Bush Bread - Burke and Wills

Burke and Wills

Ill-fated explorers Burke and Wills survived on bush bread for some time after they ran out of rations due to the death of their camels. The Cooper Creek Aborigines, the Yandruwandha people, gave them fish, beans called 'padlu' and bread made from the ground sporocarps of the ngardu (nardoo) plant (Marsilea drummondii).

There is some belief that the ngardu was a cause of their deaths. Wills's last journal entry includes the following:

..starvation on nardoo is by no means very unpleasant, but for the weakness one feels, and the utter inability to move oneself, for as far as appetite is concerned, it gives me the greatest satisfaction. Certainly, fat and sugar would be more to one's taste, in fact, those seem to me to be the great stand by for one in this extraordinary continent; not that I mean to depreciate the farinacious food, but the want of sugar and fat in all substances obtainable here is so great that they become almost valueless to us as articles of food, without the addition of something else..

It is possible that the explorers, in preparing the bread themselves, were not preparing it in the traditional way of the Aboriginal people, which may have involved soaking seeds prior to grinding in order to remove Thiaminase which depletes the body of vitamin B₁. It is therefore likely that the deaths of Burke and Wills resulted in part from beri-beri.