During the seven years in which he held office some radical changes were made by the Legislature in its own constitution and in the laws of the colony. Manhood suffrage and vote by ballot were instituted, and the property qualification for members of the Assembly was abolished. Large areas of land were thrown open for selection in quantities not exceeding six hundred and forty acres for each person, and State aid to religion was abolished. Among the incidents with which Sir Henry Barkly was personally identified was the memorable Burke and Wills expedition.

The Royal Society, at that time the Philosophical Institute of Victoria, in November, 1857, had taken up the question of exploring the interior of Australia, and had appointed a committee to inquire into and report upon the subject. In September, 1858, the sum of one thousand pounds was anonymously offered for the promotion of this object on condition that a further sum of two thousand pounds should be obtained by subscription within a twelvemonth.

This amount having been raised in the time specified, the Victorian Parliament supplemented it by a vote of six thousand pounds, and an expedition was organised under the leadership of Mr. Robert O’Hara Burke, with G. J. Landells as second in command; W. J. Wills, surveyor and astronomer; T. Beckler, medical officer and botanist; L. Becker, artist and naturalist; C. D. Ferguson, assistant and foreman, and nine associates. Twenty-five camels, twenty-three horses, with forage, waggons for transport, food, stores and medicine were provided for the explorers, who started from the Royal Park, Melbourne, on the 20th of August, 1860, amidst the valedictions of a vast assemblage. The instructions furnished to Burke directed him to make Cooper’s Creek the base of his operations —to form a depot there, to explore the country lying between it and the Gulf of Carpentaria, and to follow watercourses and tracts yielding herbage wherever practicable. At the same time, he was entrusted "with the largest discretion as regards the formation of depots and his movements generally," inasmuch as, when the expedition passed beyond the limits of pastoral settlement, it would be necessarily outside the control of the committee. At Menindie, on the Darling, a resident named Wright offered to show Burke a well-watered track to the Barcoo, and the leader, with Wills, six men, and some camels, started on the 19^th of October. It is believed that intelligence had reached him, while he was at Menindie, of Stuart’s intended expedition across the centre of Australia, and that he (Burke) was anxious to the first to achieve the exploit. At any rate, he pushed on to Torowoto, on the 30th parallel of south latitude, whence he sent back Wright, whom he had appointed third officer, to bring up the rest of the expedition to Cooper’s Creek, which Burke and Wills had reached on the 11th of November. A depot was formed, and for six weeks Burke awaited the arrival of the rest of the party under Wright. Weary of the delay, Burke and Wills, with two assistants, Gray and King, one horse and six camels, set forth on Sunday, the 16th of December, leaving four men, six camels, and twelve horses at the depot in charge of William Brahe, pending the arrival of Wright. The latter did not leave Menindie until the 27th of January, 1861, and on the way up to Cooper’s Creek the party was attacked by scurvy, to which Becker and two of the assistants succumbed. With a dilatoriness which is quite inexplicable, Wright moved forward so slowly that on the 29th of April he had not reached the creek, but met Brahe and his party returning thence. Brahe had patiently waited at the depot for four months and four days, and then, despairing of Burke’s return, had started southward on the 21st of April.

In the meantime, Burke and Wills were pushing across the continent with heroic determination and injudicious speed. They reached the tropics on the 7th of January, 1861, and they stood upon the banks of the Flinders River on the 10th of February. By this time their provisions were reduced to eighty-three pounds of flour, thirty-eight pounds of meal, twelve pounds of biscuit, the same quantity of rice, and ten pounds of sugar, and on the 21st of February they began to retrace their steps. The whole of the party soon afterwards fell ill, and their provisions began to run short. They were obliged to leave one of the camels behind and to kill two of the others, as also the horse. During the night of the 16th of April Gray died, and four days afterwards the three survivors reached the depot at Cooper’s Creek and found it deserted. On a tree was the direction: "Dig three feet westward." There they came upon a chest containing a letter stating that Brahe and his party had left the depot on that very day. Even then, so leisurely did the latter move that if Burke, after a night’s rest, had followed them up, he would have over taken them, or, failing that, would have met them returning to Cooper’s Creek; for Brahe and Wright went back to the depot arrived there on the 8th of May, and never thought of looking to see if the buried provisions had been disturbed. Had they done so, they would have found a letter from Burke stating that he and his companions had started off in the direction of Mount Hopeless sixteen days previously. Baffled in their attempts to reach South Australia by that route, the three men would have starved but for the seeds of the nardoo plant, which forms an article of diet with the natives of the district. Wills struggled back to the depot on the 30th of May, buried his journal there, but discerned no traces of the place having been visited since he left. On rejoining Burke and King, all three met with kindly treatment from some natives, but fatigue, hunger, and the inclemency of the winter nights had told fearfully on the explorers. Wills was the first to succumb, and faced his death with wonderful cheerfulness and serenity. A few days afterwards Burke feeling his end approaching, begged King to remain with him to the last, and to leave his corpse unburied with his pistol in his hand. His release occurred on the following morning, and poor King was left alone. He set out in search of a native camp, and after wandering about for some days, was fortunate enough to find one, and to meet with a hospitable reception. This was towards the end of June, before which Wright had reached the Darling, and sent despatches to the Exploration Committee in Melbourne explaining the position of affairs. Five relief parties were promptly organised, and started from different points of the continent in search of the missing men. One of these parties (led by Mr. A. W. Howitt, a son of William and Mary Howitt), started in June, 1861, to reach the Barcoo from Menindie, gained that river on the 8th of September, and a week afterwards succeeded in finding King under the following circumstances, the particulars of which are derived from the MS. diary of Mr. Edwin J. Welch, surveyor to the Victorian Contingent Exploration Party, as it was called. On the morning of Sunday, the 15th of September, as the party were proceeding along the banks of a creek, their attention was attracted by the shouts and gesticulations of a large body of natives on the other side, who were, pointing down the creek, where several other blacks appeared to be awaiting the arrival of the explorers. On approaching them, Mr. Welch was startled by observing what appeared to be a white man among them. "Giving my horse his head," he writes, "I dashed down the bank towards him, when he fell on his knees in the sand for a few moments in the attitude of prayer. On reaching him, I hurriedly asked. ‘Who, in the name of wonder, are you?’ and received the reply, ‘I am King, sir, the last man of the exploring expedition.’ The party having come in, we halted and camped. King was put in a tent and carefully attended to, and by degrees we got his story from him." The emaciated survivor of the disastrous enterprise is described as looking more like an animated skeleton, when he was found, than anything else, and as resembling a blackfellow in almost everything but colour. His narrative was a truly pathetic one. The three explorers, on leaving the depot at Cooper’s Creek, took with them the two camels, both of which succumbed soon afterwards to privations and fatigue, and had to be shot. Their own provisions were speedily exhausted: their ragged clothing afforded them an insufficient protection against the low temperature to which they were exposed at night; and their bodies (enfeebled by the meagre and innutritious food derivable from the seed of the nardoo, pounded into powder, and then baked), were incapable of offering any effectual resistance to disease. Wills was the first to feel the approach of death, and begged of Burke and King to seek for the blackfellows as their only chance of salvation by procuring food. They did so, although reluctant to leave their comrade in such a critical position, and after a weary and ineffectual journey of from twelve to fifteen miles Burke felt himself too much exhausted to proceed any farther. In the night he was conscious that his end was near, gave his last instructions to his faithful companion, and about eight o’clock in the morning of the 29th of June breathed his last, and King was left alone. Faint and famishing, the brave survivor, determined to persevere’ in his efforts to procure some food for Wills, was fortunate enough to find a large supply of nardoo in a deserted gunyah, with which he retraced his steps to where he had left the second of his leaders. Four days had been unavoidably consumed in going and coming, and poignant were the grief and dismay of the forlorn wayfarer on discovering that he had returned to a corpse. King remained with it, having for a fortnight no other companion but his own sad thoughts, and then covering up the emaciated body as best he could, he set out in search of a tribe of blacks. On finding one, he was at first kindly received, but was presently regarded as a burdensome encumbrance. He continued to cling to them, however, with the pertinacity of despair until at last he came to be looked upon with feelings of compassion, and was tolerated as a poor dependent. And so, from the middle of July until the 15th of September, John King lived the life of the aborigines, buoyed up by the hope that his fellow colonists would not suffer him to perish in the wilderness, but would rescue him sooner or later. The narrative would be incomplete if we omitted to mention that the kindly natives were liberally rewarded by the Victorian Government for the shelter and protection they had afforded to the sole survivor of the expedition. After the remains of Wills and Burke had been found and buried, the Contingent Expedition started on the return journey as far as Menindie, whence Mr. Welch, deputed by his leader to conduct King to Melbourne, set out, while. Mr. Howitt remained in camp to rest his men and camels before proceeding farther south. Mr. Howitt was subsequently instructed to revisit Cooper’s Creek and bring back the bones of the heroic explorers in order that they might receive a public funeral, which proved to be one of the most impressive spectacles ever witnessed in the capital of Victoria. Large sums of money were voted to the nearest of kin of Burke and Wills, and an annuity was settled on King, which he did not live many years to enjoy, his constitution having been shattered by the privations and hardships he had undergone; while the heroic exploit of the two explorers was commemorated by bronze statues of the two men, modelled and cast by the late Charles Summers, and erected in one of the principal thoroughfares of Melbourne, the more important incidents in which the leaders figured being commemorated by bronze bas-reliefs on the plinth. The other search expeditions proved to be the means of adding largely to our knowledge of the interior of the continent, and of opening up to pastoral settlement enormous areas of country, previously believed to be deserts. Flocks and herds now graze in the immediate neighbourhood of the spot where Burke and Wills perished, and the names of Landsborough, Walker and McKinlay, like that of Mr. Alfred Howitt, will ever be honourably associated with those of the heroic men who have just been mentioned as the pioneers of industrial progress and civilisation in the heart of this continent. Nor must we omit to mention the name of the donor of the thousand pounds which gave the first impulse to the work of exploring the interior. It was Mr. Ambrose Kyte, a self-made citizen of Melbourne.

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