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Frederick Kilian died in Adelaide on 17 November 1950 and Amelia Ernestine Kilian died there on
5 November 1962.
Australian Archives, F46, F649 S181; B James, Occupation Citizen, 1995; Northern Territory Archives Service E97/4/179.
BARBARA JAMES, Vol 3.
KILIAN, CHARLES FREDERICK (c1837–1916), pioneer boot maker, was born in Prussia about 1837. It is
not known whether he came to Australia with his parents or as an adult but on 4 May 1869 at Spring Creek,
Victoria, he married 19-year-old Amelia Gunther, daughter of Samuel and Ernestine Gunther who had also come
to Australia from Prussia. There were four children of the marriage.
Kilian came to the Territory in 1873 and for more than 30 years he and his wife leased a block of land at the
corner of Smith Street and the Esplanade, now part of Christ Church Cathedral grounds from which for many years
they ran a boot/shoemaking and repair business. He also imported shoes. The house in which they lived was the
rectory for a number of years.
In his early years in the Territory Kilian was active in the community. He was a member of the first District
Council in Palmerston and helped establish the first Palmerston Institute, the first library. In May 1876, in July 1877
and again in May 1878 he was among the signatories seeking a school in Palmerston. In 1877, the Government
Resident considered that the town’s doctor had acted unprofessionally. The townspeople, anxious not to lose their
only medico, held a meeting, chaired by Kilian, and carried a unanimous resolution that the charges against the
doctor were ‘frivolous and unwarranted’. Though German born Kilian must have spoken good English and been
respected in the community to chair such a meeting but at a Council election later that year he was only fourth on
the count and was not elected.
For a period after 1878, he was a gaol guard and is said to have managed Brandt’s sugar plantation at Shoal
Bay for several years from which he visited Palmerston once a fortnight. In 1887 he returned to Palmerston and
re-established his boot making business, although the local press, probably under the hand V L Solomon, had
this word of warning for him: ‘With odds of two Chinese against him it will require a great effort to knock out an
income by this trade but if a good article is turned out by him at a fair figure no doubt the European will be given the
preference’. He apparently met with some success because the following year he opened a boot depot at Burrundie.
In 1891, he was running a business at the Union and also operated from Pine Creek. He went to Western Australia
in 1894, on medical advice, and returned from Coolgardie two years later for a holiday with his family. He went
back to Western Australia but returned permanently to the Territory about 1905 still in indifferent health.
Charles Frederick Kilian on died on 5 April 1916 at the age of 79, survived by his wife, daughter Amelia, son
Charles who lived in Melbourne, and son Fred then in Adelaide. He was said to have been a man of ‘exceedingly
peaceful and easy disposition’ who enjoyed the goodwill of the older residents though he was little known to the
younger generation. He was buried in the Goyder Road cemetery according to the rites of the Anglican Church.
B James, Occupation Citizen, 1995; Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 15 August 1890, 21 February 1896, 13 April 1916; South Australian
State Records, GRS 1: 299/1876, 438/1877, 323/1878.
HELEN J WILSON, Vol 3.
KIM LAN: see HOUNG ON YEE, MYRTLE
‘KING BOB’: see GAJIYUMA
KING, ELSIE MURIEL: see JONES, ELSIE MURIEL
KING, PHILLIP PARKER (1791–1856), naval officer, hydrographer and company manager, was born on
13 December 1791 at Norfolk Island, the son of Philip Gidley King and his wife Anna Josepha, nee Coombe.
In October 1796 the King family sailed for England in Britannia. When his father left England in November 1799
to become Governor of New South Wales, young Phillip was placed under tuition of the Reverend S Burford in
Essex.
King entered the navy in 1807 as a First-Class Volunteer, the usual method of entry for budding officers.
He served for six years in the coastal waters of Western Europe and in the Mediterranean, rising to Master’s Mate
in 1810 and Lieutenant in 1814. There is no record of King’s early surveying experience but according to family
tradition Matthew Flinders, a friend of the family, interested him in surveying and introduced him to Captain
Thomas Hurd (1757–1823), hydrographer to the Admiralty 1808–23. Hurd, first of the professional officers who
were to give the Royal Navy’s hydrographic service pre-eminence in the field, is said to have trained the young
lieutenant. King must have proved an apt pupil. In 1817 the British government decided to complete the survey of
the Australian north and west coasts, which Flinders had been forced to abandon in 1803; and, at a time when the
ending of the Napoleonic Wars had left nearly ninety per cent of British naval officers on half-pay—professionally
unemployed—King received the command.
Flinders had worked under Admiralty instructions alone and King received similar orders regarding the
conduct of the survey; but Earl Bathurst, at the Colonial Office, also took a hand. His instructions to King required
the recording of geological and meteorological data, observations of the Aborigines and an alert eye for trade
possibilities. King and the two officers allocated to him, John Roe and Frederick Bedwell, sailed for Sydney in
the merchant ship Dick, arriving in September 1817. Before his departure, King married Harriet, daughter of