hold his compass and look through there and take a reading...

Wow, it's a bit chilling actually.

And it's really moving to hold that compass cos you know what that meant to him.

Later on he used a more accurate means of navigation or fixing his position on the land's surface,

which was necessary if the interior of Australia was to be accurately mapped.

And for that he used a sextant, and this is his sextant.

It's a well made sextant with a micrometer reading on the bottom here.

And it shows the commitment to accurately recording where he'd gone.

His observations would, of course, have been written down,

and this is one of the notebooks from 1862.

It's interesting that when you read it from this direction

the observations are of two types.

We have lunar observations and sun observations to establish

his longitude, by working out the local apparent noon.

And when you read it from the other direction there are his latitude observations,

all beautifully recorded here in a light copperplate script.

That's very, very special.

But I guess of all of the equipment that I'm looking at here,

the things that have intrigued me most have been the binocular and the telescope and his spurs.

I think these things are very interesting.

These are his binoculars, they're French binoculars,

they're good quality binoculars,

they're still functioning today and they're very light.

Optics were tremendously important for him in scanning the landscape in searching for water.

And the way he would look for that was to get up early in the morning and scan with a telescope.

The optics are of good quality but they're very light.

Very, very light and that's reflected also, that concept, in his spurs.

Look how delicate these spurs are.

That's incredible.

This was a man who in his mind believed in travelling light

and fast, and his equipment very much reflects that.

I've been looking at this, thinking about the equipment I take on a trip into the desert

and thinking, well, maybe my binoculars give me better vision

but they're heavy compared to those.

Lightness is something that as you get older I think you come to value more and more

and it's something that he really understood.

And that's the abiding impression I'm left with from his equipment -

how simple his outfit must have been, how well made it was.

It's robust, but it's all epitomising his concept - light and fast.

This travel light and fast approach was adopted by Stuart

after a failed 18-month expedition in 1844.

Captain Charles Sturt led the way.

He travelled like many early explorers,

taking everything they thought they needed with them.

Burdened by all their equipment and a flock of sheep, they moved very slowly.

Stuart having seen the error in the method came up with a plan.

He was convinced that you could explore this land

taking only the bare essentials and a few good men on horseback, travelling from sun up to sun down.

His early trips into the then uncharted land were invaluable.

Stuart taught himself what to look for, learning as he went,

banking the knowledge needed to survive out here.

He would use his bush skills to find a drink, going where the water led him.

To the untrained eye it would seem that finding water here would be nigh-on impossible

but Stuart had the uncanny knack of wringing a drink out of this sunburnt landscape.

We know that Stuart took good optics with him on his expeditions.

He took binoculars, which are convenient and very easy to use,

with which he could scan ahead looking for any indication of water,

maybe a particularly green or bushy tree down a creek,

or wildlife - birds that could indicate the presence of water, pigeons, kangaroos...

Kangaroos dig in some of these creeks for water.

But the thing that really intrigues me is the fact he was carrying a telescope with him.

The telescope gives you much greater magnification, and we know that he would go in the morning

onto high points when there was less mirage, less heat haze, take the telescope and scan the country ahead

looking for any possible source of water because that's the means by which he navigated.

And I can picture the scene.

Steady the telescope.

Focus it.

And then very carefully

follow the creek lines,

studying them for anything that could indicate

the presence...of water.

And you can very easily discern now

bushes that are particularly green and verdant,

and with a telescope like this

you can look into the bush and see the presence of bird life.

And having done that, he could then send other members of his team out to scout ahead,

send them down the creek lines to survey it, saying,

"Pay particular attention over there.

"That might be a good place for water."

And by that means he very quickly could build up an accurate impression of where the water was

so that he could navigate via reliable sources of water.

That's what was unique about Stuart's approach -

he followed the water, rather than hoping it would be where he wanted to go.

In this vast land, Stuart couldn't have done what he did without horses.

They had the stamina and reliability to travel the distances needed as he surveyed the landscape.

His life literally depended upon them.

To preserve the horses, Stuart set off early in the mornings,

setting a steady pace as they rode for hours across the baking interior.

Their needs always came first at the end of the day.

No-one could eat or drink until they'd been tended to.

Today the mode of transport has changed to four-wheel drives,

but actually the same rules apply.

When you're travelling in this sort of country, you need to inspect your tyres on a regular basis.

Make sure you've got the appropriate tyre pressures and look for any signs of wear.

These rocks here, they're not just hard, they're also very sharp.

And, of course, not much has changed since McDouall Stuart came through here.

Back then it wasn't tyres, it was horseshoes, and on his second expedition he made a major mistake.

He didn't take enough horseshoes with him and 100km north of here, he had to turn back.

You can imagine, can't you? If your horse goes lame out here, you're as good as dead.

The searing heat can play strange tricks on the mind and the eye.

Stuart learned this the hard way on Captain Charles Sturt's expedition.

Slowed to a standstill by all their kit,

Stuart was sent to scout ahead for water and after four days in the saddle

his weary eyes met with the very welcome sight

of a huge lake in the distance.

He returned with the triumphant news.

But his elation would turn to disappointment

as it turned out he had been deceived by a mirage.

He vowed never to let this happen again and wrote...

"The mirage is so powerful that little bushes appear like great gum-trees.

"One would think that the whole country was under water."

One of the best ways of getting water in a desert

in an emergency is by use of something called a transpiration bag.

To do this you're gonna need a big polythene bag.

You have to have that with you already, but here in Australia there's a real advantage.

What I'm gonna do is try and trap the moisture being transpired from these leaves

by covering a branch in a plastic bag.

Some trees will give out chemicals called alkaloids into the water and make it toxic,

but eucalypts don't do that

and that's one of the great advantages for this technique here in Australia.

What I'm looking for is a fairly bushy branch on this sapling

that's facing north so it's gonna get good sun and I'm gonna need to

trim it up a little bit to get rid of some of the excess branches that I don't need.

This far south in the Southern Hemisphere the sun passes from east to west with the sun to the north,

so that's why I'm careful to choose a north-facing branch.

It really pays to take your time, getting as many of the branches in as possible

so that you can trap as much of the life-giving water that this bush will transpire.

Have to be careful not to puncture the bag because it needs to be airtight.

Seal this end as well as possible.

So...

I've gone to quite some length to tie that firmly.

I'll leave that long so that if I have to re-tie it later I can.

Now, down at this end...

So...

there's the transpiration bag set up.

What I've created here is a reservoir to collect the water by just narrowing the bag here,

and what I'm gonna do now is adjust this cord so this is hanging down at the lowest point.

So I've rigged that so that this is right at the bottom.

The gravity will lead any moisture down into there.

That's good. And you can already start to see

moisture forming on the inside of the bag as the tree transpires.

It's like a greenhouse, trapping all the moisture transpired from the leaves

then that finds its way down here,

and we can shake it and tap some of the moisture

so that it'll run down.

So we're just gonna leave that now in the sun to do its work.

Oh, I've got a hole there - look. That's no good.

Need a bit of...

bit of gaffer tape from the crew.

Thanks.

Good, I'll leave that to do its job.

As the sun climbs, the heat rises towards 40 degrees and the transpiration bag begins to work.

The leaves perspire and release their precious life-giving moisture.

On arriving at camp for the night, Stuart had a strict routine he adhered to.

Whilst he made the most of the remaining daylight writing up his precious charts and journal,

his men would unpack the saddlebags, hobble the horses and collect wood for the campfire.

Their fire-lighting kit reflected Stuart's philosophy of travelling light.

Rick has been given special permission

to bring along the fire-lighting kit of the artist Stephen King,

who accompanied Stuart on a number of his journeys.

This is Stephen King's flint and steel...that he carried.

So this is how you'd make fire, just simple gear using rudimentary equipment.

It's very interesting, isn't it?

Little brass tube to contain it, and a striker and a piece of flint.

And this intriguing tube.

Now, this is the first time I've seen this, but I've seen photographs and drawings of it, Rick.

And what I've begun back in the UK is I've gone into my shed and I've replicated this...

I'll show you what I made, I think I've come pretty close, actually.

-That's what I've knocked up.

-It's very similar.

It's very close, and without actually seeing the original.

But there is one thing I've added that I think you'll find very interesting.

What I've done is I've put in a cord. This is a cotton cord which I've impregnated with saltpetre,

and I think that is what the tube from King's apparatus was used for.

And if I bring that charred end out and show you that...

-Yup.

-There's the charred end.

But if I can get a spark to land in the right place...

-There.

-Like that.

-Like that.

And cos this has got the saltpetre it glows like a slow match.

-And it won't go out.

-That won't go, it's gonna keep going.

Let's give this a go then, shall we, Rick?

There's our fire.

Now, the clever thing about the tube

is that you can pull that down and you can place your finger over the top of the tube,

and that starves it of oxygen and out it goes.

And I think that that's what you have in this kit here.

But, Rick, King's fire-lighting apparatus is quite well travelled, isn't it?

Yeah, more than quite well travelled, it's extraordinary travelled.

Because not only did it go from south to north, the first European crossing across the continent,

Dr Andy Thomas, who's a descendant of FG Waterhouse, who was the naturalist on the final expedition of Stuart's,

took this as a memento when he went in the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1996.

So it's pretty well travelled.

It was here, right here, right at this very spot

and it was on the north coast of Australia,

and then about 145 years later it was Andy's personal memento

as Australia's only astronaut on the space shuttle Endeavour.

That's amazing.

-That is incredible, to think that it was probably used right here.

-Absolutely.

Right here, and then it goes off... I find that amazing.

-And it's come back and it's intact.

-That's fascinating.

-Pretty special, isn't it?

OK, time to see if I have enough for a life-saving drink.

Well, let's have a look at the transpiration bag,

and I'm really pleased with that result.

In fact, the reservoir hasn't been big enough.

There's a good amount of water here, and a lot more than I can tap down from the branch.

This is my choice of technique for an emergency here.

You could have 20 or 30 of these bags stashed away in an off-road

vehicle without any difficulty should the need arise,

and all you do is put them on the branch and let the sun do the rest.

Fantastic!

I'm gonna see how much there is.

Normally you'd save the bag and open it carefully but I don't have to.

I'm just gonna cut it and see what the score is.

Go on, go on, go on.

We've nearly got... Yes.

My mug's calibrated and that's half a litre of liquid for virtually no effort whatsoever.

Decent quantity, just thanks to this bush and the power of Mother Nature herself, the sun, cheers.

It even tastes good.

BIRDS TWITTER

DIDGERIDOO MUSIC

Well, it can happen to anyone.

This may look like a set-up but believe me, no-one wants to get bogged down out here.

However it does give me the chance to show you how to get out of a similar situation.

Having had extensive experience of travelling off-road in this country,

I made sure that one of our vehicles was fitted with a winch.

But we still have to dig down and place branches under the tyres

to give us purchase on the very soft sand bed.

John, would you do us a favour...?

Everything's zipped in your swag, isn't it?

Yeah.

OK, guys, live cable.

I've seen a winch cable break under the strain before and believe me it's extremely dangerous.

The pressure on the cable is greatest near to the vehicle that is being winched.

If it snaps it'll whip back.

As a precaution we wrap a swag around the middle

to prevent this whipping action that could be lethal.

The key is to be patient and to winch slowly, taking up the slack.

Too fast and we will get bogged down again.

Very unfortunate to get stuck there, came down here last night in the dark,

tired a little bit dehydrated, made a poor decision.

Looked down the slope

and I could see where there'd been a campfire and I could also see roots of the trees

so I thought, well, that must be hard sand.

Drove down there, soon as I got in I realised it was soft and I bogged out on the underside of the vehicle.

But we're fortunate - we got one of the vehicles set up with a winch.

Here's a little tip - when you're winching and you tie your shackle on, you fix your shackle on like so.

When you do it up, a lot of people do it up really tight.

The problem with that is that by the time you've loaded the vehicle and you've pulled it out

it can have tightened and you can't get it undone.

So once you've done it up, undo it a fraction.

Still gonna hold tight once there's load on there, but it means when you get out, you can easily undo it.

Little tip, little things like that make all the difference.

Reminders of the harsh reality of living in such an environment are never far away.

Travelling in vehicles can lull you into a false sense of security,

but step out into the blistering heat of the day

and it's not long before you're reaching for the water bottle.

It's hard to imagine what drove Stuart to return time and again to the desert,

venturing further and further into this arid land,

often not knowing where the next drink was coming from.

No matter how dehydrated and exhausted from lack of sleep and nourishment,

he never veered away from his task of mapping out the great swathes of uncharted land.

Stuart became incredibly adept at finding water out here

but even he wasn't prepared for what he saw one evening on his second expedition.

Climbing a hill he saw stretching out before him

a series of hills with water springing out of the top of them.

He had discovered a line of mound springs that were to become essential to his later expeditions.

He wrote in his journal,

"This is another strange feature of the mysterious interior of Australia."

Well, that's completely weird. I've come uphill to a waterhole.

It seems like nature turned upside-down, it's quite incredible.

This is a mound spring. I've heard a lot about these,

but it's a bit of a surprise when you come here.

This was a very important place for John McDouall Stuart,

this was permanent water that he could rely upon,

and it was from here that he really kicked off on his proper expeditions.

Amazing.

It's pretty salty,

but if it was good enough for John McDouall Stuart,

I guess it's good enough for me too.

Take the opportunity to top up the old water bag.

It's hard to imagine really what this must have been like.

Riding across here on a horse would have been like crossing the lunar landscape,

so to come to one of these raised points and find all this water

must have been a fantastic experience both for man and for horse.

These canvas water bags are an ancient tool of Australia.

I guess in some ways they're falling into disuse

cos people have such good refrigerators inside off-road vehicles today.

But the basic principle is the bag's wet and you tie it on the outside of your vehicle or on your horse

or even bicycles, believe it or not,

and as you go along the breeze causes an evaporation on the surface that keeps the fluid cool inside.

Brilliant tool.

Very special place to be.

Kind of get a sense of John McDouall Stuart here,

getting ready for the journey ahead.

As a permanent source of water, the springs played a key role

in Stuart's exploration of the interior.

Mound spring expert Colin Harris is researching the springs in the area.

When I first saw these mound springs, I thought nature had turned upside-down.

You walk up the slopes of this thing to find a waterhole, it's bizarre!

Can you tell me how that forms and how they come about?

Well, the simplest description is that they're natural outlets for the waters of the great artesian basin.

So it's ground water which is bubbling to the surface under pressure.

The great artesian basin is huge, it covers about a fifth of the Australian continent.

Most of the underground water in the basin has come from

the Great Dividing Range up in northern Queensland.

It's got down into water-bearing gravels and sands and sandstones,

various aquifers, and it moves very, very slowly south-westwards

so that the water we're seeing here has probably been moving through the basin

at the rate of about one to three metres a year, which makes it a couple of million years old.

So the water in front of us here today is really fossil water - it's been around for a long, long time.

Because it's moving through the aquifers so very, very slowly

it's picking up a lot of dissolved solids as it goes.

So as soon as the water emerges lots of those dissolved solids start precipitating

out, and they concentrate over time and start forming these cones and the typical mound that we see behind us.

Tell me about John McDouall Stuart's association with the mound springs.

Yeah, well, they were absolutely critical to Stuart.

Without the mound springs Stuart, of his own admission,

would never have got across this inhospitable part of the continent.

I mean, where we are today is the harshest part of the Australian continent.

It's the lowest rainfall,

it's erratic, you'll get years sometimes with negligible rain, or almost no rain at all.

It was an almost insurmountable obstacle to crossing the continent

which was a great strategic objective,

and Stuart, once he got onto the line of mound springs up here,

realised that he would then be able to get unfailingly into the centre of Australia,

pick up the big gum creeks and then move into the sub tropics

and on through to the coast, and, ultimately, that's what he did in '62.

And he comments time and again in his journals about the fact

that without the mound springs he would never have achieved what he did.

And in the annals of Australian exploration, Stuart is right there with the best of them.

The thing I find fascinating is he comes into this country

and there's already a technology here for finding water,

with an aboriginal perspective, but he brings a new perspective on the whole issue.

It's almost like, "Well, they do it their way, I'm gonna find another way."

I have huge respect for that.

It... You know, I think that was really unusual.

The springs were an incredible life-saving find,

however the minerals in the salty water caused Stuart and his men many stomach problems.

Resourceful as ever, Stuart had an answer.

This big billycan here is a water heater.

It's ideal for my purposes cos it has a spout.

The way it works is there's this big funnel - it's really good idea.

The only way you can get water out is to put cold water in.

You put cold water in, it goes to the bottom and it forces hot water out of the side pipe.

What I'm going to do is bring the water to the boil

and I'm just going to keep it simmering,

I don't want it bubbling and spewing salt water out through that pipe.

I'm gonna attach to that a pipe

so that I can condense the steam and get fresh drinking water.

Now, I've brought a piece of plastic hosepipe with me,

I've just made a coil there.

The idea is that steam will feed into this pipe,

I'll have this suspended

and I'm gonna put a bandage around it and make that wet,

and the wind blowing across the bandage will cause evaporation

which will cool the air inside these tubes so as the

steam comes in, it condenses, forms into a liquid and runs down and that should be fresh drinking water.

Of course, in order to use the still you have to have found water in the first place.

Stuart was lucky to find such a permanent source of water in the mound springs.

Many other explorers seeking new pastoral lands and gold and minerals weren't so lucky.

There are plenty of chilling reminders of this.

You know, you can never take desert travel lightly

and nowhere is that more the case than here in Australia.

At the moment I'm inside the Royal Geographical Society of South Australia.

I've come here because there's an interesting collection of artefacts from expeditions of the past.

Simple things like this water canteen that was found in the desert.

But scratched in the outside of this tin is the last testament of William Coulthard.

He scratched these words as he lay dying in the desert of dehydration.

It's difficult to read now but it says -

"I never reached water.

"I do not know how long it is since I left Scott and Brooks...

"..but I think it Monday, bleeding Pomp, his horse, to live on his blood."

"I took his horse to look for water and the last thing I can remember

"is pulling the saddle off him and letting him go.

"Until now is not good,

"long it may weather two or three days, I do not know, I am not sure.

"My tongue is sticking to my mouth and I see what I have wrote

"and know as this the last time I may have of expressing feelings,

"blind, although feeling exu...

"for want of water, my eyes to my tongue,

"I can see no way I get help."

This land also claimed the lives of two of Australia's best known explorers, Burke and Wills.

They went head-to-head with Stuart when he eventually decided

to employ all of his acquired knowledge to the task of crossing Australia.

They were chasing fame and fortune offered to the first Europeans to cross the continent.

The Government were keen to find a route for an overland telegraph

linking north to south, improving trade and communications.

They took a very different approach to Stuart, taking everything that they thought they needed with them.

This amounted to 20 tonnes of equipment,

27 heavily laden camels and 23 horses.

They even brought along a wooden dining table.

But the desert would claim their lives.

Less than a year after setting off they were down to just three men and two camels.

They had practically no bushcraft knowledge

and, unable to process the food they found properly, Burke and Wills perished.

Well, let's see how this has been going.

It's been burning now, the fire, for four hours,

and the difficulty with this technique is always here,

it's always in the cooling.

This is very, very hot despite the breeze causing good evaporation.

Let's have a look.

Well, that's really not too bad.

I told you that it was a difficult technique, it's a lot of work for your returns

but it works, you can take salty water

and get drinking water from it, and there is a drink there.

That's not bad going at all.

As the sun goes down, this will become more efficient

because the ambient temperature will drop, and then we'll get proper cooling here

and it'll... We'll get an even higher yield. It's a lot of work.

You have to have a lot of water to get very little, but there's enough.

And this is a practical means of turning saline water into drinking

water, and it was a system similar to this that Stuart took with him on some of his expeditions.

Stuart embraced the challenge of finding water.

Once he'd found a reliable source he would carefully plot it

and then plan his future journeys around its location.

True to his character, he chose to do it in his own way.

He took little guidance from the Aboriginal people who had lived off the land for thousands of years.

Reg Dodd, co-ordinator of The Arabana People's Committee,

has agreed to give me an Aboriginal perspective.

The Aboriginal people who were living here on the desert,

their lifestyle was around the management and caring and looking after that land.

Their whole survival depended on that.

Their upbringing and teaching are...

..gave them the skills and knowledge to survive on this land.

And people would come along and say, "It's just an arid land there's nothing much here, what's here?"

But you would have knowledge that's been handed down by generations and generations after generation,

and you would know where to look for water, where to look for food.

So I'm just gonna show you where you can get water.

This is where one of our rock holes are, so it's pretty precious.

I'll just remove that, and that...

..then...

Wow that's amazing! That really is incredible out here!

Can I taste that?

You can taste that. Lovely.

Wow, it's amazing.

I've been tasting mound springs and bore holes and things and they're very brackish.

That's very sweet.

And the more you clean out, the more you can use it, the sweeter it gets, I think.

The more you use it the sweeter it gets, so you'd empty that and it'd refill?

-Do you mind if I fill my water bottle?

-You can, you can.

Without Reg I would never have known there was a water source out here

and it's so much nicer than the water Stuart and his men would have been drinking.

As with so many indigenous people,

it was the Aboriginals who paid the price for progress and exploration.

Reg, those early explorers who came through this country,

they didn't know where the special places were, did they?

No, they wouldn't, no, no, no.

They would have been travelling, they were camping

and probably venturing on places where there was no restriction of place,

only for men or women, so they wouldn't have known that.

They would have been totally ignorant.

How did your people feel about that?

I think in many places it created conflict and that,

because...on the restriction of who could go on those places and...why.

And in many places they would have had animals and stock,

and their stock would have been trampling and treading and destroying that native vegetation

that provided medicine and food for the Aboriginal people.

And where we are at this moment, that's a special place.

It is a very, very special place.

Just behind us there now is a stone table

and it would be thousands of years old. It's been carved out of the rock by the old people.

And this area we're looking at here now

is actually a ceremonial place where the boys became men,

very important place it was here.

-But despite the importance of this site there's a railway just next to it.

-Exactly, yes.

And that railway corridor travels right through

the heart of this very significant place for Aboriginal people,

so the impact of that would've been enormous.

Not only was it the railways but it was the construction of the overland telegraph line, 1871,

so...

it would have had an enormous impact.

Obviously we're making a documentary about John McDouall Stuart

but what is your...thoughts about the man?

I often think that the early explorers and the pioneers

were actually the beginning of the end of that Aboriginal culture.

In his journals he describes an event where he's crossing the land and he meets an Aboriginal family

who take him to one of these small wells that they'd dug.

And he comes along with his horses and all the horses drink the water

and the Aboriginal man looks at him with astonishment.

How do you think that man was feeling at that moment?

Of course it would have been an enormous impact because that water is so, so, so precious to him.

So, the animals just coming in there and just walking in there and destroying it,

it and it's.... Probably in place it would be sacrilege,

do you know what I mean? Creating a sacrilege.

I have heard of similar stories so many times on my travels

and it never gets any easier or more comfortable to deal with.

There's even less water in the creeks and rivers of Australia today than when Stuart crossed here.

One tip for finding a drink Stuart may have been glad of in desperate times

was discovered through research carried out by the Australian army.

These are one of the features of this part of the world.

You get these lizards called shingleback lizards -

you can see this incredible scaling on their back here.

Aboriginal people would eat these for food.

You can actually drink the liquid from the bladder of these creatures

cos they excrete most of their salts in their dung.

Not a very nice idea, much better to let this little chap walk free,

but if you were walking around here without a drink,

I don't think there'd be any hesitation.

There you go, fella.

You wouldn't want to get bitten by one, they've got a fierce bite,

they'll really flatten your finger.

As we finished recording this piece, it began to rain

but this lasted for just 5 minutes.

A torment for everyone who's living here under drought conditions.

A powerful reminder how desperate this land is for a drink.

Travelling this land, Stuart and his men spent hours in the saddle

with the wind, dust and the glare of the sun taking its toll on their eyes.

Stuart in particular suffered from sandy blight, or trachoma, caused by grit under the eyelids.

It's still a problem for those living in the outback today.

Sometimes it was so bad that Stuart was unable to leave the camp.

On one occasion he wrote,

"Nearly blind, dreadful pain, can do nothing today, no sleep last night."

But he never gave up and, through relentless example,

pushed his men hard in the fierce heat of the interior.

The more I see of the terrain that John McDouall Stuart crossed the more impressed I become.

It truly is one bleak savannah landscape, it's incredible.

And he traversed this in the hope of finding water, confident somehow that he would,

and every so often he had that life-saving success.

There's an old saying that explorers need more than just skill,

they need a degree of luck, and he certainly had that all-important ingredient.

The final place I want to visit

is a creek that became as important strategically to Stuart as the mound springs.

It provided a reliable source of water in such an arid area.

He would return to the creek many times in his explorations allowing him to forge further north,

finally using it as a jumping off point to take on water before his crossing of the continent.

Here I'm looking forward to recreating the sort of camp

that Stuart would have lived in, on the very spot where he would have pitched his tent.

He must have pinched himself when he came across this green,

verdant valley in the middle of all this desolation.

Big trees and, just like today, there's open water.

This became Chamber's Creek, and was of huge significance in the exploration of Australia

and of intense interest amongst those who wanted to run cattle in this country.

Today it's called Stuart Creek in memory of John McDouall Stuart, and it's not easy to get to.

In fact, even driving here in a car today it's still a fantastic sight

that raises your spirits when you see all that open water - fresh drinking water.

So this is where we're to end our journey.

It's quite something to know that Stuart camped here, in a tent very similar to this.

It only takes a few minutes to put up.

In this heat you really want something that is light and easy

because Stuart would rarely have stayed in one place for very long.

Stuart's original tent doesn't survive.

We've had this one reconstructed

from field sketches made on Stuart's last expedition by Stephen King.

Really gives a sense of place here and it's very good shade, which is welcome today.

Tarps are very simple in their construction.

To sit under this tarp, which is very similar to the one Stuart used,

I get a sense of how he would have looked out on the world while he was sitting,

keeping calculations on his journeys, noting down where he'd been,

hypothesising where they might next find water, instructing his men where to go.

What better way to cool off than having a dip in the creek?

It's too hot not to get in I have to tell you!

Stuart was very strict with his men, and rations were no different.

Remember, his philosophy was to travel fast and light.

They lived on a simple regime of jerked beef, tea and damper,

the bread that I'm making here.

It feels very special to sit here making this staple of his diet exactly as Stuart would have done,

listening to the welcome sounds of the birds and the fresh water nearby.

The creek and surrounding country will have changed very little since he camped here.

You can almost feel his presence and it's not hard to imagine him

sitting here by his fire in the fading light,

meticulously recording his calculations,

eating his damper and sipping on his billy-tea.

I've cooked it a little bit too much on top.

I have to say I'm more used to making this sort of bread in cold countries

and the temperature here is way up in the 30s,

so even allowing for that I haven't allowed enough.

Just gonna turn it around cos the wind's blowing this way,

make sure it's properly cooked in the middle on that side and...

Time to get some tea on, I think.

I'm gonna add one other special ingredient from my friend Rick.

Couple of gum leaves in, give it that unique Aussie flavour.

Rick has travelled the outback many times in pursuit of Stuart's history.

I started my journey with him and as I come to the end of my time here,

who better to join me and share a true bushman's meal?

Well, let's have some damper, Rick, smells good.

Yeah.

Little bit, still a fraction doughy in the middle.

-Thanks.

-I was afraid of burning it.

-It's hot.

-It's hot, all right.

Pretty tough diet, wasn't it?

Very tough diet, he must have got pretty sick of it.

Well, Rick, it's really special to be here in Stuart's campsite beside Stuart Creek,

to eat some damper and to drink billy-tea in recognition of his achievements.

-Cheers.

-Cheers, good health.

This has been a remarkable journey.

I had a great admiration for Stuart before I came here and that has grown enormously.

What really brings home the incredible achievement of Stuart and his men

is crossing the very terrain he tackled over a century and a half ago.

He learnt what he needed to survive out here,

and this knowledge made it possible for him to become

the first European to cross the continent and live to tell the tale.

This is such a tough, unrelenting environment.

It's really brought home to me how hard and determined he was.

He is the one person who revealed more of central Australia than anyone else.

John McDouall Stuart never really fitted into polite society.

It was out here in the wild lands that he found himself, his sense of purpose, and his confidence.

In a strange way, history has kind of passed him by, he's almost forgotten.

But not to those people who still live and travel here in the bush.

To them this Scotsman of diminutive stature

is remembered as a giant of exploration.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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