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fair share of humour enabled him to retail to the best advantage’. He had always been a ‘warm advocate of the vast
resource of the Territory, and a firm believer in its future’.
For the last 12 months of his life Gore and his wife lived at Brock’s Creek. He died on 19 April 1901, in the
Palmerston Hospital, of an ‘epidemic which has proved so fatal in Palmerston’ no doubt complicated by an
‘unfortunate and unconquerable weakness’ which had caused an abscess on the liver. He is buried in the Palmerston
cemetery.
Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 1872–1901.
FIONA M DARCY, Vol 1.GORE, CHARLES EDWARD (c1850–1917), mariner, was born in England in about 1850, probably in
Devonshire. He arrived in South Australia in 1863 with his parents, brothers and sisters. His father, Alfred Gore
(1822–1892) and his mother, Mary Sophie, nee Dewhirst, were first cousins. He subsequently moved to Pine Creek
and his daughter Elizabeth was born there in 1876. Gore and Elizabeth’s mother ‘Polly’ apparently were not
married, but their daughter carried her father’s surname, and his name was on her marriage certificate under ‘name
and surname of father’ so it seems the family was together for quite a while. Most of Charles Edward Gore’s life
was involved with the sea and ships, perhaps a love engendered by the long sea voyage from England when he was
only about thirteen. He was captain of a lugger or ketch sailing between Darwin and Borroloola, and at the end of
his life was a ‘hulk-keeper’ in Darwin harbour; he even died on the sea.
It is known that Charles was in Pine Creek in 1875, as his name was on a list of Pine Creek residents who
contributed to the fund for the survivors of the steamship Gothenburg, wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, after
the ship had left Darwin for Adelaide. She had many prominent people on board, including the Honourable and
Mrs Thomas Reynolds, who had been the Gore family’s business partners.
G R McMinn, surveyor and first Resident magistrate at Borroloola (from September 1886 to May 1888),
married Anna, sister of Charles and Alfred Dewhirst Gore, in Darwin in 1874. The couple had three children.
Anna died of dysentery on Christmas Day 1880, aged 27. At this time McMinn was Acting Government Resident.
The Northern Territory Times and Gazette noted that ‘the majority of our townspeople wended their way to the
cemetery to pay their tribute of respect’ to this ‘kindly and unassuming’ woman.
Charles was in Borroloola in 1890. In that year he rented part of the courthouse there as a store for his cargoes;
but his daughter’s marriage certificate, on 13 December 1893, says the marriage took place in the house of the
bridegroom (who was James Walden, a teamster from Pine Creek), so it may be reasonable to assume the bride’s
father was not then resident at Borroloola.
On 15 June 1891 a petition requesting a mail service from Borroloola to Powell’s Creek was circulated.
Signatories included ‘Charles Gore, Mariner, Borroloola’. Nine years later, in December 1899, his brother, the
journalist Alfred Dewhirst Gore, wrote articles for the Northern Territory Times and Gazette from Borroloola,
describing many places and events, but complaining about the mail service, and suggesting ways of improving
it—so obviously the first petition had not been fully successful. A D Gore also wrote of his brother captaining a
sailing boat, possibly the fourteen-tonne ketch Venture. He also mentioned the numbers and sizes (both large) of
the crocodiles in the McArthur River, and the attempts of the hotel-keeper, Mr Campbell, to poison them with
strychnine baits, with the result that ‘numbers of huge dead bodies of alligators [sic], some over twenty feet are
to be seen floating up and down as the tidal course of the river ebbs and flows!’ Charles Gore may have thought
this was a great waste of a resource; in any event he corresponded with a ‘prominent tanning firm in Bristol,
England’ to find out whether it would be worthwhile to send a shipment of ‘alligator hides’, but he discovered that
overheads—shipping facilities, rates of freight and such—were too high.
Gore was again in Borroloola in 1902; whether as resident or frequent visitor is not known. He once more
visited Borroloola, or lived there, in 1902. He seemed to have always been in charge of a sailing vessel, so
the picture emerges of Gore, aged between 40 and 52, sailing along the northern coast of Arnhem Land, and
around the island-strewn waters of Cape Wessel, southward past Groote Eylandt, past the Roper River, and up
the McArthur toward Borroloola. He probably had a well-worn copy of Matthew Flinders’ charts of the area, and
would eventually have known the coastline as well as anyone and would have regarded any voyage without storms
or cyclones, or equipment malfunction, as rather routine. In January 1902 Aborigines attacked his lugger. Gore was
wounded but he and other crewmembers repulsed the intruders.
It was probably after this episode that Gore went back to Darwin to stay. In July 1917 he was described as a
‘hulk-keeper’ on Warrego. He had been in Darwin Hospital a few weeks previously with a heart condition, and
while on Warrego had had a severe attack of heart pain. While being rowed ashore a few minutes later, he collapsed
and died before reaching the jetty. He was a ‘seaman by profession and was a man of simple and kindly nature’,
according to the local newspaper. He was 67 years of age. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Darcy of Mallapunyah
Springs, remembered him well in the 1930s and told her children of his deep Devonshire sailor’s voice, which had
frightened her when she was a child in Pine Creek.
Gore is buried in the old Palmerston cemetery, with his brother Alfred Dewhirst Gore, who died in 1901,
his sister Anna McMinn and her infant son.
Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 1875–1917; Darcy family information.
FIONA M DARCY, Vol 1.