Burke and Wills (radio play)

According to Leslie Rees, the play "strongly influenced by The Fire on the Snow, uses the survivor King as a narrator speaking remarkably fine verse, while the characters address one another in prose.

[6] According to ABC Weekly the play "retells the tragic story of the first explorers to cross Australia from south to north.

The scenes mostly concern the fateful last weeks of the expedition, when first Gray, then Wills, then Burke died, leaving only King to tell the tale.

Whenever Mr. B. or Mr. W. ran out of similes and metaphors, a narrator rushed in with lush, beautiful expressions, like: "Now fortune is hanging in the balance... as the brittle skeletons... caught in a web woven by Spider Fate."

I wish Spider Fate had bitten Colin Thiele before he ever took it into his head to write about such men as though they were male mannequins.