>> Go Back - page 0 - >> List of Entriess
excursion to Roe Downs before arriving back at the Victoria River depot on 10 May. He had travelled 2 400
kilometres.
Gregory began immediately to plan his second major exploration. In the meantime he was obliged to settle
domestic friction by suspending the geologist, Wilson, and disciplining the collector, Flood. With instructions to
rendezvous with the land party at the Albert River, Tom Tough was dispatched to Kupang for victuals. Accompanied
by Henry Gregory, Elsey, Mueller and three men, Gregory finally left the Victoria River on 20 June 1856.
They crossed the Daly and Roper rivers, and Gregory named Elsey Creek for the surgeon. He did not await
Tom Tough at the Albert River; instead he left memoranda buried in a powder canister beneath a tree marked on
30 August. On 4 September in his journal Gregory described a meeting with Aborigines on the Plains of Promise
near the river that he named after Ludwig Leichhardt. Parrot, kangaroo and dried horsemeat supplemented the
explorers’ rations. They travelled south at about 22 kilometres a day, crossing the Flinders, Burdekin and Sutton
rivers and Peak Range on the way. Gregory’s party reached Brisbane on 16 December 1856.
Governor-General Sir William Denison attributed the success of the Northern Australian Expedition to Gregory’s
prudence and courage. Characteristically modest, Gregory under-rated his own achievements. He declared the
expedition to have been of moderate danger and convenience and its discoveries of a rather negative order. In fact,
he had fulfilled the terms of his brief; his decisions avoided potential disaster for his companions; he left a standing
camp on the Victoria River and explored routes west and east of that point. The value of the scientific yield from
the North Australian Expedition is difficult to determine. A mass of data, helpful to cartographers, geographers,
botanists, geologists, meteorologists, artists and ornithologists was sent to England. The beneficiaries included the
Royal Geographical Society, the herbarium at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the Murchison Institute.
Pastoral settlement eventually followed. In recent years, some of the expedition’s pictorial records have been
acquired by Australian national collections. The Royal Geographical Society awarded Gregory the Founder’s Gold
Medal. Jointly with F T Gregory, he published his journals in 1884.
His last major expedition was a search for Leichhardt commissioned in 1858 by the New South Wales
government. He became foundation Surveyor-General of Queensland in 1859 and assumed responsibility for the
complex administration of the combined departments of Public Land and Surveys. His task was formidable and
his career both notable and controversial. Politically conservative, he was appointed to the Queensland Legislative
Council in 1882 and aligned himself with reactionary squattocracy. First admitted to the Samaritan Lodge in
1855, he was much respected as grand master of the English Chapter of the Queensland Freemasons, 1862–1905.
He was created Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George (KCMG) in 1903. He never married.
Gregory died at his residence Rainworth, at Toowong, on 25 June 1905, exactly 41 years since the day he followed
the shallow creek from the Victoria River that now bears his name. He was widely mourned as one of the last
representatives of Australian pioneers and one who ranked amongst the ‘Nestor Trio’ of her explorers.
He was buried in the Toowong cemetery. Ugo Catini painted his full-length portrait and there is a bust by
Oscar Fristram. Gregory Court in Brisbane is named in his honour, as is Gregory Street, Darwin and a national
park in the Victoria River District.
W Birman, Gregory of Rainworth, 1979.
WENDY BIRMAN, Vol 1.GRIBBLE, CECIL FRANK (1903–1995), Methodist Minister, educator and administrator, was born at Ballarat,
Victoria, on 12 June 1903, the seventh son of William James Gribble and his wife, Alice Eliza Stoney, a teacher.
His grandfather, John Gribble, had come to the goldfields from Cornwall, returning there to marry before settling
and raising a large family in Ballarat and Stawell. W J Gribble had established a successful tailoring and mercery
business and the family of eight boys grew up in a comfortable home in Mair Street, Ballarat.
Gribble was educated at the Pleasant Street State School, Ballarat High School and Ballarat College
(Presbyterian), before serving a five-year apprenticeship to a pharmaceutical chemist. Four of his brothers went
to the First World War and one was killed in France; in 1923 their father died, aged 57, and six months later their
mother succumbed to pneumonia. Gribble completed his apprenticeship but was then accepted as a candidate
for the Methodist ministry from the Lydiard Street church and in 1924 went to Queen’s College, University of
Melbourne, graduating Master of Arts with Honours in History and Political Science.
Gribble’s baritone singing voice had won him prizes at the Ballarat eisteddfod and at the end of 1929 he was
sent to the Northern Territory as a singing evangelist, with Jack Williams, a contemporary at Queen’s College.
They set off in a new ‘A’ model Ford utility from Adelaide to Oodnadatta and Alice Springs, equipped with a
portable organ and banjo, and travelled to cattle stations in the Centre until their vehicle was burnt out north
of Barrow Creek. After returning to Alice Springs to re-equip they drove north again to Katherine to stay with
Athol McGregor of the Methodist Inland Mission and thence to Darwin. Returning south by way of Mount Isa,
Cloncurry and Charters Towers, Gribble prepared for and took the church’s probationary examination en route,
before travelling by sea from Cairns to Sydney.
He joined the Home Mission Department of the Methodist church and served in Cobram and Shepparton,
and then in Hobart and Launceston. On 3 April 1933 he married Isabel, daughter of the Reverend H A Overend,
‘a saintly member of the Victorian Conference’. In 1936 he was appointed clerical secretary for the Home and
Overseas Missions in Tasmania.
In 1939 Gribble returned to Melbourne University to study for a Diploma in Education before taking up
an appointment in September with the Overseas Mission Service as Principal of Tupou College, the Wesleyan