Moreton Bay to Port Essington

Ludwig Leichhardt · 1844 CE – 1845 CE · Earth

Find an overland stock route from the Darling Downs to the garrison at Port Essington and describe the country on the way.

Historical context

Port Essington was a lonely marine outpost on the Cobourg Peninsula that Britain hoped would grow into a trading port like Singapore, and in Sydney an overland route to it was, Leichhardt wrote, “occupying much attention”. The Legislative Council had recommended an expedition under Sir Thomas Mitchell, but while it waited on London’s consent Leichhardt, a Prussian naturalist with no official post, raised his own party of volunteers, with two Aboriginal men, Harry Brown of Newcastle and Charley Fisher of Bathurst, and a herd of bullocks that was both transport and larder. Fourteen and a half months later a party that Sydney had given up for dead walked into the settlement, and the map of tropical Australia carried a chain of rivers he had named, every one of them in country already inhabited.

The voyage, step by step

1. Jimbour, 1 October 1844

   1 October 1844

   The party leaves the last station on the Darling Downs with seventeen horses and sixteen bullocks.

2. The Dawson River

   6 November 1844

   The first of the great unmapped river systems is named and followed north.

3. The Comet and the Expedition Range

   28 December 1844

   A distant range is named the Expedition Range, and a creek takes its name from a comet Harry Brown sees in the evening sky.

4. The Burdekin

   2 April 1845

   A broad river of the tropical east is followed upstream for more than two degrees of latitude.

5. Over the divide to the Lynd

   23 May 1845

   Beyond the watershed the rivers turn west towards the Gulf of Carpentaria.

6. The night attack, 28 June 1845

   28 June 1845

   A camp west of the Mitchell River is attacked after dark and John Gilbert is killed.

7. Round the Gulf to the Roper

   19 October 1845

   More than a year out, the party rounds the head of the Gulf and reaches a broad tidal river.

8. Port Essington, 17 December 1845

   17 December 1845

   Seven survivors walk into Victoria settlement at Port Essington, long after Sydney had given them up for dead.

Outcome

Walked into Port Essington on 17 December 1845 after fourteen and a half months and 4,800 kilometres, having named a dozen river systems and lost John Gilbert.

Ludwig Leichhardt

Prussian naturalist who walked 4,800 kilometres from Moreton Bay to Port Essington in 1844–45 and vanished without trace in the interior three years later.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia, from Moreton Bay to Port EssingtonLudwig Leichhardt · T. and W. Boone, London · 1847
• Leichhardt, Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (1813–1848), Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 2Renée Erdos · Melbourne University Press · 1967
• Gilbert, John (1810–1845), Australian Dictionary of Biography, volume 1A. H. Chisholm · Melbourne University Press · 1966
• The Death of John Gilbert, Lectures on North Queensland History, number 5, pages 21–35B. J. Dalton
• Harry Brown (c. 1819–1854): Contribution of an Aboriginal guide in Australian exploration, Aboriginal History, volume 39Greg Blyton · ANU Press · 2015
• Ludwig Leichhardt — Wikipedia
• Port Essington — Wikipedia
• Iwaidja people — Wikipedia

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