19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
Peter Egerton Warburton (1813-1889) was a British military officer, explorer, and Commissioner of Police in South Australia. In 1872 he undertook an expedition to the coast of Western Australia, via Alice Springs. The preface to his Journey Across the Western Interior of Australia, provided by the editor, Charles H. Eden, explained that there was a delay in publishing Warburton’s narrative as on his return to Adelaide he was enfeebled by the privations and sufferings from his long journey and had little inclination to pen a full narrative of the expedition. The promoters of the expedition thought that some account of the first successful attempt to traverse the region was deserving of a permanent record. Interestingly, it was decided that Warburton's journal entries should be published alongside accounts of earlier explorers of the region; Warburton was Commissioner of Police and a Justice of the Peace in Western Australia while he conducted his earlier explorations, before leaving that employment to further pursue exploration. Eden also wrote accounts of explorations by Eyre, Sturt, and Leichhardt, among others, culminating with the account of Warburton's journey, which described the landscape, Aboriginal peoples, and the worsening situation of the exploration party. Appended is a note on the value of camels in Australian exploration.
