TRAVEL FEATURE - AUSTRALIA
LEIGH WILKINS
THE FORGOTTEN EXPLORER
Straining ! My neck contorted as my head lolls against my shoulders . Straining ! My eyes follow a tiny fleck against the darkening blue of the outback sky . Barely visible , the indistinguishable object continues to rise , heading toward the eastern horizon .
My fellow travellers impatiently mill about , transfixed to the sky I know , without saying , they ’ re telling me to hurry up . Yet I ’ m held , captive , to this spectacle . And I know that this mundane and underwhelming experience has a significance far greater than I , and my fellow travellers , can comprehend .
Wandering , my head searches for reason , for history , for comprehension . I feel like the early explorers , the first European to view this landscape . The first white man to witness the relatively nearby spectacle that is Uluru , only to be told that “ no , sorry , you were beaten by a few days . Your peer , William
Gosse , claims to have sighted the stone and named it Ayers Rock ”. No doubt a galling experience , the consolation being the nearby Kata- Tjuta ( Mount Olga ), in my opinion a much more astonishing sight .
The object against the blue , barely visible , continues its exploration . My mind still questions . Why Mount Olga ? Why not name this much higher than Uluru sandstone peak for himself ? No , Mount Olga , named for Queen Olga of Württemberg , the daughter of Tsar Nicholas 1 of Russia , at the behest of the expeditions patron , Ferdinand von Mueller .
And standing here , I realised that nothing had been named by this explorer for his own immortalisation . A humbling realisation , standing here on the edge of the very land he ’ d explored during the 1870 ’ s , a land as harsh as any on continental Australia .
A small explorational party had
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