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WALDEN, ELIZABETH: see DARCY, ELIZABETH
WALKER, CHRISTOPHER HENRY (c1864–1930), prospector, miner and explorer, was probably born in about
1864, the son of Henry Walker, a farmer, ship’s cook and miner from Virginia, United States of America, and Sarah,
nee Wheeler, one of at least ten children. Evidence about his early life is sparse but he was a stonemason in Hobart
when he married in 1892 and later worked as a gold miner in Western Australia before coming to the Northern
Territory in 1912. His brother, Sydney Walker, a Hobart solicitor, supporting his request for Commonwealth
government assistance, recorded that he had spent 18 years in Western Australia and the last six and a half years
prospecting in Madagascar (that is about 1906 to 1912). His obituary in the Murchison Times reported that he had
worked at the Mainland Consols Mine, near Cue, in about 1900.
In June 1912, Walker applied to the Department of External Affairs for support of a prospecting expedition
to follow up Alan Davidson’s work in the Northern Territory. He indicated that he was spending some 400 to
500 Pounds of his own to finance the trip and his references described him as a ‘man of repute’, ‘well known to
many members of the Hobart Stock exchange.’ Atlee Hunt, the Secretary of the department, arranged for camels
and equipment to be supplied to the expedition at the Oodnadatta railhead in South Australia. Walker, with his
brother Arthur Charles Walker (born in 1873), then travelled north to Barrow Creek and Bonney Well to assess
the areas of the Murchison and Davenport Ranges reported some 10 years earlier by Davidson to be ‘promising’.
The brothers were accompanied by a Mr Hanel, and two Aboriginal assistants (one of whom had travelled with
Davidson). Between 1 October and 17 November, the party examined Davidson’s old workings and also made
brief examinations of the desert country to the east and northeast, but found nothing at all prospective. Walker
concluded that ‘Mr Davidson was a novice... as a miner’.
Returning to Alice Springs, Walker sent a full report of the journey to Melbourne and sought additional camels
and ordered supplies to sustain his party for a year in order to prospect the country to the west of the Overland
Telegraph Line from Ryan’s Well. In a letter to his friend and backer, Thomas Way, a Melbourne diamond merchant,
at the end of January, Walker indicated that if they failed to find ‘anything of consequence on the Territory side’
they might continue into Western Australia and make for Wiluna or Peak Hills for fresh supplies. He left Alice
Springs on 1 February and Ryan’s Well on 6 February and paused at Napperby Station where he recruited a local
Aboriginal guide. The other members of the party besides Walker and his brother, were a Mr Crofts and a ‘half
cast’ [sic] named Andy. Delayed for a week by some heavy showers on the headwaters of the Lander River, they
were only some 65 kilometres from Napperby when their Aboriginal guide left them and they halted for another
week. By then, they had reached the area of Mount Hardy and had named a large creek running north from there,
Atlee Creek, in honour of Atlee Hunt.
Continuing westward from this, their second depot camp, they were delayed by more rainstorms as they
passed through ‘excellent pastoral country’ on the way to Mount Singleton and Warburton’s Mount Farewell,
which Walker found to be some 32 kilometres east of its location on existing maps. Greeted there by a party of
17 Aboriginal men, probably Walpiri, they then travelled south searching for Ethel Creek and excavated a ‘native
well’.
Walker remained in camp there while the other three made a scouting trip to the west, taking all the camels.
On his second day alone in the barricaded camp more than 30 men approached and Walker decided it was advisable
to fire two warning shots with his shotgun to discourage any possible attack. Walker kept watch all that night and
fired off two more shots when he heard noises. The scouting party returned next afternoon, having found a ‘native
well’ some 43 kilometres to the west, and the Aboriginal visitors left, having removed a bucket, some bottles and
cans, and Crofts’s silver watch.
Walker and Andy scouted west from the next camp (Number 20) and found a prominent hill he named Jasper
Hill from which he saw what appeared to be ‘lake country’ to the west. Scouting forward again on 15 April
Walker and Andy saw a mirage ‘like great sheets of water’ and after another four kilometres came on an arm of a
lake and followed it west. They saw several islands in what were ‘large salt plains, which had the appearance of
a large plain after a snow storm’. A scouting trip to the north suggested that it might take weeks to work around
the lake to the north and Walker decided to travel south to find a way around it. When they left the lake, finding
the high sandridges near the eastern shore difficult, Walker had concluded that it extended for ‘over sixty miles
[96 kilometres] from north to south’. This was the great salt lake that, 17 years later, was named Lake Mackay,
after Donald Mackay’s aerial survey party flew over it.
The Walker brothers made their way southward and in May prospected the Kintore Range (which Walker
referred to as the ‘Bluff Range’) and Bonython Range (‘Black Range’), skirting the southeastern corner of Lake
Macdonald, which Walker thought might be a southern arm of ‘the Great Lake’ they had seen earlier. At Camp
30 in a range of sandstone hills (Emery Range) Walker judged that they were on the border of Western Australia
and the Territory, but they were already about 32 kilometres west of the border. From there they continued west
and north west to Baron Range, keeping to their practice of moving forward only when ‘flying trips’ had located
a suitable water supply for camels and observing the fires and tracks of the inhabitants to help find their waters.
After passing through a range of low hills (Ryan Buttes) in mid June, the party travelled south westerly, reaching
Wongawol Station, near Lake Carnegie, at the end of September and after resting at the homestead arrived at
Wiluna on 12 October.