Mount Hopeless (South Australia)

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The Mount Hopeless is located in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, south-west of Lake Blanche, in the Cooper Creek opens. The mountain was named by the explorer Charles Sturt in 1844, when he gave up the quest for the fabled domestic freshwater lake in Australia, which has long been suspected in the middle of the vast continent. The rocky mountain is about 127 meters high.

When the expedition of Burke and Wills in 1860 took place, located about 40 km away from this mountain was the Blanche Water station, an inhabited outpost in arid terrain of Australia, near Marree. It was a large cattle station whose ruins now lie on the Strzelecki Track. At that time it was the northernmost cattle station in South Australia. The desperate and weakened expedition group with Robert O'Hara Burke, William John Wills and John King were trying to achieve from the Cooper Creek from about 240 miles away place, because this was more than Menindee. Menindee was the place where they had left a deposit. They did not reach Mount Hopeless, but went back to Cooper Creek. Wills and Burke died, only King survived and was alive found by the rescue group, which led Alfred William Howitt, because it Aborigines had kept alive.

In 1870, the Australian cattle thief Harry Redford drove a herd of cattle from an estimated 600 to 1,000 cattle from Queensland on the Strzelecki Track past Mount Hopeless and sold it for £ 5000 at the Blanche Water Cattle Station.