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and he had three sisters. He arrived in South Australia as a ship’s doctor on Lismoyne in 1855, and at first lived at
Nile Street, Glenelg.
In 1863, when in practice at Angaston, South Australia, and also surgeon to the Adelaide Regiment, Millner
applied for the position of Colonial Surgeon, Health Officer and Immigration Agent in the Northern Territory,
about to be settled by the South Australian government. He stated that ‘apart from nine years in country medical
practice’ he had spent ‘several years afloat, in the Arctic regions, whaling and in the Mail and Emigration Services’.
He stated that in addition to his medical qualifications he was capable of acting as coroner, registrar of births and
deaths, postmaster, etc. He was advised that his application would be considered when any appointments were
made, but was not appointed to the abortive Escape Cliffs settlement.
He practised next in Yankalilla, where he was well-respected in the district, and it was there that he left his
wife Esther and his three children, when in January 1870 he ‘led a relief expedition’ to the Northern Territory,
after Goyder’s surveys of the Darwin area in 1809. He evidently considered that the conditions in the Northern
Territory were quite unfit for women and children.
George Goyder returned to Adelaide in September 1869 leaving Dr Peel in charge until January 1870,
when Dr Millner arrived from Port Adelaide in Kohinoor. Peel departed on 6 February 1870 and Dr Millner
held the commission of Acting Government Resident and Special Magistrate, Medical Officer and Protector of
Aborigines. His salary was 500 Pounds per annum. The population was forty-three which included three surveyors,
five policemen and five carpenters or masons. Goyder had established a base camp consisting of tents and shacks of
stringy-bark and paper-bark. Sawn timber was scarce and when Bloomfield Douglas was appointed Government
Resident in April 1870 and decided to bring his family with him on the Bengal, it was necessary to build some
better housing. The huts that were built were rough, with pressed mud floor; the windows were sheets of iron,
propped open.
When Bloomfield Douglas arrived on 24 June, the population rose to 60. Dr Millner then became Colonial
Surgeon and Protector of Aborigines. He was overworked in his medical practice, but his reputation was high and
he often had fifty patients in his care. He kept a rough journal of the day-to-day events of the early 1870s, which
gave an insight into the early times of the settlement, as well as a record of the medical problems of the colony and
some of the first contacts with the Larakia Aborigines.
Port Darwin was away from the regular sea routes, mail being to Kupang in Dutch Timor, 650 kilometres
away. At one time, there was no communication with the outside world for nine months, except for the arrival of
a telegraph line construction party, until Bloomfield Douglas sent Gulnare to Kupang to collect mail and stores.
Leather rotted in the humidity of the wet season and white ants destroyed wooden structures. The discovery of the
goldfields brought hundreds of miners. In 1873 Bloomfield Douglas joined the prospectors and Dr Millner was
again Acting Government Resident until the arrival of George Byng Scott in October 1873.
Mrs Esther Millner died at the end of December 1872 after a short illness, but it was not until early in 1874 that
Dr Millner was able to return to South Australia.
On April 1874, he married Elizabeth Woods, the youngest daughter of the late J F F Woods, of ‘The Coppice’,
Nottingham, England. They were married at Gawler and returned to Palmerston with the three surviving children
of his first marriage, two daughters, Esther Eustace, aged 12, Grace Maud, four years, and his son William Sturt,
aged ten. They lived on Section 672 on the Esplanade at Palmerston, a block now occupied by the British Australian
Telegraph Museum Building (Lyons Cottage) and at one time held by the National Trust.
By the end of 1874, the population had grown to 600 white residents and 180 Chinese and Malays. Stores
had been opened, but there was no school, water cost ten shillings a load, and its cleanliness was not guaranteed.
Law and order was made difficult by the living conditions, many disputes at the goldfields, and by the residents
often refusing to pay taxes.
In February 1875, Dr Millner and all his family sailed on Gothenburg, returning to Adelaide because of illness.
Gothenburg was a steamer of 500 tonnes, with 86 passengers and 38 crew, and an experienced master, Captain
Pearce. In the early hours of 24 February, the ship struck a reef in Flinders Passage, off the Queensland coast,
gale force winds made it impossible to free her and 102 drowned in the wreck, swept from the deck and the boats.
All the Millner family perished.
The chancel in the Anglican Church at Yankalilla is dedicated to the Millner children. A street and suburb of
Darwin are named after James Stokes Millner and it is believed that George McLachlan named features south of
Darwin after the family.
P F Donovan, A Land Full of Possibilities: A History of South Australia’s Northern Territory, 1981; D Lockwood, The Front Door, 1968;
Northern Territory Times and Gazette, 6 March 1875; Adelaide Register, December 1872; SAA, 790/977/ 1863, 80/1870.
M E DIVE, Vol 1.
MILLS, WILLIAM WHITFIELD (1844–1916), surveyor, was born on the 19 November 1844, at Norley Street,
Plymouth, Devon, a few streets from Plymouth Hoe. He was the oldest of seven children, four boys and three
girls, born to Josias and Elizabeth Land Mills, a daughter of Alexander Grant Whitfield, a solicitor and freeman
of Plymouth. Josias Mills was variously described from time to time, as an auctioneer, a ‘fancy warehouseman’ or
dealer, a paperhanger and ‘fancy dealer’.
Mills was educated at Heavitree School about a mile east from Exeter on the road to London. He was a member
of the Church of England. On leaving school, Mills became a printer.
On 23 January 1866, he sailed from Plymouth in the 930-tonne three-masted sailing ship Atalanta, and arrived
at Port Adelaide on 15 April 1866. He had four Pounds in his possession on his arrival. He joined the South