Port Essington

Port Essington; an engraving

The French explorer Jules Dumont D'Urville, after a visit to the new settlement of Port Essington, wrote "The British consider themselves the owners of the whole of New Holland. It is mainly to indicate that assumption of ownership and to secure this vast territory that they are so persistent about establishing an outpost on these inhospitable shores." (Dumont D'Urville vol. 2, p. 390) Dumont D'Urville called in at the new settlement on his return voyage to France after explorations in Antarctica and the Pacific. The settlement of Fort Victoria had been founded just five months when the French expedition was there in April 1839. Dumont D'Urville's artist Louis LeBreton drew three views of it which were published in Voyage au pole sud et dans l'Oceanie : sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zelee, ... Atlas pittoresque vol. 2 plates 118 - 120.

Previous attempts at settlement on the north coast of Australia had failed dismally. Fort Dundas on Melville Island (1824-29)was geographically isolated and poorly sited on the island. While Fort Dundas still struggled, a second attempt at a settlement was tried, this time on the mainland on the Cobourg Peninsula. This was Fort Wellington in Raffles Bay. The harbour was better but otherwise conditions were not. Both settlements struggled to cope with the extremes of the tropical weather patterns, their isolation, the distance from the colony in Sydney and from the home government in England. Fort Dundas was abandoned on 31 March 1829 and Fort Wellington in August of the same year.

Increasing use of Torres Strait by shipping and the growing number of shipwrecks this entailed, led for renewed calls for a settlement on Australia's north coast. Finally, in October 1838 a settlement was established at Port Essington. Phillip Parker King, who surveyed the northern coasts of Australia (1817-19), described the harbour as 'equal to if not superior, to any I ever saw...' (quoted in Powell p. 51). Victoria, as the new settlement was called, was settled by soldiers and marines as with the previous attempts. However no land sales were offered by the Colonial Office so any chance of private development was stymied. Once again the settlement, almost totally reliant on supplies from Sydney or Timor, stagnated. It struggled on until 1849 before it too was abandoned.

No further attempts at settlements on Australia's north coast would be made until after South Australia annexed the Northern Territory in 1863. It too made some poor choices until George Goyder, Surveyor-General of the colony, selected Port Darwin in 1869.

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