Burke and Wills Expedition Across Australia

Burke and Wills: Across Australia. Australia is a huge country, and the outback,

the Australian word for the interior of the country, is desert. In some years,

it rains only eight centimeters in the outback, but in other years,

rainstorms turn the desert into sandy swamps. Until the 18th century,

only Aborigines lived in Australia. These are the first people who lived in Australia.

When Europeans went there to live, they built towns on the coast. However,

in the 1850s, people began thinking more about the interior. In 1860,

Robert O'Hara Burke, a police officer from Ireland, was chosen to lead an expedition