Exploration – 1866 and 1867

From 1865, further exploration focused on attempts to find a site for a settlement base which might be more suitable than Escape Cliffs. This work was to result in confirmation of suggestions that the best location for the settlement port and capital would be Port Darwin.

In September 1865 McKinlay, one of South Australia’s best credentialed explorers, was instructed to take a party to Escape Cliffs to explore the Northern Territory and report on the most favoured localities for settlement. In the first instance he was to examine the country from the Adelaide River east to the Liverpool River, then south to the Roper River. Then he was to set out again, to explore south-west towards the Victoria River.

On 14 January 1866, McKinlay and his party of 15 men, 45 horses, 69 sheep and stores set off eastward from Escape Cliffs. After battling torrential rain, floods, bogs, and cane grass two metres high, they took almost six months to reach the East Alligator River, 170 km east of Escape Cliffs - far short of the February Liverpool River rendezvous arranged with Captain Howard in the Beatrice. With provisions and men and horses exhausted, McKinlay’s position was perilous. Although the wet season had ended, his men were unable, in their weakened condition, to face the ordeal of the return journey by land.

In a desperate expedient, McKinlay’s men killed their horses and with the skins made a frail barge. On this they returned to Escape Cliffs by sea, arriving on 5 July 1866. The expedition had been a fiasco. McKinlay made a short overland expedition to Anson Bay before departing for Adelaide on 13 August.

The South Australian Government in 1867 commissioned yet another exploration to select a site for a settlement. This was a coastal expedition led by Francis Cadell in the steam launch Eagle. Cadell first concentrated on the Liverpool River which had been discovered by Captain King in 1818. Cadell thought the place was suitable for a settlement capital, although he did consider “mosquitoes are the greatest drawback”.

Then Cadell sailed to the Roper River where, after negotiating a shallow bar, he proceeded 70 km upstream to Leichhardt’s Bar, where Leichhardt had crossed the river in 1845. Cadell’s work on this occasion was important because it drew attention to the Roper as a means of access to the interior. Five years later the river was to be used for this very purpose during construction of the Overland Telegraph.

Finniss had been recalled to Adelaide in November 1865 and Escape Cliffs was left in the control of surveyor J.T. Manton. Manton had none of Finniss’ optimism for the Northern Territory venture and its abandonment seemed to him to be inevitable. He became concerned about the hostility of Aborigines and in July 1866 he advised the Chief Secretary in “it would not therefore be prudent to weaken this part of the Expedition by attempting to explore, or do any surveying, for we know very well there is no land within 100 miles of us worth surveying.”

Later, Manton did undertake three expeditions of his own, first to the head of the Adelaide River where he saw “undoubtedly the best country I have seen in the Northern Territory ... fit for agricultural purposes and would produce anything indigenous to a tropical climate”.

Then he sailed along the coast as far as the East Alligator River but found no country suitable for a capital. In November he was genuinely impressed with Port Darwin, saying “As a site for the town and port of the first settlement, there is no place equal to it on the north or north-west coast of this territory.” By a process of elimination and reduction it was becoming apparent that Port Darwin might be the only suitable site.

Manton’s more favourable attitude, and the positive report on Port Darwin, came too late. On 6 November 1866 Manton was instructed to bring the whole party back to Adelaide. The men left Escape Cliffs in the Eagle on 11 January 1867.

South Australia’s first attempt at colonisation of the north had failed. One of the only enduring outcomes had been increased knowledge of the country.

That knowledge was to be decisive in the firm decision, in late 1868, that Port Darwin would be the site when yet another attempt was made to establish a northern settlement.