The settlement of Queensland’s northern frontier has provided us with some of the most colourful and amazing stories in all Australian history. Stories of valiant exploration through wild, impenetrable country, of disaster and shipwreck, of the discovery of gold, and above all of indomitable courage and tenacity.

Some of the most famous explorers took up the challenge offered by the vast unknown tract of land that was North Queensland. The country they discovered and recorded was astonishing in its contrasts: part fertile grazing land, part inaccessible mountain terrain, part insect-infested mangrove swamp. A few of the men who first charted this country – Ludwig Leichhardt, Burke and Wills, Edmund Kennedy – perished in their endeavours; and their names have now become legendary. Others, more successful and no less heroic, followed in their tracks.

Many other names long familiar in Australia’s history fill these pages: Robert Towns, James Venture Mulligan, George Elphinstone Dalrymple, Frank and Alex Jardine and James Melton Black.

In this book, Glenville Pike makes the past come alive as he recounts the saga of those turbulent pioneering years. His is a magnificent and compelling account of one of the most fascinating – and least-known-chapters – in Australian settlement.