Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Ian Frazer answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

On June 26, 1872, the pioneering squatter William Hann left Mount Surprise, south-west of Cairns, for Princess Charlotte Bay — 300 miles away through a scrubby wilderness — with an Aboriginal guide, a surveyor, two scientists and two fellow bushmen.

Hann's pocket-sized diary gives, in 79 closely written pages, basic details of their meandering 137 day reconnaissance of the largely uncharted south-eastern interior of Cape York. In the 1970s, his descendants donated the diary to James Cook University Library, among personal papers including several notebooks from the northern expedition. Hann's mission from the Queensland Government was to gauge the character and mineral resources of country south of the 14th latitude with a view to future settlement and occupation. He recorded — in compass bearings, distances travelled, topography, botany and geology — each stage of navigating his party to a glimpse of the Coral Sea and back, on horseback and by foot. Hann, then aged 35, had lived in the north for eight years, running grazing properties in the Upper Burdekin with his brother Frank, in partnership with the north Queensland Government geologist Richard Daintree.

Well-known entries record the party's discovery, in early August 1872, of promising traces of gold in the stream Hann named the Palmer River after then Premier Arthur Palmer. Prospector James Venture Mulligan verified this find in August, 1873, leading to the Palmer River gold rush and founding of the port of Cooktown in 1874. But the diary is also significant for Hann's observations in country then regarded as the last remaining unexplored district in eastern Australia. He tells of a district barely recorded by the far north's earlier explorers Ludwig Leichhardt (1844 - 45), Edmund Kennedy (1848) and the pastoralists Frank and John Jardine (1864 - 65). Hann's sketches of generally peaceful encounters with Aboriginal people extended knowledge of the Cape's First People and contributed to his reputation as their friend.

The historiography of north Queensland acknowledges the diary as a valuable primary source. In 2019, two James Cook University researchers, botanist Dr John Dowe and historian Dr Kal Ellwood used it in separate studies; respectively dealing with the region's environmental and social fabric. Dowe co-authored The Botanical Collections of William Hann's Northern Expedition with Peter Illingworth Taylor, great-grandson of the expedition's geologist Norman Taylor. Ellwood's PhD thesis, A Shared History Forgotten: Aboriginal Miners and Prospectors of Tropical Queensland argues for the agency of Hann's guide, Jerry, as a crucial expedition member.