Castaways - Unintentional migrants as featured in the JCU Library Special Collections "Origins" displays

Shipwrecks producing castaways may be familiar tropes in fiction, but they are also grounded in real events. Across Australia’s history, such events have occurred with regularity. Their occurrence in north Queensland has most often been because of close encounters with the Great Barrier Reef. Those who survived these wrecks became unintentional migrants - people cast into unfamiliar territories and cultures. Some were rescued, others were not. All were shaped by the communities they encountered, and through their stories, helped shape how the wider world came to understand the peoples with whom they lived. 

Wood engraving of James Morrill by Samuel Calvert, dated 1863. Source: State Library of Victoria.

One of the most well-known castaways from the Townsville-Bowen region is the English sailor James Morrill. in 1846, the Peruvian, en route from Sydney to China, was wrecked on Horseshoe Reef during a storm. Morrill and six other survivors, near to death, washed ashore on the southern point of Cape Cleveland, just south of present-day Townsville. Three of these survivors perished before Morrill and the other three were found and cared for by members of the Bindal People. Before long Morrill was the sole European survivor. He was adopted by, and went on to live with, the Bindal people around Mount Elliot, later spending time with the Juru People to the south, before returning again to the Bindal on their country. Throughout the 1850s he had no contact with Europeans. His account of this period, and the people he lived with, survives in his short memoir, Sketch of a Residence among the Aboriginals of Northern Queensland for Seventeen Years, a rare book held in the JCU Library Special Collections and one of the Library’s 50 Treasures. See this precious item on display right now in the “Origins” displays on level 1 of the Mabo Library. 

Sketch of a Residence by James Morrill, Rare Book Collection, JCU Library Special Collections.

In 1861, as the Kennedy District was ‘opened up’ to pastoral expansion, European incursions intensified which brought increased frontier violence. After mass killings of his adoptive kinspeople in the early 1860s, Morrill sought to act as intermediary and advocate for the plight of the traditional peoples. He approached a homestead in the Burdekin delta in January 1863, and when met with the threat of being shot, he reportedly shouted, 'Don't shoot mateys, I'm a British object.' His attempt to bridge two worlds, in that place and time, reflects both the possibilities and the limits of such roles on a violent frontier—one that ultimately proved untenable for him and unwinnable for the First Peoples themselves. 

Untitled [HMS Rattlesnake?], 1891, by William Frederick Mitchell. Purchased 1964. Te Papa (1992-0035-1897).

 

Further north, around the same time, another story unfolded. Barbara Crawford Thompson, a Scottish-born woman who had been living in Sydney, became the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the Torres Strait in 1844. The vessel she was in was destroyed on a reef near Horn Island during a storm. Rescued from drowning, she was taken in and adopted by Kaurareg Islanders from Muralag (Prince of Wales) Island, among whom she lived for five years. The biography, Wildflower: the Barbara Crawford Thompson story, written and published by Raymond John Warren, Brisbane in 2007/8 tells her tale. 

Another book which has been labelled “the most reliable modern source on the voyage and its encounter with Barbara Thompson is The Rattlesnake: A Voyage of Discovery to the Coral Sea, by Jordan Goodman (Faber & Faber, 2005)" (1), which can be found in JCU Library’s General Collection and the Shaw Collection. 

Thompson’s story entered the English-speaking world through the 1852 publication Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. Rattlesnake by John MacGillivray. When the ship encountered Thompson, she was taken aboard and later returned to Sydney. The marine artist Oswald Brierly, who was on board, recorded her recollections of life with the Islanders. Some of Sir Oswald Walters Brierly’s original drawings, now held in JCU Special Collections (part of the 50 Treasures), capture the region connected to her experience.

H.M.S. Rattlesnake, June 7th, 1848, by Oswald Walters Brierly. Pencil on paper, 16.5 x 54.5 cm. JCU Art Collection. Photograph by Michael Marzik.

MacGillvray described Thompson as being returned to her parents in Sydney “in excellent condition”(2. p. 163). Yet, unlike many male castaways, Barbara Crawford Thompson disappears from the historical record after her return. Whether by choice or circumstance, she did not assume the role of intermediary or public witness. Her relative absence from the archives and the limelight reflects the kinds of stories colonial audiences were more inclined to value and preserve—those that reinforced familiar narratives and stereotypes of ‘wild and marauding natives’, rather than accounts that complicated or challenged such views. 

ITM435752: Photographic material - Historical-Personalities, Dept no A209, Queensland State Archives.

 Another well-known castaway story from north Queensland is that of Narcisse Pelletier. In 1858, at just fourteen years old, the French cabin boy was abandoned after the wreck of the Saint-Paul on the eastern coast of Cape York Peninsula, south of present-day Lockhart River. He was rescued and adopted by an Aboriginal family of the Uutaalnganu-speaking Pama Malngkana (Sandbeach People). Pelletier lived with them for seventeen years, becoming fully integrated into community life. He learned language, participated in cultural practices, and underwent initiation ceremony. 

In 1875, however, he was taken against his will (by his own account), by the crew of a British pearling vessel and transported to Sydney, before being returned to France later that year. He remained there until his death in 1894. 

His experiences were first recorded in Dix-sept ans chez les sauvages (Seventeen years with the Savages): les aventure de Narcisse Pelletier by Constant Merland. This text includes some of the earliest sheet music to record Aboriginal songs.. The featured four Cape York Songs were transcribed and arranged by Edouard Garnier from the singing of Narcisse Pelletier, with the lyrics written phonetically in language. 

Recent publications featured in the library display about Pelletier’s story include Stephanie Anderson’s Pelletier - The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York. Published by Melbourne books (2009), it contains an introductory essay and English translation of the original book about Pelletier’s experiences by Merland, and an ethnographic commentary by Athol Chase, and can be found in the library’s General Collection. Robert Macklin’s Castaway: The extraordinary survival story of Narcisse Pelletier, a young French cabin boy shipwrecked on Cape York in 1858, published in 2019, is held in the Library’s NQ Collection and Shaw Collection of Australian Art & Culture. 

The North Queensland Collection copy of Living with the locals: Early Europeans' experiences of Indigenous life.

These individual accounts are brought together in broader works such as Living with the Locals, Early Europeans’ Experience of Indigenous Life, by John Maynard and Victoria Haskins, published by the National Library of Australia (NLA) in 2016. Drawing on extensive archival research and the work of numerous recent researchers, the book situates stories like those of Morrill, Thompson, and Pelletier within a wider pattern of cross-cultural encounters and relationships across Australia in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ABC news, in promoting this book, published an article by the authors about its development which features a series of six short animations celebrating these first contact stories of friendship and survival, under the same name: Living with the Locals. 

As unintentional migrants, these castaways occupied a unique position between worlds. Their stories, shaped by survival, adaptation, and cultural exchange, continue to expand our understanding of Australia’s shared and contested past. 

Castaways – unintentional migrants is an aspect of the JCU Library Special Collection’s current Origins displays that are on view on Level 1 of the Eddie Koiki Mabo Library, JCU Bebegu Yumba Campus, Townsville / Thul Garrie Waja until Sunday 19th April 2026. 

You can find more books about castaways and NQ ‘shipwreck survivors’ in the JCU Discovery Collection - Studies in North Queensland History. 

References

1. Ashworth, W. B., Jr. (2025, October 16). Scientist of the day: Barbara Crawford Thompson. Linda Hall Library. https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/barbara-crawford-thompson/

2.  Maynard, J., & Haskins, V. (2016). Living with the locals. NLA Publishing.