Tony Robinson Explores Australia

Eureka (1x4)

Air date: May 24, 2011

Hear about the early explorer who was shot by his own camel? Tony goes to the scene of the crime, recreating one of Australia’s most peculiar chapters in history. He walks in the footsteps of the early inland explorers and discovers how the grab for land led to atrocities against the indigenous inhabitants. The fortunes of Australia were turned around by the discovery of gold. It brought people, commerce, corruption and dissent. It started with a trickle, and quickly spread to a tide of prospectors, deserting the cities and heading to the goldfields in search of fortune. But earlier it was the lure of the unknown, the promise of new discoveries in Australia’s vast and at times forbidding interior that spurred on teams of early explorers. This episode is about the mixed fortunes of these two groups – the foolhardy explorers who set out into the wilderness, and the gold seekers hungry for riches, and united as they rebelled against corrupt police and a tax hungry government.