Burke And Wills

The doomed Burke-and-Wills expedition of 1860 is the stuff of Australian schoolboy legend. A party of four men crossed the forbidding interior desert of the subcontinent from Melbourne on the southern coast to the Gulf of Carpenteria in the north, but on the return journey, the party succumbed to the heat and lack of food, and only one survivor made it back to tell the tale. Robert O'Hara Burke (Jack Thompson), a fiery Irishman, is the leader of the party. With him is Englishman William John Wills (Nigel Havers), along to do scientific work, and 19 other men. With its conclusion already familiar, the film has some trouble maintaining a dramatic center. The landscap...