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grave and, after a resupply trip to his camp by his second-in-command, W O Hodgkinson, knew of the deaths of
Burke and Wills and the rescue of King.
McKinlay then headed north. Heavy rain in February 1862 transformed Sturt’s Stony Desert into ‘running
streams and blossoming meadows’. Stores were low, but the group lived well on fish and meat. McKinlay kept
tight discipline, maintained good relations with the Aborigines, and shaped his course accurately for the Gulf of
Carpentaria, reaching it in May 1862—three months before John McDouall Stuart reached Chambers Bay in
what is now the Northern Territory.
Unluckily HMS Victoria, with which he was trying to rendezvous, had sailed. McKinlay made for Port Denison
(Bowen) on the east coast of Queensland. By 20 June, his men were rationed to 566 grams of salt meat a day, and
by 31 July, all livestock except 10 horses had been eaten. ‘Quite a good breakfast’, McKinlay wrote one day of
their camels’ feet stew. On 2 August, he saw cattle tracks, and the group was saved. On his return south, he was
lauded with Landsborough in Melbourne and with Stuart in Adelaide. His party was the second to cross the
continent from south to north, and first to do so and return safely. Like Stuart, he never lost a man.
In 1865, McKinlay was chosen to find a better site for settlement on the north coast than Escape Cliffs at
Adam Bay in the Northern Territory. In the one overland tour he was to examine the Liverpool, Roper and Victoria
Rivers—a grand, and in hindsight, impossible task. An uncharacteristic procrastination led to his party’s leaving
for Arnhem Land in the middle of the Wet season. For six months, McKinlay and his 14 men struggled through
soaking rains and sheets of water. By June 1866, he was trapped on the western bank of the East Alligator River
with no food, most of his men ill and under spasmodic attack from Aborigines. He could not retrace his steps,
and the impenetrable Arnhem Land escarpment prevented movement to the east. He killed his horses, dried the
meat, bound the skins to saplings and, with a big canvas tent as an outer skin, made a punt in which he and his party
sailed down the flooded East Alligator and out into the Arafura Sea. Six days and nights of enormous effort—at one
stage they were 14 kilometres from shore—took them along the coast and back to Adam Bay.
On both this and the Burke Relief Expedition McKinlay quarrelled with, and sacked, his second-in-command,
though they had to stay with him until journey’s end. A short and relatively painless trip by sea provided information
about the Daly River, Anson Bay and Port Darwin. Of the latter, McKinlay said: ‘Port Darwin, from its central
position and excellent harbour, with good and safe approach has vast advantages, for shipping, to any other on
the coast, with deep water close in and protection from all weather’. He doubted that the land was suitable for a
settlement, however, preferring instead the heads at the harbour entrance, Point Emery and Talc Head.
Between explorations McKinlay continued to take up runs in South Australia and, in 1863, married Jane Pile,
of Gawler. They had no children. He made a short trip to Palmerston in 1870, acting as an agent for London and
Adelaide land order holders, and died in Gawler on 31 December 1872. John Forrest laid the foundation stone of
an impressive monument to him in Gawler.
John McKinlay has not been accorded the attention or respect he deserves, by either historians or the lay public.
However his achievements are viewed overall, he remains the first of the white explorers to have led a successful
expedition across Australia from the south coast to the north and back. And despite the disorder and discord of the
Northern Territory trip, it, too, deserves acknowledgment as an epic of survival. McKinlay traversed more than
4 000 kilometres of unknown territory, both on land and water, and made an important contribution to geographical
knowledge. He brought considerable skill as a bushman to his expeditions, of which there is evidence in his and
others’ journals.
His attitude towards his men could be called firm but fair. He suffered no fools, and incompetence always
aroused wrath. But more than once, he confided his personal judgments to his journal, rather than pass them on
in official reports. His attitude to the continent’s first inhabitants was, while it might be called ‘softer’ than that
generally prevailing, still pragmatic. His approach to his guides on the Burke expedition appears to be that of a
fair-minded man. When he was occasionally disturbed by small betrayals of trust he reacted like a schoolmaster.
Aborigines met on the way were kept at a distance, but there was no arrogance or violence apparent in McKinlay’s
feelings towards them. When they let fear and anger drive them to displays of power, as on the East Alligator River,
McKinlay naturally defended himself and his men with ‘well-placed buckshot’. It is an arrogant-sounding phrase,
but it was in keeping with the white man’s perceived superiority at the time and there is no mention in the diaries
kept by McKinlay or his men of any serious injury having been caused
As to his place in history, McKinlay’s achievements and the expanded knowledge that flowed from them
outweigh the failures enough to suggest that he has been undervalued. True, he did not carry out the secondary
object of the Burke relief expedition, which was to examine the country between Lake Eyre and Central Mount
Stuart, and at no stage did he turn his horses’ heads towards Fowler’s Bay as ordered. But his work was vital, adding
to the knowledge gained by Burke and Stuart and, with the first and possibly still the greatest transcontinental
droving feat, showed stock could be moved that way, both sheep and cattle.
The Northern Territory debacle, if nothing else, showed the futility of attempting to move through the Top End
during the wet season. It also, of course, demonstrated once again the ability of humankind to survive against
apparently impossible odds.
K Lockwood, Big John, 1995.
KIM LOCKWOOD, Vol 3.McKINNON, WILLIAM (BILL) (1902– ), seaman, labourer, salesman, prison warder and policeman, was born
on 16 June 1902 at Ballina, New South Wales, the youngest of four children of a cane farmer whose forebears had
come to Sydney in 1837 from Skye in Scotland. He was educated at schools in Nambour and Cleveland in southern