Summary
Melbourne’s blinding gaslight spills across the cobblestones in 1860 as Robert O’Hara Burke—an Irish constable with the eyes of a trapped hawk—accepts command of the Victorian Exploring Expedition, a cavalcade of camels, crackling ambition, and whispered colonial dread. His second, the scientific meteorite William John Wills, carries sextants instead of passion, yet between the two men a tremulous, wordless devotion ignites beneath the Southern Cross. Dorothy Beer’s camera lingers on their gloved hands almost touching while provisions are checked, as if the continent itself were a third lover jealous of human intimacy. The party snakes inland from Royal Park; coppery horizons swell into mirage, and the celluloid blooms with ochre dust that seems to crawl under the audience’s fingernails. At Cooper’s Creek they establish Depot Camp 65, where Burke and Wills, accompanied by the loyal, taciturn Gray and the gnarled King, push on toward the Gulf of Carpentaria while the supply party waits, order dissolving like wet paper. Heatstroke hallucinations shimmer onscreen: Burke sees Wills transfigured into a snow-white ibis, Wills imagines Burke’s moustaches dripping liquid gold. Gray dies; the return is a death-march of salt-crusted lips and dwindling flour. Base camp has been evacuated hours earlier—Blanchet’s drumming score erupts into a funereal waltz. The final fortnight is rendered in near-static tableaux: Burke cradling Wills beneath a coolibah, sharing the last nibble of nardoo while a corona of crows blackens the sky. When Wills expires, Burke folds the beloved’s diary against his own chest, whispers an inaudible promise, then walks—barefoot, delirious—into a saline oblivion that the camera refuses to sentimentalize. The closing iris reveals King, rescued by Yandruwandha people, speaking to a journalist: love, he says, is the only compass that never lies, though it may guide you straight into the desert.
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