Our thirty-second treasure is one of the original diaries from an expedition that would significantly influence the history of north Queensland settlement. From the Library Archives comes William Hann's diary.
Ian Frazer answers the question "why is this significant?"
William Hann’s respect for the Aboriginal people of Cape York is expressed matter-of-factly in the daily log of his 1872 expedition from Mount Surprise to Princess Charlotte Bay and back.
Until recently, seeing this pocket-sized diary involved visiting JCU’s Eddie Koiki Mabo Library in Townsville armed with a pencil, gloves and digital camera. The Hann Family Archive has been in the safe keeping of JCU Library’s Special Collections for the past 40 years. Now, digitised as one of Special Collections’ 50 Treasures, Hann’s daily diary notes on the Northern Expedition — June 26 to November 11, 1872 — can be studied online alongside his official expedition diary (published in June, 1873), and easily accessible on the National Library of Australia’s Trove website. His jottings on a dozen or so encounters with the cape’s first people are all enlarged on in his official expedition diary. Some of the incidents are also mentioned in two field notebooks, less legible than the diary and not available online.
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| William Hann's expedition diary. Photograph by Micahel Marzik. |
Hann and his wife, Mary, were remembered after their deaths, respectively, in 1889 and 1894, as friends of the Aboriginal people in their district of the Upper Burdekin. William’s biographer Geoffrey Bolton, cited a story that Hann had killed a bullock for a corroboree in the 1870s that drew a crowd of 300 to Maryvale, the Hann family property. William J. Fox’s History of Queensland, Its People and Industries, published in 1923, records that Mary, while living at Bluff Downs in the 1860s, had in her husband’s absence dealt courteously and fearlessly with a large deputation of Aborigines, ensuring long-lasting mutual respect. In 1923, journalist Spencer Browne remembered William and his brother Frank as `good friends to the blacks’.
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| An excerpt from August 1872, where the expedition party found gold on the Palmer River. |
William Hann’s digitised diary shows his reliance on his Aboriginal guide, Jerry, during four-and-a-half sometimes fraught months in uncharted scrub— as a go-between, savvy bushman and friend. He signed off the official version of his diary with this tribute: `I would especially refer to the native boy, Jerry, who . . . was faithful and obedient in every difficulty and staunch in every danger.’ Incidentally, the party of six also owed much to 20 long-suffering horses who carried them most of the 600 miles with stores including 300kg of food
and three boxes of ammunition. They seem to have feasted on 25 of Hann’s sheep along the way.
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| William Hann, 1873. North Queensland Photographic Collection, NQID20875. |
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. William, 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.
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| Mary Hann, wife of William Hann. From the State Library of Queensland, available online. Photographic print: black & white, Negative Number: 54812. |
The best-known of his diary entries record the party’s discovery, in early August 1872, of promising traces of gold in the stream Hann named the Palmer River after 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.
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| Members of the Hann expedition party: Thomas Tate, William Hann, Fred Warner and Norman Taylor. North Queensland Photographic Collection, NQID20148. |
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.
Over the course of 2020, JCU Library's Special Collections will be unveiling 50 Treasures from the collections to celebrate 50 years of James Cook University.
Author Biography
Ian Frazer grew up in southern NSW with many Queensland relatives and handed-down stories of the Palmer Rush. A journalist interested in history, he trained on the Goulburn Evening Post, in 1972 replete with musty files. In 1996, fed up with chilblains, he moved North, worked for the Townsville Bulletin for 20 years and is now writing a biography of the Sunshine State's famed meteorologist Clement Wragge. Ian has studied history at the Australian National University (BA 1975, MLitt 1997) and JCU (MA 2003) and has written one other biography, on medical missionary Ed Tscharke — God’s Maverick — published in 1992.
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