Ludwig Leichhardt is Australia’s most intriguing explorer. Born and educated in Prussia in the early 19th century, Leichhardt was a polymath, a man fascinated by the natural world and possessed by a longed for adventure and exploration. Australia was then almost completely unexplored apart from the colonies clustered on its coastline-the interior a vast and mysterious blank. It was a continent and a time ripe for amateur naturalists and explorers, and Leichhardt took up the challenge.

His expeditions were to begin in triumph, then dwindle into acrimony, despair and misery before finally ending in disappearance and death and giving rise to one of the enduring mysteries of the Australian history.

pp. 416 illusts #0518/1019

John Bailey, acclaimed author of Mr Stuart’s Track and The White Divers of Broome, has written a masterful biography of this strange, brilliant, difficult, driven and tormented man. Against the background of colonial life in the 1840s and the harshness of the Australian landscape, Into The Unknown reveals the quirks of personality and character that both made Leichardt such a success and the eventually destroyed him.

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