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His uncle, the Reverend Francis Johnson, married the sister of Sir James Brooke, the first Rajah of Sarawak,
and his naval career, commencing in 1842, took him into this area fighting pirates at Sarawak. After service in the
Indian navy, he married Ellen Atkinson in 1848 in Northumberland. He went back to sea in 1852 and eventually
obtained the position of naval officer and harbour master in Adelaide and later Collector of Customs, in 1854,
succeeding Captain Lipson. Douglas by 1860 was chairman of the Marine Board, inquiring into lighthouses and
eventually became a stipendiary magistrate.
In March 1870, Captain Bloomfield Douglas was appointed the first civilian Government Resident of the
Northern Territory. He travelled north on Bengal and, having the Sarawak example in mind, tackled the fledgling
administration of South Australia’s Territory in the same way, but did not have sufficient administrative background
to deal efficiently with the many tasks of the new administration. Money was spent unwisely; he quarrelled with
officials, mining legislation and regulations were ignored and he became more interested in personal gain on
the goldfields. He did, however, promote early explorations by George McLachlan to Katherine in 1870 and
others to the Roper in the initial move to commence the erection of the Overland Telegraph Line desired by the
government.
Some of his administration did not win support from Thomas Reynolds, Commissioner of Crown Lands,
who went north to review the position and Douglas was asked to resign in June 1873. His financial position
in doubt, the government sent him to Singapore in April 1874 on a mission to recruit Chinese miners for the
Territory goldfields. He organised 200 coolies for the goldfields and stayed on in 1875 as acting police magistrate
in Singapore.
He became Government Resident in Selangor after Hugh Low’s term as Resident at Perak in 1876. Klang declined
as a centre as traders went up river to Kuala Lumpur. By 1880 Douglas sought to transfer the administration to that
area—a very filthy mining camp. His attempts there were not immediately successful, his son-in-law, Dominic
Daly, was dismissed as superintendent of works for land jobbery and he was again asked to resign.
Douglas joined his son-in-law, Daly, who was with the British North Borneo Company. Douglas’s wife died in
England in 1887 and he later joined the Department of Marine and Fisheries in 1893 in Nova Scotia. He remarried,
aged over seventy years, to the daughter of the Collector of Customs at Sydney, Nova Scotia.
His name is remembered in Douglas Street, Fannie Bay, and in Douglas Peninsula, a name that fell into disuse
for the earlier name Cox Peninsula, across the harbour from the town of Darwin.
The mariner who made a contribution to naval explorations in various parts was not so successful in the field
of government administration. He died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on 5 March 1906.
E Sadka, The Protected Malay States: 1874–1895, 1968; C M Turnbull, A Short History of Malaysia, 1980; Northern Territory Times and
Gazette, 31 May 1879; Ottawa Archives PC40/837/1898, PC443, 452 and 790/1903.
V T O’BRIEN, Vol 1.
DOVE, EMILY ISABELLA MAY (1889–1978), Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary, was born in
Melbourne on 26 March 1889. Their widowed mother Helen, nee Robotham, at Heathcote, Victoria, brought up
her and her sister. She had no professional training, but played an important part in the ongoing life of the CMS
missions in north Australia.
May Dove was accepted was accepted as a CMS missionary for the Roper River Mission on 5 February 1923
and left for the north the following month. She arrived at Roper in May and joined Louisa Cross in caring for
the half-caste children there. She accompanied the thirty-five half-caste children when they were transferred to
Emerald River, Groote Eylandt, in September 1924. For the next six years she worked with Louisa Cross caring for
the half-caste children until the mission devoted its full attention to the Groote Eylandt Aborigines.
May Dove was on extended sick leave from July 1932 until December 1933, when Messrs Warren and Dyer,
while on Groote on a peace expedition to the Aborigines, urgently asked for her return. She went back to Groote
immediately and was reappointed a permanent missionary on 13 May 1935. While on leave in 1938 she attended
lectures in anthropology under Professor A P Elkin at the University of Sydney.
On her return north by flying boat in November 1938 she was appointed to Oenpelli where she worked with
great acceptance until the evacuation of missionary and half-caste women and children in 1942. She then helped
care for the evacuated half-castes from the north and from the Alice Springs Hostel, at Mulgoa, New South Wales.
There were seventy-seven evacuees in all, ranging from tiny tots to adolescent boys and girls and a few young
married women. Some of the children did very well at school and afterward stayed on to become teachers in the
south. She continued to work at Mulgoa until the remaining small group of half-castes was transferred back to
Alice Springs in 1945.
On her retirement in 1946 the CMS recorded its appreciation of May Dove’s work by stating: ‘It is the privilege
of very few missionaries of our Society to have so long a record of service as that given by Miss Dove, and
especially is this the case in our Missions to Aborigines. In her service as a whole, she has evinced a spirit of
devotion and self-forgetful zeal.’ She died in Melbourne in November 1978.
K Cole, Groote Eylandt Mission, 1971; K Cole, Groote Eylandt Stories, 1972; K Cole, A History of Oenpelli, 1975; CMS Records, Melbourne;
Private papers of Miss E I M Dove.
KEITH COLE, Vol 1.
DRIVER, ARTHUR ROBERT (MICK) (1909–1981), engineer, soldier, public servant and Administrator,
was born on 25 November 1909 at Albany, Western Australia, the youngest of five children of Henry Driver,
farmer, and his wife Mary Ann, nee Hinkenbotham. He was educated at Hale School, Perth, and graduated in Civil