00:00The historic Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth is the final resting place of Wallace Ogilvy Caldwell and his wife Sarah.
00:15They've laid here for the best part of a century in an unmarked grave and we're here to pay respect to them and the achievements of Wallace in his amazing story as a pioneer in the Australian Outback.
00:30But this story really begins on the other side of the continent on a property called Rich Avon on the Richardson River near Donald in Victoria's Wimmera region.
00:42The starting point of the longest sheep drive in Australian history. In charge for most of it was a then 21 year old drover Wallace Caldwell.
00:53So Tom this is the spot.
00:56Yeah Tim this is where the sheep started way back in 1882 and we've got a plaque to commemorate that event and this was the starting point of that epic journey which covered three and a half thousand kilometres.
01:12Their destination the Northern Territory then on the unmapped frontier of European settlements.
01:19Tom's great grandfather and namesake Thomas Guthrie a wool trader and prominent pastoralist bought this property in 1864.
01:29In the years following he amassed a massive pastoral holding and wanted to expand it further.
01:35He got a tip off for this land that was being opened up on the Barclay Tableland and he went to Adelaide to the auction, put his hand up and ended up with 1.4 million acres, sight unseen.
01:48Back then the only way to get livestock there was on foot. As they journeyed north they encountered ever worsening drought.
02:03Caldwell's account is simply harrowing. He wrote, we were only doing from two to three miles a day. You could only let them crawl.
02:10We would carry sheep from the tail to the head, drop them and by the time the tail got up you would have to start over again carrying.
02:19The camps yards were made of dead sheep as every drover camping in them would be sure to leave some behind.
02:25The next drover who came along would pile them up and so it would go on from day to day.
02:31Caldwell's valiant efforts to save as many sheep as he could was probably because his pay depended on how many sheep made it to the Northern Territory.
02:44At Wilcannia on the Darling River the emaciated sheep could go no further.
02:50Caldwell made a heartbreaking decision.
02:53He slept on it for a while, woke up in the middle of the night and said this is hopeless, we can't go on and as he says let the sheep go.
03:02When they mustered them a month later they gathered less than half the original flock.
03:07They pushed on, Caldwell scouting well ahead, carefully surveying the country for pasture and water.
03:14Then their fortunes changed completely.
03:17And when they crossed the Queensland border the whole conditions changed.
03:23There was grass everywhere and as he says later once he hit Queensland he never lost another sheep.
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