Dr Jonathan King climbs Mt Hope and identifies the location of Ludwig Becker’s watercolour sketch.

Dr Peter Barker, owner of Mt Hope Station where the Burke and Wills expedition stayed, tells him that part of the area that Becker painted has been turned into a gravel quarry. See also Ludwig Becker's original sketch View from Mt. Hope.

Further Information

TRANSCRIPT

-When the Burke and Wills Expedition got to Mount Hope Station in 1860, the artist Ludwig Becker took some time off to climb up here to the top of Mount Hope, where he sat down with his sketchbook and painted the scene, which featured Pyramid Hill. And today, 150 years later, it looks almost identical.

-That's the painting that Ludwig Becker did when he climbed Mount Hope, looking back towards Pyramid Hill, when he was on the Burke and Wills tour. And you can climb that hill and look back and can line up those hills, and see exactly the same view. But when you line them up, an interesting thing is that hill's now missing, because its a quarry, gravel quarry.

-So they took it away for gravel.

-For gravel, yeah. That hill.