The expedition was born in the parlours of Melbourne. In 1857 the Royal Society of Victoria, an organisation drawn from the colony's wealthiest and most learned men, resolved to fund a crossing of the continent from south to north and raised the money largely by public subscription. To lead it they chose Robert O'Hara Burke, a police superintendent born in County Galway in 1821, a man of restless courage but little bush experience, who had pursued the post anxiously. As surveyor and astronomer they appointed William John Wills, born in Devon in 1834 and trained in medicine, a careful and methodical young man who would become Burke's loyal second. The instructions were vague, the rivalry urgent: a South Australian party under John McDouall Stuart was racing for the same prize, the honour of being first across the centre.

Burke was a man in a hurry, and haste undid him. He pushed ahead of his supplies, left men strung out behind at Menindee, and at Cooper Creek made a fateful decision: to strike for the Gulf at once, before the wet season closed in, with just three companions. The small party, Burke and Wills with John King tending the camels and Charles Gray as camp organiser, followed a line northeast of Stuart's intended track and reached the Little Bynoe River, west of the Norman River, on 11 February 1861. They were thirteen days behind schedule and running low on food. When the mangroves stopped them short of the coast, Burke and Wills left Gray and King at the camp and pushed on alone, returning three days later having tasted the failure of arriving so near and not quite reaching the goal.

What the explorers left behind was almost nothing, and that is what makes the site so moving. Early Australian explorers marked their passage by blazing trees, cutting away a patch of bark and carving into the wood beneath: their initials, a date, a number recording the progress of the journey. The cipher B/CXIX meant Burke's 119th camp. During their three days here the party blazed fifteen Coolibah and Gutta-percha trees, scars that could later be matched against the precise entries in their journals to prove, decades on, exactly where they had stood. These quiet cuts in living wood are now rare and precious things, surviving alongside the famous "Dig Tree" at Cooper Creek as some of the only tangible evidence of the whole tragic enterprise.

The return journey was a slow catastrophe. Charles Gray weakened steadily, suffering pain in his head and limbs, and died on the morning of 17 April 1861. When the surviving three finally staggered back into Cooper Creek, they arrived only hours after the support party, having waited four months, had given up and departed. Burke and Wills both died along the creek in late June. John King alone survived, kept alive by local Aboriginal people who shared their food and shelter with the starving stranger until Alfred Howitt's search party found him in September. Months later another searcher, Frederick Walker, hunting for the lost men, camped near this very site and blazed his own tree three-quarters of a mile away. The blazed trees stood undiscovered for nearly half a century until station staff stumbled on them in 1909. Ten survive today, fenced and marked on a dusty plain that betrays no hint of the desperate drama it once held.