Brilliant :)

In all seriousness though, Les Hiddens (wikipedia entry) is an absolute legend.

Twenty years ago you would have had to find a facsimile¹of a journal (I have quite a few in the ExpeditionOz Library) or have some pretty darn good reason for wanting to view the original at a library or museum, but with the advent of the internet, everything is available online (well almost everything and not all of its good) and if you hunt around a bit it doesn’t take long to find a bunch of journals of famous explorers who traversed this huge continent in its early days of white history.

Below are some links to some sites which might interest you:

Project Gutenberg Australia – Journals of Australian Land and Sea Explorers and Discoverers
This site has a pretty good collection of journals from Gregory Blaxland, David Carnegie, William Carron, James Cook, William Dampier, Edward John Eyre, Matthew Flinders, John and Alexander Forrest, Ernest Giles, Frank and Augustus Gregory, George Grey, William Hovell and Hamilton Hume, Alexander and Frank Jardine, Phillip Parker King, William Landsborough, Ludwig Leichhardt, John MacGillivray, John McKinlay, Thomas Mitchell, John Oxley, John Lort Stokes, John McDouall Stuart, Charles Sturt, Able Tasman, Frederick Walker and William John Wills.

For maps and other information on a wide range of people, check out their Australian Explorers, Discoverers and Pioneers section.

Western Kentucky University – Nineteenth Century Exploration of Australia
This site is based around a map that outlines a number of explorers paths through Australia with links to other websites containing more detailed information.

Roma Reilly’s Australian Explorers (Also available at this site)
This site, which was designed for primary school aged children, has some pretty concise and basic information on John Forrest, Edmund Kennedy, Ludwig Leichardt, Thomas Mitchell, John Oxley, Edward John Eyre, Robert O’Hara Burke, Matthew Flinders, Charles Sturt and George Bass.

I’ll be the first to admit that text documents or PDF’s are no substitute for having a good old fashioned leather bound book in your hands while you are sitting at the camp fire reading about expeditions of old, but journal facsimiles aren’t the easiest things to find these days, so I guess we take what we can get our hands on…so happy reading :)

ADDITION: If you actually want to lay your hands on some good old fashioned printed material, go and check out the books available at the Early Australian Exploration Books page and some of the other book category pages that Westprint (Victorian based map makers and publishers) have listed on their site…they have a pretty good selection and i’ll certainly be adding a few to the ExpeditionOz Library from it :)

¹ – facsimile: Used to describe a copy or reproduction especially when describing a copy of a journal with regard to explorers..

According to AdventureStats (part of the ExplorersWeb group of websites that I have mentioned before) to meet the “GUIDELINES for HUMAN POWERED CIRCUMNAVIGATION”…

A true circumnavigation of the Earth (around the world) must:

• Start and finish at the same point, travelling in one general direction
• Reach two antipodes (Antipodes = two diametrically opposite places on Earth)

From the above follows that a true circumnavigation must:

• Cross the equator a minimum of two times
• Cross all longitudes
• Cover a minimum of 40,000km or 21,600NM (a great circle)

The statistics page at AdventureStats for Global Human Powered Circumnavigations, or Global HPC, shows that only one person has completed this amazing feat, Jason Lewis of the Expedition 360 project, and it took him a grand total of 13 years, 2 months and 25 days to cover just over 72,000km (or 45,000 miles)…wow…now that’s an expedition.

Check out the site as it has video snippets, photos, a logbook and other stuff that was gathered over the 13 years of the expedition.

Personally, I think I’ll stick to primarily land based expeditions as I’m not a big ocean/open water person (and he did cover a lot of water between the 12^th of July 1994 and the 6^th of October 2007), but you have to tip your hat to Jason Lewis and his support team for not only completing an amazing expedition, but being the first to do it…well done :)

The news is starting to spread about the death of the great mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist Sir Edmund Hillary, who with the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest on the 29th of May 1953.

Along with Tenzing Norgay, Sir Edmund Hillary will without a doubt continue to be an inspiration to all who venture into the mountains, no matter how big or how small or where they are.