Born on this day
Saturday, October 23, 1813. : Explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, first to travel from the eastern coast to Port Essington in the north, is born.
Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt was born on 23 October 1813 in Trebatsch, Prussia (now Brandenburg, Germany). His thirst for knowledge led him to study philosophy, languages and natural sciences in Germany. Although he never received a degree, he was a passionate botanist. Leichhardt arrived in Australia in 1842, and immediately expressed an interest in exploration, although he lacked necessary bush survival skills.
Leichhardt made a total of three expeditions. In October 1844, he left from Jimbour, on the Darling Downs, on an expedition to find a new route to Port Essington, near Darwin. The 4800 km overland journey reached its destination on 17 December 1845. His second expedition, from the Darling Downs in Queensland to Perth in Western Australia, commenced in December 1846. However, wet weather and malaria forced the party to return after they had travelled only 800km.
Leichhardt’s final expedition began in March 1848, picking up where his second expedition left off. However, somewhere in Australia’s vast outback, Leichhardt, together with six other men, eight horses, fifty bullocks and twenty mules, vanished. Many theories have abounded as to what happened, and many claim to have found evidence of the remains of the expedition, but what really happened remains one of Australia’s enduring mysteries.
Australian Explorers
Thursday, October 23, 1823. : Oxley departs Sydney to search north for a site for a new settlement, leading to the discovery of the Brisbane River.
John Joseph William Molesworth Oxley was born in Yorkshire, England, around 1784, although his actual date of birth is unknown. He joined the navy in 1799 as a midshipman in the ‘Venerable’, and two years later, sailed as master’s mate in the ‘Buffalo’, arriving in Australia in 1802. Oxley became an avid explorer, by both land and sea, and was soon appointed Surveyor-General in New South Wales.
On 23 October 1823, Oxley set sail from Sydney to travel north along the coastline. His aim was to find a suitable settlement for convicts who had not been reformed, but continued to re-offend. Reaching Port Curtis (Gladstone), Oxley rejected the harbour as unsuitable, due to its many shoals and mangrove swamps. Oxley returned south and entered Moreton Bay, where he met up with the lost ticket-of-leave convicts Thomas Pamphlett and John Finnegan. Along with two other companions, John Thompson (who had died) and Richard Parsons, Pamphlett and Finnegan had been blown off-course from the Illawarra coast and disoriented by a storm many months earlier. Aborigines had helped sustain the men, who had then explored much of the area on foot.
Oxley identified Red Cliff Point, which had been discovered and named by Matthew Flinders in July 1799, as suitable for a penal settlement. Pamphlett and Finnegan showed Oxley a large river, which Oxley traced for about 80 km and later named the Brisbane River. Redcliffe was settled by a small group of officials, soldiers, their wives and children, and 29 convicts. After a year, the settlement at Redcliffe proved unsustainable as it was too far from the fresh water of the Brisbane River. The settlement was moved south to the banks of the Brisbane River. Although Oxley has long been credited with the discovery of the Brisbane River, he was not the first white man to see the river or the future site of Brisbane.
Australian Explorers
Wednesday, October 23, 1861. : South Australian John McKinlay’s relief expedition to locate Burke and Wills finds the burial site of party member Charles Gray.
The Burke and Wills expedition was supposed to mark the state of Victoria’s greatest triumph: Victoria hoped to be the first state to mount an expedition to cross the continent from south to north. Instead, due to mismanagement and lack of clear communication, three of the four members of the party who finally made the attempt to cross to the gulf and back, never made it back. Charles Gray died on the return journey from the Gulf, his companions spending a day digging a shallow grave for him in the desert, and subsequently missing their own relief party from Melbourne by seven hours. Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills died some weeks after returning to their depot at Cooper Creek, where they found the supplies left by the relief party but failed to leave a message informing future relief parties they had been there. Thus, they were believed to have not even returned from the Gulf. John King alone survived, after being taken in and nursed by the Aborigines of the Cooper Creek area.
Although the expedition had been financed by Victoria, South Australia mounted its own rescue mission for Burke and Wills. John McKinlay, born at Sandbank on the Clyde in 1819, first came to New South Wales in 1836. He joined his uncle, a wealthy grazier, under whose guidance he soon gained practical bush skills, and then took up several runs in South Australia. McKinlay was chosen to head up the relief expedition for Burke and Wills, setting out from Adelaide on 16 August 1861. During the course of his search, McKinlay’s journals show that he crossed the continent from south to north, then east and back again, possibly making McKinlay the uncredited first explorer to cross the continent and survive.
In October 1861, with the help of a native guide, McKinlay discovered evidence that horses, camels and white men had camped near a waterhole. In a letter dated 23 October 1861, he wrote:
“Hair, apparently belonging to Mr. Wills, Charles Gray, Mr. Burke, or King, was picked up from the surface of a grave dug by a spade, and from the skull of a European buried by the natives. Other less important traces — such as a pannikin, oil-can, saddle-stuffing, etc., have been found. Beware of the natives, on whom we have had to fire. We do not intend to return to Adelaide, but proceed to west of north. From information, all Burke’s party were killed and eaten.”
McKinlay had, in fact, located the burial site of Charles Gray who, despite the party’s painstaking efforts to bury him, had then been dug up and eaten by Aborigines. An Aboriginal elder with whom McKinlay was able to communicate indicated that Gray had actually been killed in a skirmish between the whites and natives, not from exhaustion and illness as had been previously thought. The remains of Burke and Wills were eventually located by the Victorian relief expedition.
Australian History
Saturday, October 23, 1965. : Canberra, capital city of Australia, begins operation of its first two sets of traffic lights.
The world’s first traffic light was operating in London, England, even before the advent of the automobile. Installed at a London intersection in 1868, it was a revolving gas-lit lantern with red and green signals. However, on 2 January 1869, the light exploded, injuring the policeman who was operating it. It was not until the early 1900s that Garrett Morgan, an African American living in Cleveland, Ohio, developed the electric automatic traffic light. Originally based on a semaphore-system, traffic lights gradually evolved through the years to become the red-amber-green lights they are today.
Canberra’s first two sets of traffic lights were brought into operation on 23 October 1965, some thirty years after Sydney received its first traffic lights, in 1933. The Canberra lights were located at the junction of Northbourne Avenue and London Circuit, and Northbourne Avenue and Cooyong Street.
Australian History
Saturday, October 23, 1976. : Much of southern Australia experiences a total solar eclipse.
A solar eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, casting its shadow over the Earth. On 23 October 1976, Australia was right in the path of a total solar eclipse, which tracked across the southern half of the continent. The track passed very close to the capital cities of Adelaide, and Sydney. It is rare for a solar eclipse to pass over a populous city, but Melbourne, second-largest city in Australia, was directly in the totality path.