Explorer Ernest Giles's young sidekick, Alfred Gibson, lost his life in the desert that was named after him. No trace of him was ever found. Outback adventurer Karma Abraham set out to search for clues.

Four months ago, Andrew Dwyer announced that he was going into the Gibson Desert to look for the remains of Alfred Gibson. Maybe his bones would not be there, but perhaps a belt buckle, or his field glasses, or the Gregory patent compass he was carrying. Was I interested in joining the expedition? The answer was yes.Dwyer is a 40-year-old Victorian adventurer, whose Diamantina Touring Company runs six or seven trips a year into the more remote parts of Australia. He's the thinking person's Crocodile Dundee, a gifted bushman and mountaineer with a botanist's and geologist's knowledge of the outback. And, of course, he knows how to winch a four-wheel drive out of a creek bed or take one over the top of a 40-metre sand dune.

I'd been on two of his expeditions before - one up the Oodnadatta Track, across the Simpson Desert and down the Birdsville Track, and the other to the little-known desert ranges in the far north-west of South Australia. I was already a dab hand at rolling a swag, pitching a tent and making the ecologically correct early morning trip into the bush carrying a spade and a box of matches. On both previous occasions, I'd been a passenger in one of the half-dozen four-wheel drives that make up the convoy.
This time, I tell Dwyer, I'll be coming as a "tag-along". I've bought my own four-wheel drive, a nine-year-old Toyota "Troopie" that used to live at the end of my street in suburban Sydney. The previous owner looked after it lovingly for years, fitting it out with a bed, refrigerator, stove, cupboards, UHF radio and racks for fishing rods.
The Gibson expedition was to start at Alice Springs. There were six other starters. "We'll pick you up at the petrol station at Yulara," Dwyer says.
First, Troopie and I have to get to know each other. I enrol in a weekend four-wheel drive training school at Braidwood, in the NSW Southern Highlands. I learn to do stall-starts on steep slopes, to climb sand dunes and make river crossings, to use a winch, to slip and slide. I learn never to drive in salt water and never to cross a river without walking across it first. Yes, but what about crocodiles? Where I'm going there are not going to be any crocodiles, but some of my fellow students are bound for Kakadu. Ah, a simple solution, we're told. You park your vehicle out of sight behind a river gum and wait for some mug to come along and do the walk ahead of you. It seems a wonderfully Australian solution.

Troopie and I set off for Yulara, the Northern Territory tourist village north of Uluru, travelling via Dubbo, Broken Hill, Port Augusta and Coober Pedy. It's a long and often tedious drive. The BBC talking books my friends have plied me with - several by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers - fail to keep me alert. I never do discover who murdered Roger Ackroyd, and Lord Peter Wimsey's well-modulated voice tends to put me to sleep. I pull to the side of the road and have a nap. Revive and survive, as they say.
There is plenty of traffic on the highways, no matter how many hundreds of kilometres you are from civilisation. I realise I have become one of that vast band of "grey nomads" who constantly crisscross Australia. We wave to each other or give the thumbs-up sign. Any moment now I'll be ringing Macca on Australia All Over on a Sunday morning to tell him my whereabouts: "I'm on the Barrier Highway, just coming over the hill to Peterborough. There's a beautiful valley ahead - blue hills and newly ploughed red soil." Where am I off to, Macca will ask. "The Gibson Desert to look for the remains of Alf Gibson."

Alfred Gibson was one of three men who accompanied the great Australian explorer Ernest Giles on his 1873 expedition into central Australia. Giles was looking for the source of the Murchison River and always there was hope of finding the long-sought inland sea. He had 20 packhorses, four riding horses and two dogs.
The small band travelled through Anagu Pitjantjatjara lands, through the Everard and Musgrave ranges of South Australia, and on to the Olgas and the Mann and Petermann ranges of the Northern Territory and then into Western Australia.
The journey was fraught. They ran out of water. Their horses died. The natives were unfriendly. They supplemented their diet with wallaby and pigeon, then ran out of ammunition. Raw horsemeat went on the menu.

Our expedition is different in every way, not least gastronomically. Dwyer is an excellent cook and a whiz stir-fryer, and sometimes it seems strange to be eating a Thai curry in the middle of the desert. We drink good South Australian reds and marvel at the quality of Tony Marino's prosciutto from Adelaide. We camp our first night in Hull River at Lasseters Cave. Lasseter of the lost reef has been here before us.
Along the road we pass groups of Aborigines, some with broken-down cars. From one of the cars - its engine has blown - I give an Aboriginal woman a lift for 150 kilometres along Lasseters Highway to the Docker River community. She has been chosen to get help while the others remain with the car. It is an awkward, silent journey and she alights without a word or backward glance.

Aboriginal communities control many thousands of square kilometres in the centre and permits have to be obtained to drive through their land. Some places are out of bounds, forcing Dwyer and his travellers to detour hundreds of kilometres.
Tribal elder Ernest Bennett and his wife, Rosa, accompany us for part of our Gibson Desert journey. He tells us where we may and may not go.
There is no singing around our campfire at ight. Instead, Dwyer reads to us from Giles's diaries, which give us an accurate picture of the general area in which Alf Gibson disappeared. We also have the assistance of GPS (Global Positioning System) and a laptop computer. Wednesday, 11th March, 1873, Dwyer reads. The thermometer last night 84%, the morning cloudy. Along the foot of the hills, where we now travelled, the country became scrubby and as we approached the pinnacle and for two or three miles round it, it was I may almost say, impenetrable. I felt certain now of finding some rock-water.

On day two, we travel across the WA border, pausing at the Giles Meteorological Station where 20th-century explorer Len Beadell's Gunbarrel Highway grader is a prized exhibit. We follow the abandoned section of the original highway out to the western edge of the Rawlinson Range. Now we are getting close. Troopie is travelling well. The days are warm, 20 degrees, the evenings cold. One night there is a frost. The desert is getting to me, as it always does. I can understand perfectly why Robyn Davidson travelled through it with her camels. We see camels everywhere, a healthy-looking lot, but none of the rock wallabies that were part of the landscape when Giles came through. We spend all the next day exploring the Rawlinson Range and go looking for Desolation Glen, the Gorge of Tarns and Circus Water.
We hope to make it to Edith's Marble Bath, but we would have to walk in and the going is too rough. Giles named all these places and not many white people have been here since. This is red, sandy, stony country, the spinifex interspersed with desert oak and bloodwood. No roads. No tracks. Rough driving. Troopie loses the telephone aerial and a chunk of rear bumper.
We are an unlikely group of explorers - a retired stockbroker and an amateur historian among us - but, increasingly, our Akubras look as if they belong. The desert is wonderfully, eerily quiet. At night, the rest of the group climb into swags and tents, and I climb into the back of Troopie. There are a million more stars in the sky than when I left the city.

Tuesday, 21st April, 1873. I remarked to Gibson as we rode along that this was the anniversary of Burke's and Wills's return to their depot at Coopers Creek and then recited to him, as he did not appear to know anything whatever about it, the hardships they endured, their desperate struggles for existence and death there: and casually remarked that Mr Wills had a brother who also lost his life in the field of discovery, as he went out with Sir John Franklin in 1845. Gibson then remarked, "Oh, I had a brother who died with Franklin at the North Pole and my father
had a great deal of trouble getting his pay from Government." He seemed in a very jocular vein this morning (he was often not so; for he was generally rather sulky, sometimes for days together) and said to me "How is it, in all these exploring expeditions a lot of the people go and die?" I said, "Well, I don't know Gibson, how it is; but there are many dangers in exploring that may at any time cause the death of some of the people engaged in it besides accidents; but I believe want of judgment or knowledge or courage in individuals brought about their deaths, but death was a thing that must occur to every one sooner or later." To which he replied, "Well, I shouldn't like to die in this part of the country anyhow."

On day four, we are well out in the Gibson Desert. We camp somewhere near The Kegs, so named by Giles because he left two large waterbags and two five-gallon kegs in a tree there. Giles and Gibson had pushed on into the desert, leaving behind two members of their team at the Rawlinson base camp. When Gibson's horse died, Giles instructed him to ride back to The Kegs on his own horse and, after watering it, to ride the 90 kilometres back to the camp and get help. Gibson was never seen again. He was 23 years old.

Dwyer reads us the entry from Giles's journal: I called this terrible region that lies between the Rawlinson Range and the next permanent water that may eventually be found to the west, Gibson's Desert, after this first white victim to its horrors. Gibson, having my horse, rode away in my saddle with my field glasses attached; but everything was gone - man and horse alike swallowed up in this remorseless desert.
(Amazingly, Giles survived, walking back to The Kegs where Gibson had already been and then, with a keg on his shoulder, a blanket, revolver, knife and cartridge-pouch, staggering east to the Rawlinson camp in a state of semi-consciousness.)
In the remorseless desert, we do not find Gibson's field glasses, or his belt buckle or compass. Around the campfire that night, there is some discussion about whether Giles might have murdered Gibson. The two men had not liked each other, and Giles's diaries show us that he had little respect for his companion. Two men in the desert, one horse and only about half a litre of water between them... Did Giles reason that there could be only one survivor?
Fanciful stuff gets said around campfires. The next morning I go looking for a bullet as well as a belt buckle and field glasses.

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