Ambivalent Eulogy: Catherine Martin's 'The Explorers'

Catherine Edith Macauley Mackay (later Martin) was only 13 in 1861 when Burke and Wills set out from Melbourne in their bid to race the South Australian explorer John McDouall Stuart in crossing the continent from south to north. Although such an enterprise is now more likely to be seen as a characteristically imperialistic gesture, part of an attempt to establish theoretical sovereignty over the land by imposing a Eurocentric grid upon it, at the time such a venture was regarded as little short of necessary and self-evidently valuable.