Day 37 - Garig Gunak Barlu National Park

From about 3am last night I kept hearing a strange noise, like something was chewing on the tent. I turned the torch on but couldn't see what it was as of course the noises stopped. In the morning we saw it was a green tree frog. It was jumping from George's bed onto the fly wire, but it couldn't grip there because of the slippery texture. These failed attempts made the scraping sound. Justin put it in an enamel cup and outside. It hung in there until it got its energy back then disappeared. It had been jumping for hours! Yesterday Justin had organised a boat tour we wanted to do of a failed English settlement across Port Essington. This meant we had to be at the boat ramp near the Rangers Station by 6.50. Given it is a 15 minute drive there, we did well to get there on time. We all had an apple and a muesli bar for breakfast though. It was the first dawn we'd seen all trip, and according to our guide Hugh, the first day of hte build up to the wet season. The overcast sky was making the morning very muggy, but made for some dramatic photos.

 

Hugh liked a bit of speed so Phoebe had fun with her hairstyle for the 14 nautical miles across to the ruins at Victoria Settlement.

 

Victoria Settlement was running only from 1838 to 1849. It was the third attempt for a settlement to be established in the north by Sydney. The powers that were at the time were worried about an invasion from the north by the Dutch or French. In the eleven years they managed to get five cottages built in the married quarters, a magazine, a hospital, hospital kitchen, a bakery, blacksmiths, a brick kiln, a jetty, Government House and a small customs building on the shore's edge, three wells, numerous other homes and inevitaly, a cemetary. There were around 80 people living here at most. Like most outposts in the period, they did it tough. Disease or childbirth took out a lot of the population and a cyclone was a further blow to numbers. Many buildings were wooden, so have been destroyed by termites over time, as have parts of all the remaining brick buildings.

 

The magazine (above).

 

 

Three of the Married Quarter cottages and a close up (above). These were built in a Cornish style because that was where the labour available originally came from. The rounded fireplaces are designed to give out maximum heat, not what you need in the tropics. The Settlement, also known a Port Essington, suffered from a lack of skilled labour. By the fifth of these cottages they had honed their skilled, therefore each successive cottage has survived better than any built previously.

 

The hospital kitchen with the hospital base bricks in the foreground.

 

Close-ups of the hospital kitchen (above). To me, the bread oven to Phoebe's left looks like the forerunner to modern pizza ovens. By the time the settlement's provisions arrived from Sydney, the flour was 80% weevils!

 

These are the views from the hospital, all very nice but working in this hospital in the 1800's was a big price to pay for the view. At one stage all in the settlement barr two had malaria.

 

It was a short distance from the hospital to the cemetery. Only four grave stones remain as all the rest had wooden crosses. There are 54 people buried here.

The above reads "In memory of Mrs Lambrick and child. Dearly beloved wife of Lutiant Lambrick 47 ROM Hobart Died Port Essington 1828-1848".

 

The top and bottom of the brick kiln.

 

The girls trying to pull the anchor after morning tea. Last week Hugh spotted dugongs here, but not today sadly. We returned home for a cooked brunch and a lazy afternoon in the heat. We decided to leave the next morning. I would love to come back here, but a boat would add an extra aspect to our time here. We felt we had done everything we wanted to do here, and some of us were getting crabby in the humidity. We had another frog on the tent that night. Tuscan meatballs and noodles was quick to prepare so I could focus on packing as much as possible for departure the following morning.

 

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