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day and month after month practically alone—“on me Pat Malone”—he calls it—with or without a blackboy
according to the circumstances, and five trips out of his yearly eight throwing dice with death along his dry stages,
and yet at all times as merry as a grig and as chirrupy as a young grasshopper...
‘A thousand miles on horseback,... into the Australian interior and out again, travelling twice over three long
dry stages and several shorter ones, and keeping strictly to the government time limit, would be a life-experience
to the men who set that limit—if it wasn’t a death experience. “Like to see one of ‘em doing it ‘emselves”, says
the Fizzer. Yet never a day late, and rarely an hour, he does it eight times a year, with a “So long, chaps”, and a
“Here we go again”...
‘At all seasons of the year he calls the first two hundred miles of this trip a “kid’s game. Water somewhere
nearly every day, and a decent camp most nights”. And although he speaks of the next hundred and fifty as being a
“bit off during the Dry”, he faces its seventy-five mile dry stage, sitting loosely in the saddle, with the same cheery,
“So long, chaps”...
‘Five miles to “get a pace up”—a drink, and then that seventy miles of dry, with any “temperature they can
spare from other parts” and not one drop of water in all its length for the horses. Straight on top of that, with the
same horses and the same temperature, a run of twenty miles, mails dropped off at Newcastle Waters, and another
run of fifty into Powell ‘s Creek, dry or otherwise, according to the circumstances.
‘“Takes a bit of fizzing to get into the Powell before the fourth sundown”, the Fizzer says—for, forgetting that
there can be no change of horses, and leaving no time for a “spell”, after the “seventy-five mile dry”—the time
limit for that one hundred and fifty miles in a country where four miles an hour is good travelling on good roads,
has been fixed a three and a half days. “Four, they call it”, says the Fizzer, “forgetting I can’t leave the water till
midday. Takes a bit of fizzing all right”, and yet at Powell’s Creek no one has discovered whether the Fizzer comes
at sundown or the sun goes down when the Fizzer comes’.
The mail left Katherine for Anthony’s Lagoon via Elsey, Daly Waters, Newcastle Waters, Powell’s Creek,
Brunette Downs every six weeks. It was a route with long stretches and dried out waterholes. Peckham was
haunted by an ever-present fear that he would die of thirst, somewhere on the Downs, as had the pioneer of the
route. Once, with his horses lost, he crawled on hands and knees to water. He continued to do this mail run until at
least 1904 when contract was then taken over by someone else.
Peckham then visited his twin sister and family back in New Zealand about 1905 for a holiday, during which he
also planned to take a trip to India, but apparently missed the steamship. Peckham soon returned to the Territory.
In 1907, the Northern Territory Times lists Peckham as being the successful tenderer for the contract to carry
mail from Katherine to Victoria River Police Station via Delamere, Willeroo and Victoria Rivers Downs Stations.
His run included Springvale Homestead and included carrying goods such as leather, whisky, rum, calico, matches,
cartridges, medicine, and of course, mail. The route was 800 miles though trackless bush and was undertaken every
six weeks.
In April 1911 Peckham set out on the by now routine mail run. When he arrived at Victoria River Downs, the
station manager’s wife, Mrs Townshend, was seriously ill. A letter was posted in his canvas bags, calling for a
Darwin doctor.
When Peckham’s team arrived at the Campbell’s Creek crossing, 19 kilometres away, he found it too high to
cross, so they waited. Knowing the letter seeking help for the sick woman was urgent, Peckham and the boy tried to
cross again the next day. They put all the packhorses in, and tried to drive them across on their riding horses. Two
horses with packs on crossed, and two other horses with their packs on got back on the same side. Peckham came
off his horse, and both were swept downstream. The boy got across and unpacked the two that had crossed, swam
back, and unpacked the other two. He then looked for Peckham, but could not find him, so returned to Victoria
Downs Station.
Mr Townshend and several others went back to the crossing. They found Peckham’s riding horse drowned with
saddle and bridle on, about a mile below the crossing. On the following morning, the body was recovered floating
in the river, some distance from the crossing. As Peckham went down, he had shouted to the boy ‘Save the mails!
Can’t be helped if I drown.’ Tragically, the sick woman had died even before they had tried to cross the flooded
river. The date of his death was 17 April 1911.
The Fizzer, like many others before him, had given his life for the mails. He was buried on the riverbank where
he had perished and later his body was moved to lie near those of other characters from Mrs Gunn’s books, in the
special Never Never memorial cemetery south of Mataranka, under a gravestone made at the Adelaide School of
Art and commissioned by his sister, Agnes Hambley.
The Peckham family remains strong in the Territory, as descendants survive Henry Ventlia Peckham from
his son, Henry Peckham, born to an Aboriginal woman near Newcastle Waters around 1902. He has surviving
relatives elsewhere in Australia and New Zealand.
Mrs A Gunn, We Of the Never Never, 1908; H T Linklater, Echoes of the Elsey Saga, 1980; Northern Territory Archives Service, Timber Creek
Police Journals; Northern Territory Times and Gazette, various issues; family information.
PENELOPE MCDONALD, Vol 3.
PEEL, ROBERT (1839–1894), surgeon, was born in England in 1839, came to South Australia as a young
man and spent most of his working life there. He was best noted in the Territory as the doctor who accompanied
George Goyder to Darwin in 1869, assisted the survey party and later was Protector of Aboriginals.
He was registered as a medical practitioner in South Australia in 1864 and appears in the earliest Blue Book (1866)
of appointees to the Colony of South Australia as Assistant Colonial Surgeon. He transferred to Mount Gambier on
25 October 1866. His reasons for joining Goyder’s party in 1869 are unknown.