A Desert Tragedy

COOPER'S CREEK by Alan Moorehead. 222 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

In the deceptively simple form of an historical narrative, Alan Moorehead has provided his native Australia with a national myth--and a singularly bitter parable of defeat and frustration it is.

Cooper's Creek is the story of the two explorers, Burke and Wills, who in 1861 became the first to cross the Australian continent from south to north, and who died of starvation and exhaustion on the way back. This dispiriting episode is lifted to symbolic status by the simple power of the narrative and Moorehead's pervading sense that history is neither bunk nor irrelevant to the present, but offers the illumination of tragedy.

Moorehead's book is a tragedy of 19th century optimism confronted by a desert that is not merely an absence of people but the presence of death.

It is a theme that also obsesses Australia's greatest living contemporary novelist, Patrick White, who wrote Voss as an elaboration of the Nietzschean aphorism: the desert is spreading; woe to the man who contains a desert. By no coincidence whatever, the Australian painter of desolate landscapes, Sidney Nolan, collaborated with Moorehead on Cooper's Creek; it was a theme that had always fascinated the artist, and he suggested it to the writer. Indeed, Nolan's painting of Burke on camelback leaving Melbourne at the start of his doomed journey perfectly expresses the grotesque and tragic story.

Atlantis or Blank. "Here perhaps, more than anywhere, humanity had a chance to make a fresh start," Moorehead begins. The Australians were 12,000 sea miles from corrupt old Europe; no errors from the dead past could hold them down. Gold and wool made the new Australians rich. Ten years after Victoria's founding in 1850, a box at the Melbourne opera sold for $35. Italianate palaces sprouted in the bush, baroque banking houses on avenues laid on the raw clay of a new city. But these top-hatted colonial vulgarians led a "capsule" life on the edge of a great continent; outside their city they were lost. The interior was a mystery that might contain the disappointment of a "ghastly blank" or the rich promise of a new Atlantis.

So the Victorian Exploring Expedition was formed to see how much lay behind the myth. Robert O'Hara Burke, a dashing Irish police inspector, was its leader. William John Wills, a bookish young man who knew a bit of astronomy, would do the surveying. Neither he nor Wills was a good bushman.

There were touches of the bizarre about the expedition from the start. Camels had to be bought from a traveling circus, and they made the men irritable and the horses neurotic. The expedition took off to the sound of speeches and brass bands, but before it had shambled far from the settled areas, it took on a dispirited air.

The strange landscape got the men down. In passage after passage, Moorehead evokes the weird nonhuman quality of the Australian bush. There is "a kind of trance in the air, a sense of awakening infinitely delayed . . . the alien white man walking, through the grey and silent trees, would have the feeling that someone or something was waiting and listening." It was the same quality that was to drive D. H. Lawrence to near frenzy in Kangaroo: "Sometimes a heavy reptile hostility came off the sombre land, something gruesome and infinitely repulsive."

Whatever it was, it did for Burke and Wills. They could not live off the land as American explorers had been able to do. They ate their camels and their failing horses. They got sick eating snake. Crow's meat proved unnourishing. Even rats got scarce. In the end, Burke and Wills were reduced to eating nardoo--dry grass seeds the size of peppercorns. They were filling, but gave no strength. Only the astonished aborigines kept them alive with their pitiful leftovers of yams or grubs.

Burke and Wills made it to the Gulf of Carpentaria, but even here it was "a story of predestined anticlimax." All they knew was that the water was salt. Mangrove swamps kept them from sight of the sea, and so they were denied the vision of a Cortes, a Pizarro, or a Lewis and Clark. They died on the way home, arriving at Cooper's Creek only nine hours after the base party had left. Thus they passed into legend, their names to this day in Australia a byword for any hopeless enterprise.

Vision v. Space. The huge Australian hinterland is still unpopulated. It is difficult to grasp the incredible fact that "it is still quite possible to retrace Burke's march to the Gulf, camping where he camped, and seeing more or less the same things he saw." Alan Moorehead did just that. At Cooper's Creek there were only the bones of dead cattle everywhere and traces of ruined homesteads. Here and there, scalding water spouted from an abandoned artesian bore.

This is what fate bestowed on the Australians instead of the Mississippi and Missouri valleys. Burke's grave marks forever the place where a people who were inflated by Victorian visions and an American sense of limitless possibilities were defeated by the measureless reality of uninhabitable space.

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