WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

Sydney; the Mermaid was barely sound, and on return was condemned for further
northern work.
King is recognised as one of Britain's leading hydrographers, and in 1824 he was
made a fellow of the Royal Society. He took great pride in undertaking very detailed
coastal surveys: while previous French navigators had stayed so far offshore that they
had taken Gantheaume Point for an island, King had not only hugged the dangerous
coast, he had taken a whale boat up the Prince Regent River (Edwards 1991).
King's work contributed significantly to British knowledge of the Australian coastline.
He is regarded as the greatest of the early Australian marine surveyors and near the
end of his life, he was promoted to the rank of Admiral. He undertook detailed and
methodical charting, and named many locations along the Kimberley coast (Baytte
1915). Among the names he gave, some were clearly messages for the French: he
dubbed the two most conspicuous mountain peaks 'Mt Trafalgar' and 'Mt Waterloo', a
pointed reminder of two British victories, one on sea, the other on land (Edwards
1991). King was the first person born in the Australian colonies to achieve such
renown in Britain, and it would be years before another 'native born' would rise to
similar public stature (ADB 1967).
The first British investigations of the interior of the west Kimberley were made by
Lieutenant George Grey in 1837, as part of a survey sponsored by the Royal
Geographical Society. Grey and his twelve men set up camp at Hanover Bay, the site
where Aboriginal people had confronted Phillip Parker King and his crew 17 years
earlier. Grey's party came with seed to plant crops and stock for food. However
despite their best efforts to prepare themselves, they were illequipped for the
conditions they would encounter, which were like nothing they had ever experienced
before. Grey wrote in his journal:
* * * *
'I soon found that we had landed under very unfavourable circumstances… The
country … was of a more rocky and precipitous character than any I had ever seen
before. Indeed I could not more accurately describe the hills, than by saying that they
appeared to be ruins of hills, composed as they were of huge blocks of red sandstone,
confusedly piled together in loose disorder, so overgrown with spinifex and scrub that
the interstices were completely hidden. Into these one or other of the party was
continually slipping or falling' (Grey quoted in Edwards 1991).
* * * *
Grey and his men had landed in December, during the build-up to the wet season,
when the heat was unbearable and there was little permanent water to be found. On
their very first foray inland, three of their dogs died and the men, succumbing to
dehydration, made themselves ill drinking brackish water: 'A feeling of thirst and
lassitude, such as I had never experienced, began to overcome all of us' (Grey quoted
in Edwards 1991). Their attempts to travel inland were hampered first by not enough
water and then by too much. Once the rains started, Grey's party had to cross
dangerously swollen rivers, and they suffered from sleeping each night in wet clothes
on damp ground. Many of the stores which they had so carefully transported from the
other side of the world had to be abandoned after being ruined by floodwaters. Their
sheep and goats ate poisonous plants and died. Not only did the men confront life-
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