Die of Thirst in the Australian Outback

We live near the coast, more or less at the south eastern corner of Australia.

Coulthard’s grave. Mr Babbage burried William Coulthard in the shade of the myall tree where he died.

One of our our sons lives about a third of the way across the country. When traveling alone, it’s possible get there in two days, driving 15 hours the first day, sleeping on the roadside, and driving another seven hours the next day.

This is where I go for the desert. Well, it’s not really desert, it’s the arid region. Six inch rainfall. In fact one of the pastoralists (sheep and cattle) was adamant that “there’s no desert around here,” so I’ve been a bit careful, since that.

On my last trip I visited Coulthard’s grave. William Coulthard was a pastoralist who got the exploring bug and headed off into the arid region with two companions. When things got pretty desperate they split up, Coulthard going alone in his search for water.

The other two men eventually stumbled back to help, but not Coulthard. In his search, he climbed a sand dune for a better view and must have come to the end of his tether only six miles up the dry creek bed from a waterhole.

He cut his horses throat and drunk it’s blood. The horse was eventually found but was in such bad condition that it was shot.

Coulthard scratched his final story on his tin water bottle, cut a notch in a scrubby tree to hang his watch and there in the shade of that dwarfed and leaning myall tree, he died.

It was over three months before Mr Babbage, a government sponsored explorer and surveyor, found Coulthard’s remains. Although Babbage had made a search for Coulthard up and down the dry bed of Pernatty Creek, it was by chance that he came upon the remains, six miles north of his camp at the waterhole that Coulthard missed by half an hour on horseback.

Babbage took his men back the next day with some tools. They dug a deep grave and conducted a simple funeral service.

It’s likely the sand may only be a couple of feet deep and that they struck pretty hard digging from there on. From the journal entries it seems that the digging and service took a lot longer than expected.

It seems likely, too, that with eagles, crows, dingos, goannas and other smaller scavengers about, there may not have been a lot left of Coulthard, spread over the immediate area.

You can be sure that it’s a pretty sobering experience to stand there where Coulthard died of thirst and contemplate the isolation.

In my blog that deals with my travels in the footsteps of explorer John McDouall Stuart, I tell of my adventurers at Bottle Hill, which is a day’s ride on a horse, north west of Coulthard’s grave.