Months earlier, Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills had pushed all the way to the Gulf of Carpentaria, completing the first overland crossing of the continent from the settled south, a journey of around 2,800 kilometres. The return was where the expedition unravelled. Burke ordered everything abandoned except food and what the men could carry on their backs, and Wills, the surveyor and scientist of the party, had to leave behind the very tools that recorded their position. The goal was the depot camp at Cooper Creek, far to the south near the present Nappa Merrie homestead, where supplies and waiting men were supposed to be. They were racing toward rescue with nothing left to spare, lightening their loads one buried cache at a time.

The camp left two kinds of evidence, scattered along the unnamed ephemeral creek on what is now Durrie Station. The first is a litter of European artefacts: percussion caps, nipples and bullets matching the weapons the expedition carried, buckles, sewing needles, and small brass fittings such as a clasp, latch and hinge that may once have closed an instrument case. Each item has been checked against the expedition's detailed List of Stores and found consistent with goods officially supplied. The second kind of evidence stands two and more kilometres east along the creek: two scarred trees. The origin of the scars is unknown, but they may be blazes cut by the expedition, deliberate markers meant to guide later explorers, or any rescuers, to the buried cache.

The race south ended in one of the cruelest near-misses in exploration history. By late April the men reached the Cooper Creek depot, only to find that the party waiting for them had given up and departed earlier that same day. Burke and Wills did not survive. Both died at the end of June 1861, within days of each other, on the banks of Cooper Creek. Only John King lived, and he lived because the Yandruwandha people of the Cooper sheltered and fed him for some two and a half months until a search party reached him in September. The expedition that set out to conquer the interior was, in the end, kept alive by the very people whose knowledge of this country its leaders had never thought to seek.

The Plant Camp matters precisely because it is undisturbed ground that can still answer questions, and that makes the damage done to it especially painful. Heritage-listed in 2008, the site shows clear evidence of looting. Both scarred trees have been dug around extensively, the soil turned and tested by treasure-hunters searching for buried instruments. Every artefact pulled from the ground without record of where it lay strips away the context that could tell us how the explorers rationed their supplies, why they kept some objects and discarded others, and what those choices reveal about a journey that ended in death. The buried camp was meant to be recovered one day. It deserves to be recovered carefully, not pillaged.