Disturbing Old Ghosts

Lex and Mark casting for whiting at Record Point, Port Essington

Once in a while you have an opportunity to be part of something truly wonderful. Lex and I were invited to join an expedition organized by retired Darwin architect Peter Dermoudy to Victoria Settlement, Port Essington, to locate unmarked graves and to rescue the four existing grave monuments from the encroaching bush. Peter had recruited Geoff Annear and his 60 ft motor yacht Seacret to provide transport and accommodation for themselves and a dozen very keen expeditioners, including the Northern Territory Administrator Tom Pauling.

Monday 11 October we collected our friend Mark Day, a journalist with The Australian, from the airport and headed Tramontana out of the harbour. We slogged through strong headwinds and opposing tides, and with great relief dropped the anchor off Black Point, just inside Port Essington harbour, at midnight thirty hours later.

The settlement was the site of the third attempt at establishing a British presence on the north coast. The Dutch, French and Americans were perceived as a potential threat to the security of British ownership of northern Australia, so in 1838 a couple of boat loads of Royal Marines were despatched to remedy the situation. They formed a garrison about ten miles down the long, wide bay of Port Essington, at Adam Head, and called it Victoria, after the young Queen.

Yachts anchored off Adam Head

To put this in perspective, Melbourne had only been founded three years earlier,  Adelaide just the year before, and Darwin would not be surveyed until 1869. The landing of the First Fleet had only occurred 50 years before. There was essentially nothing comforting or familiar to Europeans in all the distance from the Swan River penal colony in the far south west, to the Moreton Bay convicts in the east.

Cemetery, with Emma Lambrick's monument at the rear

Victoria Settlement lasted for eleven years, during which some 58 people died – mostly from malaria - and were buried in what must be the loneliest cemetery in Australia.  In 1849 it was abandoned, and the garrison packed up and went home to England, taking with it Captain John MacArthur, nephew to his uncle of the same name who years earlier had kick-started the Merino sheep industry at Camden NSW, in between various duels and banishments. John MacArthur had not left Victoria in the entire eleven years, and barely escaped becoming a resident of the cemetery himself.

Apart from a short-lived attempt at a cattle business at the site in the 1870s, little has disturbed the ghosts of Victoria Settlement since then, apart from the odd visit by adventurous tourists. It’s too far off the track to become a regular destination, and difficult to get to without a boat.

The Cornish style chimneys, all that's left of the married quarters

Today, it’s as hot and lonely as it was in 1838. Breezes don’t seem to reach the cliff-top, and the light is stark and sharp. At the top of Adam Head, the white chalky cliff from which the settlement spreads out, a row of black stone chimneys is all that remains of the five cottages built for the married couples. It’s not difficult to imagine what a young English wife must have felt, coming ashore for the first time.

We set about disturbing the ghosts pretty quickly. Peter had a copy of a painting that showed the graves in relation to Mrs Lambrick’s monument, so rough sight lines were cleared through the tangled growth by hand to try to fix the positions where the unmarked graves might lie. Wayne then went to work with his non-invasive, ground penetrating radar machine, which looks a lot like a lawn mower, only silent. By the end of the day all 54 graves had been located. Furthermore, archaeologist Steve Sutton was able to confirm that the brick kiln was used to make charcoal and not lime as originally thought.
 

The ghosts were even more discomfited by the roar of chain saws the next day when the Black Point rangers joined the shore party. Several trees overhung the stone monuments, and these were cut down and removed, and the immediate area cleared. A search across the harbour the following day for the site of a boat building operation wasn’t so successful, although several stands of very old Tamarind trees were noted, evidence of the Macassan trepang fishermen who came regularly to trade with the Aboriginal people along the coast.

The last evening we held a play-reading of the play Cheap Living, a 1797 farce last performed at Victoria in October 1839, when Sir Owen Stanley called in and decided the troops needed entertaining. Peter Dermoudy had a copy of a painting of the original performance night, showing a rough stage draped with old ships’ ensigns. Old ships’ ensigns being hard to come by, Peter hand-painted some large sheets with Union Jacks, and hung them above the ruins of the hospital kitchen on bamboo poles. Lights were strung beneath, wired to a 12 volt battery. No noisy generator was going to remind us it wasn’t really 1839. Tom Pauling, a famous Darwin thespian as well as our current Administrator, directed the action.

For a couple of hours that night, Victoria came alive again as the stage lights glowed on weathered, crumbling brickwork and human voices drifted out across the silent bush. Ten people performed in the play, watched by another eighteen or twenty who leaned in through the window and door openings, the audience bolstered by three or four lucky yachts serendipitously visiting Victoria Settlement and receiving a once in a lifetime experience.

It was a weird and wonderful thing to do, to recreate an event like this at such a remote and isolated place. I'm sure the old ghosts heartily approved.