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Having discovered that he had personally tendered for new mail contracts, his employers promptly accused him
of ‘flagrant disloyalty’ and his services were terminated. It is clear from the correspondence that Stevens regarded
Goldsborough Mort’s coffers as a bottomless pit. He also had a lease, taken over by C E Gore, over Croker Island
that was another interest the company may not have known about.
Stevens completed the mail contracts sailing as Master of Kookaburra, but was undercut by A E Jolly and
Company for the next contracts. He disposed of his interests and left the Territory in June 1901 in his ship, bound
for Brisbane. Despite the fact that Jolly and Company’s vessel was wrecked within three months Stevens was
unable to regain the contract though there is no doubt that he knew the Northern Territory coastal and river waters
better than anyone else of his day. Many, many ships were stranded but there is no record of any vessel under his
command getting into difficulties. He was undoubtedly a superb seaman.
His business interests precluded him from playing any other role in the life of Palmerston, and for this he was
criticised in the Northern Territory Times and Gazette, though he occasionally played cricket and participated
in regattas. In 1891, he was appointed Dutch Consul to succeed V L Solomon, who by then sat in the South
Australian legislature.
Stevens married Rosy Emma, one of Paul Foelsche’s two daughters, in about 1885. (There is no direct
evidence of the marriage but there are no registrations for the last six months of 1885). Four children were born
of the marriage. Rosy Stevens and the children left for South Australia in July 1900. The cyclone in January
1897 had virtually demolished around them a substantial six roomed stone and brick home that was built in 1883.
This stood on the Esplanade on Lot 648 and was leased from the South Australian government that bought it, to be
used as a residence for the judge, in 1884 for 2 000 Pounds. Stevens only briefly held freehold land in Palmerston.
He purchased Lots 665 and 517 in 1884 but the following year they were transferred to the Earl of Rosebery.
From 1886 to the end of 1894, he ran his office from Lot 518 on the corner of Knuckey and Smith Streets, a site
that for many decades of the 20th century was identified with F E Holmes. Prior to that, his base had been a stone
and brick residence on part of Lot 526 at the corner of Smith and Bennett Streets. This is where a bank now stands
but which for decades was identified with A E Jolly and Company.
The family settled in Brisbane for the next 12 years, spent three years in Sydney while the children finished their
schooling, and then moved to Singapore where Stevens again had business interests and where he remained until
his death in early 1942, shortly after being made a prisoner of the Japanese following their capture of Singapore.
During that time, he was one of the founding members of the Royal Singapore Yacht Club. In old age, he became
something of a notable eccentric around the Singapore waterfront.
He was undoubtedly an adaptable and resourceful man. His early pioneering days in the north were a far cry
from the upbringing of his childhood, but apart from commenting in his memoirs that he ‘had evidently landed
at the wrong end of Australia’ he quickly ‘became acclimatised and accustomed to the fact that we were cut
off from the rest of the world except by an under-sea wire!’ His main complaint in fact was that there were so
few ‘ladies’.
Reverend Julian E Tenison Woods, the redoubtable cleric and traveller, described him as one of the ‘leading
men of the Territory, a squatter, bushman, a sailor, an engineer, a man ready and fit for any hard work and to whose
good sense, courage and coolness one could trust anything.’ There was something of the rogue about him. He left a
thrilling story about the newly constructed Victoria riding out a typhoon in Hong Kong on her delivery voyage yet
according to the press reports he was not on board. Goldsborough Mort who were his employers for so many years
get scant mention in his memoirs. Perhaps the title Reminiscences of a Hard Case reflected his view of himself,
though his advice to young men making their way in a developing country was to ‘be good tempered whatever
happened’. He was not the first, nor would he be the last, to claim credit not strictly his due but he was the man
on the spot and there is no question that the developments which occurred under his guidance were a result of his
advice to his employers.
Whatever his personal characteristics, Stevens was, however, a very important figure in the nineteenth
century Northern Territory. Men of his energy and resourcefulness were needed for the little which was achieved
although almost always their efforts were destroyed or hampered by the dilettante succession of South Australian
governments. He certainly had the respect of business colleagues. After he left the Territory, he borrowed at least
300 Pounds from W J Lawrie, who by then owned Marrakai, among other properties. Lawrie died in January 1920
but in his will he made special provision for the money Stevens owed to him. It was to be repaid at Stevens’s
‘discretion’ and he was not to be ‘inconvenienced or unduly pressed for payment.’
M Durack, Kings in Grass Castles, 1959; I Hepburn, No Ordinary Man, nd; E Hill, The Territory, 1951; W J Sowden, The Northern Territory
as It Is, 1882; H W H Stevens, Reminiscences of a Hard Case, 1937; North Australian, 15 October 1887; Northern Territory Times and Gazette,
8 August 1874, 29 August 1885, 14 November 1885, 15 October 1887, 1 January 1892, 25 January 1897, 7 April 1899, 19 October 1900,
24 June 1901, 5 July 1901, 24 September 1901, 27 December 1901, 10 January 1902, 7 March 1902, 29 August 1902, 28 August 1903,
24 June 1904, 17 February 1905, 13 March 1908, 1 October 1909, 29 July 1910, 31 May 1912; Archives of Business and Labour, Australian
National University, Goldsborough Mort Papers, Deposit 2; Northern Territory Archives Service, E96/108, NTRS 790, A10164; State Records
of South Australia, GRS 1– 227/1891, 511/1891, 632/1892.
HELEN J WILSON, Vol 2.
STEVENSON, GEORGE JOHN WILLIAM (1839–1893), lawyer and politician, was born on 7 May 1839 in a
small pioneer cottage that still stands at 88 Finniss Street, North Adelaide, son of George Stevenson and Margaret,
nee Gorton. George Stevenson, Stir, had been private secretary to Governor Hindmarsh, first governor of South
Australia, and had read the Proclamation at Glenelg on 26 December 1836. He was also the foundation editor and
co-owner of the colony’s first newspaper, the South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register. Throughout his life