Douglas, Harriet Willes ²¹¹

  General Notes:

Of Australia and Malaya.
From Peter Douglas - Harriet rammed the first telegraph Pole of the Overland Telegraph in Darwin. Her father was the Government Resident at the time. Peter has a newspaper article about it and a photograph. There is a plaque in Darwin.

Harriet Douglas, who was pictured opening the Darwin to Adelaide
telegraph line, had two children, a boy and a girl. I have in my
files copies of articles they wrote that were published in the
Sunday Times about their life in Borneo including some amusing
asides about their grandfather Bloomfield's temperament and language
and his crocodile shooting activities. If anyone is interested,
Bloomfield left the Royal Navy to get involved in a campaign in
Borneo that led to one of Mary Johnson's brothers being made Raja of
Sarawak. The dynasty became known as The White Rajas of Sarawak and
a number of books, both factual and fiction, have been written about
them. It will be interesting to see whether Bloomfield gets a
mention in any of them. (Chris Wheeler - see reference 6/10/04)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The following was published in the Sunday Times

THREE MONTHS BY SEA TO DARWIN

Governor's A.D.C. And His Wife As Pioneers

FREEMANTLE GALLEY SLAVES

Nurtured amid refinement, a girl was taken from her Adelaide home to help in pioneering the Northern Territory more than 60 years ago. This is the story of her experiences, told by her son.

By D. D. Daly, grand nephew of Sir Dominic Daly, former Governmor of South Australia.

In April, 1870, shortly after the return of Mr G. W. Goyder's surveying expedition in which my father took part, my grandfather Captain W. Bloomfield Douglas was appointed Resident of the Northern Territory of South Australia, as it was then called. He had held various appointments in South Australia for nearly 20 years, such as Harbormaster, Collector of Customs, and President of the Marine Board. He had a family of seven, ranging in ages from two to 19 years, and it was a great wrench for my mother, the eldest, and her sister, aged 17, to leave their many friends and old associations in Adelaide - especially as they had only recently "come out" and had been going to balls and parties at Government House - and go into what was practically exile.

The Government had bought a fast sailing Canadian-built schooner, originally meant for a slaver, the "Gulnare," of about 200 tons, for the use of the Northern Territory; and in this little vessel, my grandparents sailed, with their family and a nurse, for their future home.

At Port Darwin the great news was that an agreement had been concluded between the British Australian Telegraph Company and the South Australian Government to bring Australia into telegraphic communication with, not only the mother country, but the whole world. The voyage, including the three weeks spent at Brisbane, had taken nearly three months, a difficult thing to believe in these days of rapid transit in luxurious liners.

The first rude home

The new Resident and his family found it hard work at first to make their new quarters at all home-like; for they consisted only of very rough huts, and the accommodation was very limited for so large a party. The sleeping apartments were in a large log hut divided by partitions. The spaces between the polls were plugged with "paper bark,” a species of gum tree whose bark is nearly white and peels off in flakes. Their roof was bark also, and indeed, this material was called into requisition very freely throughout the settlement. The floors were made of mud, pressed flat and mixed with gravel, sand and limestone.

Windows of glass were unknown; they were only frames filled with unbleached calico swinging on a pivot, and there was only one sitting-room, a galvanised iron hut, always intensely hot throughout the day.

Riding expeditions were a great joy to my mother and her eldest sister, but before they were allowed to penetrate any distance into the heart of the country, they were taught revolver shooting. D-straps were fixed to their saddles, and they carried their weapons slung at their side.

At times, a shooting expedition was got up on Melville Island. Here, in 1825, Sir Gordon Bremer had formed a settlement, which, like the other attempts at colonisation on the coast, had been abandoned. The settlers had left buffaloes and ponies, and the numbers of these had, in the course of years, multiplied. Wild cattle also were sometimes seen here. The natives of Melville Island bore a very bad name at that time, and the Port Darwin blacks always maintained that “that fellow very bad one.” They used bows and arrows as well as spears. For all this, the shooting parties never came to any harm, and a little fresh buffalo meat for a change was most welcome.

Fixed First Transcontinental Telegraph Pole

After three months, everyone began to wonder when a ship would call in and bring news of the outer world. At last the Omeo, one of Meichan and Blackwood's steamers, came in early one morning and anchored in front of the camp, bringing the mails from Adelaide and a consignment of telegraphic material, together with the contractor and his men for the overland cable. Before a week had elapsed, on September 15 1870, the first telegraph pole was fixed; and the honor of doing this, amid a gathering of the whole little community fell to my mother.

When the Omeo steamed once more out of the harbor, it was little realised that 10 months were to elapse before news or letters would be received again. My mother told me that the Franco-Prussian war was fought and finished before they even heard of it.

In September, 1871, my mother, who had been engaged for some time, sailed for Adelaide in the Omeo, which made a long passage, owing to the shortage of coal on board and an adverse monsoon. The ship's boats and every available piece of timber were used for fuel; then the Omeo had to put into Brisbane for coal.

After their marriage at Adelaide, my parents settled at Narracoorte for 10 months.

In The Gold Rush

After delays due to difficulties in completing the land line and the breaking of the cable between Port Darwin and Banjoewangle, the two ends of the transcontinental line were united and the first message came through from Adelaide to Port Darwin on August 22, 1872. The audacity of the enterprise was no less great than the success with which it was carried out; and the next development that declared itself, through the opening up of the telegraph line, was the discovery of gold in the Northern Territory.

My parents were keenly watching the progress of events in their quiet little township home. The Northern Territory had grown dear to them, in spite of the hard and isolated life they had experienced there; moreover, both of them being born pioneers, they decided to try their fortunes once more at Port Darwin, and, leaving Narracoorte, they took passages in the Omeo from Melbourne in September, 1872. Port Darwin had seemed to them far more distant from Adelaide or Melbourne than England, until telegraphic communication was well established.

The "Omeo" was crowded to excess with diggers bound, not only for Port Darwin, but for Northern Queensland also. There had been a fresh discovery of gold there as well. The voyage was uneventful, and they steamed into Port Darwin, where every landmark was familiar to them both.

Excitement And Reaction

The story of this gold rush was the same as that of many another, excepting that in a tropical country the difficulties and hardships were infinitely greater for the multifarious seekers of fortune. Provisions, of course, rose to a fabulous price. Flour was £20 a ton, and the prices of cartage varied with each teamster's demand - it never went lower than £20 a ton, but the men gave any price asked, even to have their pickaxes and swag put upon the drays.

Following the great and unhealthy excitement came a reaction. My father, who had known the Territory as a surveyor and as a land selector, came to the conclusion that unless the reefs were systematically worked by proper machinery, there was no future for gold mining at all. He, therefore, determined to return to Adelaide, in order to procure the necessary plant, and be one of the first to place it upon the goldfields. Alas! All his hopes of success were frustrated by the extraordinary bad luck which pursued him on this voyage. The story of the "Springbok" has already been told in these columns.

Leaving The Territory

The Territory now presented no further inducements for waiting for what seemed a far-off hope of success, and, as things were at that time at the very lowest step of depression, my father and mother decided not to remain there, but to return to Adelaide at the earliest opportunity.

My grandfather had been across to Singapore, and had received an offer of employment in the Government service of the Malay States, which he accepted, as his family were now growing up and had wearied of the hardships and lack of civilisation of Port Darwin. Thus ended our connection with the Northern Territory.

On October 4, 1873, my father and mother left Port Darwin in and 80 ton schooner, the Mary King, for Adelaide. Though my mother knew that they would be very uncomfortable, she persuaded my father to risk no further delay by waiting for the chance of a larger vessel sailing within a reasonable time.

My mother seems to have rather overestimated her powers of "roughing it" at sea, for she had not been on board more than 24 hours before she regretted having sailed in so small a craft. There was no proper accommodation for ladies, and no privacy. The only other passengers were disappointed diggers returning from the goldfields, and these were suffering a recovery from their many "farewell" bouts. As a matter of fact, they turned out to be goodhearted fellows on the whole, but at first the small deck was covered with these sleepy men, some of them afflicted with delirium tremens, raving and staggering within a few yards of my mother's usual seat; and of course, their language was the reverse of what ought to have reached a woman's ears.

The Galley Slaves

The route taken by the Mary King was around the western coast of Australia, and the Leeuwin, the longest and most uninteresting passage to choose.

The ship encountered some very rough weather. Provisions commenced to run short. The diggers grumbled at their rations,, and frequently threw them overboard. By degrees all the tinned meat came to an end, likewise the potatoes, and there was only salt meat, biscuits, and duff left. My parents had the same rations as the fo'c'stle hands. It was decided to run into Freemantle for provisions. For the last two days before getting into port, the fare consisted of flour and water, with the few raisins thrown in. Rum, somehow, held out to the bitter end. It usually does! That and ale were all they had to drink, as even the supply of tea had given out. It can be imagined how my mother longed for a cup of tea!

On reaching Freemantle, they found no fewer than six ships hard and fast ashore as the result of a storm in a harbor then exposed to the full force of the "southerly buster." They saw one fine barque lifted by the huge angry green rollers and thrown violently on a ledge of rocks.

As soon as the little schooner was more, harbor and Customs officers came off to her, their boats manned by convicts dressed in prison clothing, freely decorated with numbers and emblazoned all over with the ominous broad arrow. The unfortunate creatures were chained to the thwarts, and as they bent to the oars their fetters clanked in the most dismal manner. This was quite a novel sight to my mother, as her own colony, South Australia, had started free of the convict taint. Apropos of this, she used to relate the disagreeable ordeal that visitors from Perth used to undergo on their arrival during her girlhood at Port Adelaide. Before landing, police officers were bought the ship and required the passengers to produce a document partaking of the nature of a passport, signed by Western Australian authorities, to prove that they were neither convicts or time-expired men.

At last they neared home. Heading out St. Vincent Gulf, they passed landmarks of a country which had been familiar to my mother ever since she was four years old. The range of hills behind Adelaide drew nearer and nearer, and they were signalled from the Semaphore. Their many discomforts and hardships were soon forgotten in the joy of landing at Port Adelaide; and thus came to an end the experiences of two pioneers in the Northern Territory.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ^152,346

Harriet married Living