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handsome: ‘I like Captain Wickham’s appearance’, wrote Elizabeth MacArthur to her brother William, ‘and think
with you that Annie has drawn the prize of the lot.’
In 1843 Wickham was appointed Police Magistrate at Moreton Bay, which was then proclaimed by Governor
Gipps to be open for free settlement. In this office, he won the respect and affection of the colonists by managing
their affairs with commonsense, understanding and justice. By his surveying work in Moreton Bay, he contributed
materially to the colony’s rising prosperity. The colonists regarded Wickham as a far-sighted founding father
and when his position was raised in status from police magistrate to that of Government Resident, they showed
their gratitude by giving a ball in his honour. In 1852, his wife died, leaving him with three children, and in 1857,
he married Ellen Deering of Ipswich, a barrister’s daughter.
At the birth of the new colony of Queensland Wickham was offered the position of Colonial Treasurer, but
declined it and did not obtain a pension for his services in Australia. In 1860 he sailed for England in Duncan Dunbar,
retired to the south of France in poor health and somewhat straitened circumstances, and died from a stroke at
Biarritz on 6 January 1864. He was buried there in St Martin’s churchyard.
Wickham was a man of refinement and shining integrity and a stickler for good order and discipline.
Phillip Parker King believed that there was not a more correct, gentlemanly, high-minded man in the service, and
Philip Gidley King, a midshipman under Wickham from 1831–36, described him as a ‘great hand’ at ‘holystoning
decks, painting ship, blacking... and making everything smart’. During his period as captain of HMS Beagle,
from 1837–41, Wickham made a significant contribution to the discovery and charting of the north and northwest
coasts of Australia. He named King Sound, and after the discovery by Stokes of the Fitzroy River, he ascended it
as far as latitude 17°44’ south.
Wickham was a competent artist and an entertaining writer who sketched and recorded descriptions of the
places he visited in Australia; but its annals suffered a severe loss when most of these records were burned before
his account was ready for publication. Apart from some of his personal and official correspondence, a few of
his sketches survive and a number of his reports and papers which were published in the Nautical Magazine
from 1840–42.
Although Wickham suffered ill health and recurrent attacks of dysentery during his entire service afloat in
Australian waters, he ever preferred the good of the service to his own advantage, and stimulated by Stokes—
his mentor in hydrography—was always anxious to make new discoveries. ‘We sail tomorrow’, Wickham wrote
to his friend S A Donaldson in Sydney, ‘like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in search of new adventures.’
A gregarious man, when on remote service Wickham missed the society and comfort of his friends, but found
great joy in ‘the consolation of letters’. Not well to do, and longing to marry and settle down away from sea life,
he had visions of making his fortune by land speculation in Australia’s southern colonies, but these castles in the
air dissolved in the harsh light of reality.
In 1837, when Beagle commenced her work in Australia, there was still a strong belief that the centre of the
continent was occupied by a vast inland sea, and Wickham clung to this belief after Stokes had abandoned it.
On the eve of the discovery of the Adelaide and Victoria rivers in northern Australia, he wrote from Port Essington
‘we sail tomorrow on our wanderings and in ten days more I hope to have found an inland sea and to be five hundred
miles into the interior.’ These hopes were fed by his observations of the direction of the flow of the rivers in the
north and north-west of Australia, and in 1842 he wrote a memorandum on the possible existence of a mountain
range 1000 to 1300 metres high, with a reservoir, located near latitude 20° south, longitude 132° east—a position
about 250 kilometres from that of the Murchison Range in the Northern Territory.
Whenever the exigencies of the navy demanded sacrifices, Wickham made them, his dictum being ‘The Service
requires this sacrifice and Queen Victoria, being an arbitrary mistress must first be attended to.’ Although authorised
to take his ship home he abandoned the comforts of his command and returned at his own expense to England and
half pay—a final sacrificial act as captain of HMS Beagle.
L S Dawson, Memoirs of Hydrography, 1885; G C Ingleton, Charting a Continent, 1944; John Lort Stokes, Discoveries in Australia, 1846;
C G Drury Clarke, ‘Capt. John Clements Wickham’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol 12 no 1, 1984; ADB vol 2;
Hydrographic Office Surveyors’ and Captains’ letters, 1 July 1837–20 September 1841; Papers of P P King Lethbridge collection, MS A3599,
Mitchell Library; Wickham—S A Donaldson correspondence 1839–40 MS C223, Mitchell Library; Nautical Magazine, 1840, 1841, 1842;
J C Wickham, ‘Description of the Victoria River’, MS A308, Mitchell Library; J C Wickham, ‘Report on Abrolhos Islands’, MS 3306B/523,
Battye Library RGSJ, 1841; J C Wickham, ‘Memorandum on a Mountain Range’, Cat A293 p 263, Mitchell Library; ‘The Romantic Story
of Newstead House and the People who Occupied It’, 944.1/12, Mitchell Library; Macarthur Papers, vol 40, pp 55N60, MS A2936, Mitchell
Library.
MARSDEN HORDERN, Vol 1.WILKINSON, GEORGE HENRY (1873–1933), storekeeper, was born at Emerald Hill in Victoria on 7 July 1873.
He was born to George Albert Wilkinson of Hampshire, England, and Isobel Foote Wilkinson, nee Dow, whose
birthplace was Fifeshire, Scotland. It is believed that his parents met after immigrating to Australia, for they were
married at Emerald Hill in 1872.
Precise dates are not available, but it is known that the Wilkinson family moved to Adelaide and later to
Sydney, which became their permanent place of residence. The father, George Albert, was a saddler by profession
and he eventually established a business in Sydney.
George Junior was approximately 17 years of age when the family moved to Sydney and, from later evidence,
was apparently acquiring qualifications as a bookkeeper/ accountant. Undoubtedly the family (then numbering six
children) was affected by the depression of the 1890s, although the father’s skill as a saddler received recognition
when he became the supplier to Anthony Hordern of Emporium fame. However, by the mid-1890s young Wilkinson,