And now you can do that in a virtual way and without any of the actual hardships (like having to eat your camel, having to duck the spears hurled by angry natives) with a new virtual map launched on Tuesday.

The Australian Dictionary of Biography, based at the ANU, has produced a digital map, perhaps the first of its kind, that enables us to join Ludwig Leichhardt's 1844-45 expedition from Moreton Bay to Port Essington.*

It has features galore, too many to mention, but ADB's Christine Fernon rejoices that it incorporates the sometimes vivid journals that four members of the expedition (including Leichhardt) kept. This means that you can click on one of the 309 little blue tabs clustered along the online map of the expedition's route north, representing the camp sites, and read what the journal writers wrote while at the very place where you have joined them.

You can also, because the map makes sophisticated use of Geographic Information System imaging, see what has become of pristine places the expeditioners passed through and described. So for exampleApril 2, 1845, at the "Camp of Murmuring Waters" they were beside the murmuring waters of the Burdekin River. Today, the digital map shows, that campsite is beneath the great lake behind the Burdekin Dam. Then, a wild and empty place where the expeditioners made the first discoveries of Australian coal (they used some on their fires), it is now taken up with Queensland's huge coal mines.

Fernon says that they chose this expedition because everyone loves explorers and their stories, because in its time it was the longest land exploration trek taken in Australia, and "because everyone knows about Leichhardt mainly because of his death". He disappeared in 1848 and that tragedy, that mystery, is given mystical treatment in Patrick White's Voss.

"There is a special romance about him."

There'll be times, when you join the expedition, that you'll need a strong stomach. Fernon, laughs, but shudders too, as she notes how "Leichhardt talks a lot [in his journal] about what they ate and it becomes more and more gruesome".

"They ran out of food. They only took enough food for five months and the expedition took 14 months so eventually they lived off what they could find. They ate their bullocks. Leichhardt was such an experimenter. He'd kill the bullocks and dry their flesh in a way that hadn't been done before in Australia but might [Leichhardt was German] have been European. No one really got sick on the trip [testifying to the nutrition of the food they ate] which was unusual for explorers. But they experimented and ate a lot of things. They even made Casuarina seeds into coffee. They used to have fat cakes from the bullock fat - they used every bit of the bullock, so bullock fat mixed with flour. They had [Fernon grimaces to think of it] a special Christmas dinner that was really gruesome and so if you look up December 25's journals you will read all about it."

Although our ADB illustration is of Leichhardt on one of the despairing days of the expedition (it is October 25, 1845, and he writes that he is in tears over the sudden drowning of horses and at having to leave behind botanical and geological collections that now can't be carried). Fernon says that his journal shows him to have been overwhelmingly an optimistic chap.

"He was happy. He'd wax lyrical about how wonderful everything was. He'd eat a grotty meal [perhaps of bullock-fat cakes] but rejoice that you couldn't get anything better, even in the best restaurant in Paris! He was just in his element. He just loved finding everything."

"Leichhardt's journal has been digitised and it's online, but here we're offering something richer I think. School children will benefit from it. There's so much information, and it's all in the one spot."

The digital map (and there is too a swish new paper map, for $45, from which our despairing Leichhardt's picture is taken) will in time be added to and overlaid and made richer still. For example, a scholar's map will be added, telling lots about the different Aboriginal tribes whose kingdoms the party of experimenting gourmets pass through.

Tuesday's launch was attended by German Ambassador Christoph Muller, and Australia's Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb.