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On arrival at Darwin in February 1869 Goyder and Peel discovered fresh water supplies below the cliffs of the
proposed town. The bulk of water to service the men of the expedition came from a well in the ‘Gully’, presumably
named by Goyder, as it appears in his diary. Surveyor W Harvey, recording the first survey of the area near Daly
Street shows the feature as ‘Doctor’s Gully’ and the well as ‘Peel’s Well’. Water was taken by longboat to the camp
and later by wagon. Later this well, one at the camp (below Government House) and one at Cavenagh Square
appear to have formed the main supply for the town.
Early residents of Palmerston remembered Dr Peel with gratitude for the antidote to malarial fever so prevalent
in the Territory which he prescribed whilst there, and which was known as ‘Peel’s mixture’.
Peel’s journal of daily events in Darwin recorded details of the progress of the survey from September 1869 to
January 1870 and a similar diary by Dr James Stokes Millner continued the record after Peel’s departure with
Goyder.
When he returned to Adelaide, he resumed his practice, occupying a cottage in North Terrace. In 1876 and
1877, he represented the Hindmarsh ward in the City Council.
Dr Peel was associated with the founding of the Adelaide Children’s Hospital in 1876 as House Surgeon under
Dr Moore, visiting England in 1877, and resigning from the hospital in 1880. In 1879, he qualified as a licentiate
of the King and Queen’s College of Physicians, Ireland.
Sometime before 1883, he moved to Mount Gambier, and was a Past Master of the Mount Gambier Lodge of
Freemasons. After a time in Melbourne and England, he returned to Adelaide, and died at General Havelock Hotel
on 11 January 1894.
J B Cleland, Medical Names in Australian Nomenclature, 1974; M J Kerr, The Surveyors: The Story of the Founding of Darwin, 1971; Blue
Book, 1866, 1867, 1868; Register, Adelaide, 29 October 1866; Observer, Adelaide, 13 January 1894; Robert Peel, Diary, SAA; James Stokes
Millner, Diary, SAA; Adelaide Children’s Hospital, Report, 1877.
JACQUELINE M O’BRIEN, Vol 1.PERKINS, (VICTOR) BRUCE (VB) (1913–1992), shipowner and company director, was born on 4 March 1913
at Torpoint, Cornwall, the son of Alfred Claude Wilson Perkins and his wife Edith Amelia, nee Squance. He obtained
an engineering apprenticeship in the Royal Naval Dockyard at Devonport, England, and in 1937, he was sent to the
British Naval Base at Seletar in Singapore. He then joined the Army and in 1941 served with the rank of Captain
with the 2nd Battalion, Malay Regiment. After Malaya fell to the Japanese, he spent four years as a prisoner-of-war
(POW); six months in Changi and three years on the infamous Burma to Siam railway. After the war, he held a
responsible position supervising the repatriation of some 35 000 POWs and displaced persons. On his return to
England, he discovered that he had been listed as ‘killed in action’.
After business management and further technical studies he returned to Malaya and joined a company where, for
over two years, he was responsible for the operation and maintenance of a fleet of coastal and river vessels. He then
joined Remunia Bauxite Company in Johore where he was in charge of maintenance of the mine equipment and
the logistics of transferring the ore to ships anchored two miles offshore. In 1955, Alcan brought him to Australia
as field manager to start its prospecting program that extended throughout Cape York and the gulf company into
Arnhem Land. In 1958, he moved to Darwin as agent for Timor Oil, having persuaded the company to use Darwin
as the operational base for the landing craft servicing its exploration work in East Timor. When the company
had difficulty using the vessel in Timor he offered to buy it and operate it for them. Thus began the V B Perkins
Shipping Line.
Perkins set up his operation in Frances Bay and gained more land by reclaiming mangrove swamps. The only
tenure available in Darwin in the post-war years was comparatively short-term leasehold that no bank would
accept as collateral for finance so for many years his own home was mortgaged. Only after self-government was he
granted a formal lease of the land; further legislative changes in 1982 allowed conversion to freehold and security
of title.
For many years, Perkins employees were not unionised but eventually in order to stave off the Waterside
Workers Federation (WWF) they joined the Miscellaneous Workers Union. The WWF persisted and the matter
came to a head in April 1973 at the height of Konfrontasi when a shipment of containers destined for Freeport,
Indonesia (now Irian Jaya) was declared black. The result was that Freeport moved their supply base from Darwin
to Singapore. Perkins lost the Freeport transhipment work and VB determined to beat the WWF, as he knew that
to do otherwise would be to put his whole operation at risk. As his daughter, Mandy, wrote, ‘having once worked
under the threat of being shot up by Communists, that element within the organisation did not appeal’. In the
campaign that followed, he had the loyal support of his own employees. Barely a day passed during April 1973
that the Northern Territory News did not carry a headline about the small ships’ issue. Such headlines as ‘Darwin
Supply Work Lost by Black Ban’ and ‘Barge Dispute – A Nail in Port Coffin’, were supported by letters from
Tom Milner, Chairman of the Northern Territory Port Authority. In a ‘postscript’, several Perkins’ floats followed
the May Day Parade that year and very pointedly made their opinion known. Perkins, with a halo round his head,
drove a black Ford. With a federal Labor government in power, no help was forthcoming from that direction.
Eventually with the help of Tom Pauling (later Solicitor General) a loophole was found in the Stevedoring Industry
Act. The Act provided that businesses described as ‘Industrial Undertaking’ were exempt but it meant that in
order to make the point all Perkins’ vessels were sent overseas, and Aboriginal communities were therefore not
receiving their usual regular supplies. Not until the Aboriginal settlements began to lobby Canberra did the federal
government listen. Within seven days VB Perkins and the other landing crafts operators, were each classified as an
Industrial Undertaking. Perkins had won his battle with the WWF.