Darrell Lewis Libri

The frontiersmen who came to the Victoria River District of Australia’s Northern Territory included cattle and horse thieves, outlaws, capitalists, dreamers, drunks, madmen and others, from the explorers of the 1830s and 1850s to the founders of the big stations in the 1880s and 1890s, and the cattle duffers in the early 1900s. This book looks at them all. Drawing on painstaking research into obscure and rich documentary sources, Aboriginal oral traditions, and first-hand investigations conducted in the region over thirty-five years, Darrell Lewis pieces together the complex interactions between the environment, the powerful and warlike Aboriginal tribes and the settlers and their cattle, which produced what truly became A Wild History.

The vast deserts of Outback Australia hold many secrets, but there's one great mystery which stands out among all others - the mystery of the lost Leichhardt expedition. In April 1848, Ludwig Leichhardt and six other men set out westward from the Queensland frontier, heading for Swan River settlement in Western Australia. They never arrived. Somewhere in the immensity of the Outback, then almost completely unknown to Europeans, the entire expedition disappeared. For more than 160 years, supposed clues to the fate of the expedition have been discovered - human skeletons, old guns, rock paintings, Aboriginal stories of white men being massacred or perishing of thirst, trees marked 'L,' and old wagon tracks beyond the frontier. Official and private expeditions have followed up leads, but nothing conclusive has been found. This book draws together and summarizes all the search expeditions, assesses the validity of all the claimed 'Leichhardt' relics, and the various theories proposed - all the attempts to answer the perplexing Where is Dr. Leichhardt?