Thomas Mitchell, who explored vast tracts of western New South Wales and northern Victoria in the 1830s, dragged two wooden skiffs over 3,000 miles of arid scrub without once getting them wet, but refused to the last to give up on them. ‘Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,’ he wrote with a touch of understatement after his third expedition, ‘I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.’
