The Explorers: Stories of Discovery and Adventure from the Australian Frontier

A lively collection of extraordinary stories of adventure and discovery, The Explorers tells the epic saga of the conquest and settlement of Australia. Editor Tim Flannery selects sixty-seven accounts that convey the sense of wonder and discovery, along with the human dimensions of struggle and deprivation, which occurred in the exploration of the last continent to be fully mapped by Europeans. Beginning with the story of Dutch captain Willem Janz's 1606 expedition at Cape York – the bloody outcome of which would sadly foreshadow future relations between colonists and Aboriginal peoples – and running through Robyn Davidson's 1977 camelback ride through the desolate Outback deserts, The Explorers bristles with the enterprise that Flannery explains as "heroic, for nowhere else did explorers face such an obdurate country."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

There are few things more interesting than reading the actual words of explorers. These are the people who witness history at its creation, and through their eyes (and words) we can truly travel back in time. Imagine, then, the experiences of explorers seeing the spectacularly beautiful continent of Australia for the first time. After a long sea voyage, they come upon a land inhabited by a culture that has been on Earth longer than any other. Struggling to find similarities with their homelands, they give this wild country names that reflect their heritage but know all the while that they have ventured into something completely unknown to them. Detailing events from the 1606 discovery of "Nova Guinea" to a solo camel ride through the outback in 1977, the 67 stories in this anthology often read like science fiction and sizzle with suspense. Flannery's (Throwim' Way Leg) thoughtful introduction and his comprehensive bibliography are alone almost worth the price of the book. All libraries will do their patrons a favor by offering them this collection of firsthand accounts of the taming of a challenging continent.AJoseph L. Carlson, Lampoc P.L., CA

From Booklist

The conquest and settlement of Australia proves just as exciting as the conquest and settlement of North America, as readers will behold in this engrossing anthology prepared by Flannery, the director of the South Australia Museum. He has gathered 67 excerpts from a variety of accounts of Australian exploration, each one offering "the experience of being a fly on the wall at exemplary moments in Australian history" and each one, with a single exception, written by an eyewitness. The chronology ranges from 1606, when Willem Jansz (commanding a Dutch ship) paid the first authenticated visit to Australia by a European, to 1977, when a physician by the name of W. J. Peasley took his four-wheel-drive vehicle out into the Gibson Desert during severe drought conditions to rescue an elderly Aboriginal couple. In between are such interesting stories as the first European to obtain evidence of the existence of the koala (in 1802) and an 1848 narrative by an Aborigine about the tragic end of the John Kennedy Cape York expedition. Brad Hooper

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