Background

In 2008, when the Royal Society of Victoria began organising commemoration activities for the sesquicentenary of the Burke and Wills Expedition in 2010, Peter and I met Dave Phoenix, who, in that year, walked from Melbourne to the Gulf following the route of the Expedition. Some time in 2010, I persuaded Dave that we should use the material that he had gathered to produce a guide for people who wanted to drive the route, and that I would do a structure and first cut for him if he would trust me with his material.
He agreed, but when I saw how much there was to deal with, we settled on the idea of producing "Following Burke and Wills Across Victoria".
During 2010, as we went to the various commemoration activities that were held between Melbourne and Swan Hill, Peter and I drove parts of the Victorian Route. Dave finished the first book and we self-published in 2011. We then persuaded CSIRO Publishing to take on the publication of the complete book, "Following Burke and Wills Across Australia". By 2013 we had a draft of most of the book, and in October that year Peter and I drove back and forth in the back blocks of NSW checking out both the draft and the driving route. We started in Swan Hill and went as far as the Dig Tree (near Innamincka) before heading back to Melbourne. Our findings were fed back in as Dave refined the draft in 2014, sorted out the illustrations and drew the maps. We delivered the final version to CSIRO Publishing early in 2015, and the book was officially released 1 June 2015.
Peter and I have been enjoying outback trips for many years, and we've previously travelled from Cloncurry to Normanton, and visited Innamincka, Birdsville and Bedourie. But we haven't travelled the section of the Expedition's route between Birdsville and Cloncurry. So we decided that this year, we would get some red dust on to my author copy of the book by renting a 4WD camper and going bush again.
The story now starts...