The central image against which the Australian character measures himself is the bush. ‘The Bush is the heart of the country, the real Australian Australia’, wrote Francis Adams, a journalist who migrated to Australia from England in the 1880s. In his travel guide published in London in 1893 he lauded the ‘true Bushman’ as ‘the man of the nation’. But he also tempered his praise with a recognition of the dangers which attend bush life, dangers which later writers would concur made the bush ‘no place for a woman’. Adams remarked that ‘The Anglo-Australian has perished or is absorbed in the Interior much more rapidly than on the sea-slope or in the towns.’ Adams' descriptions reveal several attributes familiar to the discourse on the Australian tradition: the male-as-norm and land-as-other; the bush as central and city as peripheral to self-definition; and the personification of the bush as the heart, the Interior—a mysterious presence which calls to men for the purposes of exploration and discovery but is also a monstrous place in which men may either perish or be absorbed.

When Adams wrote of death in the bush he may have been thinking of the fate of Burke and Wills, Australia's most celebrated explorers, who perished in July 1861 during their attempt to traverse the continent from south to north.