The NT of SA – and Escape Cliffs

Although the site of the Escape Cliffs settlement lies on the eastern side of Adam Bay, the Adelaide River mouth, and is thus just outside the Litchfield Shire, the place was of fundamental importance to what is now the Litchfield area, and indeed to the Territory as whole.

Escape Cliffs was the spot chosen as a base for the first attempt to establish permanent white settlement in the Territory, from June 1864. There had earlier, between 1824 and 1849, been three military outposts, on Melville Island and on Cobourg Peninsula, but these were never intended to be venues for permanent settlement.

The South Australian explorer John McDouall Stuart had reached the north coast near Point Stuart, about 80 km east of Escape Cliffs, in July 1862. Stuart’s triumphant crossing of the continent caused wild excitement in Adelaide because it was thought that he had found a practicable route across the continent, an overland connection with the far north coast.

South Australians had for some time looked to the far north to provide opportunities for settlement expansion. The area which is now the Northern Territory was then nominally part of New South Wales, but the mother colony had never shown any interest in settling it. Now South Australia’s own explorer had returned with news that there was good country to be found in the north coast hinterland – potentially the finest colony under the British Crown, Stuart said, “suitable for the growing of anything and everything”.

And a suitable springboard for trade with populous Asia, a terminus for a transcontinental railway and a connection point for a telegraph system linking Australia with the outside world, thought ambitious and wishful thinking South Australians.

So the government in Adelaide lobbied the British colonial authorities for the transfer of the northern area. This was done, and in July 1863 “The Northern Territory of South Australia” was proclaimed, to be a province of South Australia until sufficiently developed to exist as a colony in its own right.

The South Australians lost little time. They resolved to establish a settlement on the north coast, and to finance its development by selling land around it. In March 1864 they threw open land for purchase and within four months they had sold 1,524 blocks – even though the purchasers had never seen the land, the blocks had not been surveyed and settlement had not begun.

The next task was to achieve that survey and to establish a base for actual settlement.