William Mortlock
9 November 1843 William Mortlock William Mortlock arrived in South Australia on 9 November 1843 and on 17 December sailed to Sydney returning with a quantity of mixed merchandise. He established himself as a maltster with interests in flour milling. In 1847 he undertook his first pastoral venture near Port Lincoln which, with additions, eventually became Yalluna Station. In 1850 in Port Lincoln he married Margaret, the 18 year-old daughter of John Tennant. In the 1860s he greatly extended his holdings which included Pichi Richi, Mount Arden and Yudnapinna leases. He represented Flinders in the House of Assembly for various terms from 1868-84. He died at Avenel House, Medindie on 10 May 1884. His son William inherited his estates and later bought Martindale Hall from Edward Bowman. The Mortlock family are remembered for their generous bequest to the Waite Research Institute and the Mortlock Library which held South Australian archival material. D. Pike (ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 5, pp.301-02.
Disappearance Of Henry Bryan
26 November 1839 Disappearance of Henry Bryan On 26 November 1839 Lieutenant J.S. Pullen with Governor Gawler, Captain Sturt, Henry Inman and two gentlemen of the Governor’s household, Gill and Henry Bryan, began a journey up the River Murray from Lake Alexandrina. Lieutenant Pullen had been appointed Commander of Colonial Marine and Marine Surveyor of South Australia on 31 may 1839. He had arrived in South Australia with Colonel Light in the brig Rapid on 18 August 1836 and with him had surveyed the mouth of the Murray and sailed into the Port River on 28 September. Later, on his own, he surveyed Port Elliot and much of the south coast. The exploratory trip up the Murray ended disastrously. On reaching the Elbow (Morgan) the party was met with supplies and horses sent from Adelaide and on 11 December set out to travel in a north-westerly direction towards the ranges, the highest peak visible was give the name Mount Bryan. After two days riding in very hot weather and with their water supply dwindling both men and horses were suffering. On the return journey to the river Bryan, whose horse was slow, lagged behind the main group. He was never seen again in spite of an intensive search over eight days. The Governor and the remainder of the party arrived back in Adelaide on 28 December. Pullen returned to England and served with the Royal Navy, rising to the rank of Vice Admiral, and continued his adventurous life in the Arctic. Goolwa was at first called Port Pullen in his honour. George Loyau, The Representative Men of South Australia , Adelaide, 1883, pp.197-98. James Hawker, Early Experiences in South Australia , Facsimile edition 1975, pp.54-7.
Sir Hans Heysen
11 November 1908 Sir Hans Heysen On 11 November 1908 Hans Heysen and his wife were able to fulfil a long held wish when they went to live in his beloved Hahndorf. Hans Heysen came to South Australia from Hamburg as a young boy and by the time he was 16 he was painting watercolours of the countryside around Hahndorf. On weekdays he worked as an errand boy for a hardware store at Norwood and later travelled around the local area, six days a week, selling butter and eggs from his father’s produce cart. One day a pawnbroker offered him £2 15s per week for six watercolours and three oils and Heysen began his career as a serious painter. In October 1899 he left for Europe and for four years studied in France and Italy. On his return he married and taught art in Adelaide. A successful exhibition of his work in Melbourne in 1908 enabled him to set up his home in Hahndorf. For the rest of his life he lived and worked there, painting the people, animals, buildings and particularly the trees of the Adelaide Hills and other parts of SA winning the Wynn Prize nine times He died on 2 July 1968 and his studio where he worked for more than fifty years is preserved as his memorial. Colin Thiele, Heysen’s Early Hahndorf, Rigby, 1976.
Thomas Worsnop
12 November 1852 Thomas Worsnop Thomas Worsnop who arrived in South Australia on 12 November 1852 had a variety of jobs before he became Town Clerk of Adelaide in 1869. He first settled at Port Elliot with his family and worked as a storeman for Elder, Stirling & Company for seven years. In 1859 he was appointed a sergeant in the SA Volunteers, for a time he worked on the land but not with great success, then as a traveller for Logue’s Brewery and in 1863 was lessee of the Globe Inn in Rundle Street, but was declared bankrupt in May 1864. He then worked as a teamster in the north. In September 1866 he became a clerk in the Town Clerk’s department and on 11 January 1869 was appointed acting town clerk taking over permanently later that year. He was a good administrator and was able to reduce the debt of the city council. He was also most concerned with protecting the parklands. In 1878 he wrote a detailed History of the City of Adelaide and later published several papers on Aboriginal artefacts and weapons. He died on 24 January 1898 at his home in Barnard Street, North Adelaide. Bede Nairn (ed), Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 6, p.440.
Parsee Wreck
13 November 1838 Parsee wreck On Tuesday 13 November 1835 the sailing ship Parsee was wrecked on Troubridge Shoal, but owing to the remoteness of habitation the news did not reach Adelaide for five days. Two passengers had managed to cross the gulf in an open boat to seek help. The ship was en route from Hobart with 60 passengers and cargo and had run aground in fair weather being some 70 miles off the proper course. All the passengers were able to get ashore to a small, sandy island, but there was no shelter as it was only covered by low scrub. The only fatality was one woman who was seriously ill and died before help reached them. Governor Gawler sent the Rapid with a doctor on board to rescue the castaways but due to headwinds it did not reach the island until a week after the disaster. This ship was only one of a number which came to grief on the reef at Troubridge before a lighthouse was installed there in 1856. James Hawker, Early Experiences in South Australia , Facsimile edition, 1975, p.34.
Adam Lindsay Gordon
14 November 1843 Adam Lindsay Gordon Adam Lindsay Gordon, who was born in the Azores in 1833, arrived in South Australia in the Julia on 14 November 1853. He joined the mounted police and was stationed in the South-East at Penola and Mount Gambier for two years and for a time lived at Dingley Dell near Port MacDonnell. Renowned as a great horseman he rode in steeplechases on country racecourses and is said to have jumped his horse over a fence, and back, on a narrow section around the lake at Mount Gambier just where the ground falls away steeply. After leaving the police force he worked for a time a horse breaker and was persuaded to enter parliament. But he was not a good politician and only stayed a short time. He left South Australia in 1869 and lived on a pastoral property in Victoria. Described as a complicated and introverted man, one of his best poems The Sick Stockrider shows the inner depression which often gripped him, but also shows his love of the bush. The depression finally brought him to despair and he shot himself on a beach near Brighton in Victoria on 24 June 1870. 100 Famous Australian Lives , Paul Hamlyn, Sydney, 1969, pp.146-53.
Sir Charles Todd
15 November 1872 Sir Charles Todd On 15 November 1872 the Post-Master General and Superintendant of Telegraphs, Charles Todd, was given a public demonstration of appreciation on the completion of the Overland Telegraph lines to Darwin. In 1870 the South Australian Government entered into an agreement by which the British and Australian Telegraph Company agreed to connect Singapore with Port Darwin by cable and the colony was to construct an overland line across the continent. Charles Todd was given the task of overseeing the erection of the line which followed, roughly, the route taken by Stuart. Through this vast treeless, largely desert country a line of 1755 miles was erected using 36,000 poles of timber, some carted hundreds of miles, at a cost of £480,000. Work was begun at each end and the wires met at the centre of the continent in August 1872. Todd, using a small pocket set, made the first two-way communication with England from a camp at Central Mount Stuart. Todd was later conferred with an honorary degree (MA) from Cambridge in 1886, was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1889, and received a knighthood (KCMG) in 1893. H.M. Cooper, A Naval History of South Australia, Adelaide, 1950, p.94.
Pastor Kavel And Captain Hahn
16 November 1838 Pastor Kavel and Captain Hahn On 16 November 1838 Pastor August Kavel, a Lutheran minister, and about 250 people who had fled from religious persecution in Prussia, arrived in Port Adelaide in two ships from Hamburg. Their passage had been made possible with the help of George Fife Angas. At first they set up huts on land owned by Angas to the north of Adelaide and called their village Klemzig. The rental was to be £10 per acre per year. Early in 1839 a further group of Germans arrived in the Danish ship Zebra , captained by Dirk Hahn. It was first intended that they should join Kavel’s people at Klemzig, but Captain Hahn determined to see them properly settled. On the invitation of William Dutton he accompanied him and his two partners to inspect land they were having surveyed at Mount Barker, which greatly impressed Hahn. An agreement was reached whereby Dutton and his partners would rent 150 acres to the immigrants and help them become established by providing them with animals and seed on credit until they could harvest their first produce. In early March after an arduous trek from Port Adelaide they began to build their village of Hahndorf. The industrious Germans, both men and women, through sheer hard work overcame the difficulties and trials of starting with nothing and after many years of hard struggle were able to buy their land and repay their debts to Dutton and Angas for their passage money. Anni Luur Fox, Hahndorf , Fox Publishing, 1977, pp.9-22.
Wonga Shoal
17 November 1912 Wonga Shoal Just after daybreak on 17 November 1912 a young lad noticed that the Wonga Shoal light, nearly two miles off the Semaphore jetty had disappeared. He hurriedly told his father, a local pilot, who took some convincing until he reached the Esplanade and could see for himself. During the night the ship Dimsdale sailing towards the anchorage crashed into the lighthouse, knocking it over and the two keepers were drowned. The lighthouse, completed by July 1901, was an iron structure on screw piles with accommodation for two keepers. The revolving light, weighing 11 tons floating on a bath of mercury weighing 5 tons, was 74 feet above the highwater and was visible for 19 miles. After the destruction of the light a temporary lightship was moored on the spot and was replaced in 1923 by a new structure fitted on to the old screw piles. This served until 1962 when with the erection of a new lighthouse on O’Halloran Hill at Marino Rocks, which covered the Wonga Shoal sector (Wonga being Aboriginal for west or sunset) it was removed. Captain J. Maitland Thompson, ‘Wonga Shoal’ The First 100 Years of Semaphore 1883-1983 , pp.19-20.
Christmas Pageant
18 November 1933 Christmas Pageant The first John Martin’s Christmas pageant paraded through the streets of Adelaide, from Angas Street to the store in Rundle Street, on Saturday 18 November 1933. Aeroplanes flew low over the city with loud hailers to advertise the event. The cast ranged from the ‘Old woman who lived in a shoe’ to the one and only Father Christmas. The most ambitious float was a battle cruiser, manned by a female crew, and complete with guns, Britannia and John Bull with bulldog. Thousands of people lined the street to see the eight floats with three bands. Apart from five years during the war (1940-44) the pageant has thrilled young and old every November and over the years has grown larger and more spectacular. In 1987 there were 72 sets which included 61 floats, 16 bands from the city and country towns and over 1300 people taking part. Traditionally the Pageant was set off, right on time, when Sir Edward Hayward blew a whistle; he did this every year until his death in 1983. From 1986 the State Bank joined forces with John Martin’s and now, this well-loved annual event goes under the banner of the Credit Unions. In 2009 the pageant had 3873 volunteers in the parade and behind the scenes working hard to present the spectacle. Advertiser , 20 November 1933.