Some family friends have just recently been on a cruise on the Kimberley coast and sent our family these pics. The pics are of Sheep Island in the Camden Harbour area. My great great grandfather was the Walter named on the memorial plaque. He was a policeman and on the night he died of wounds (after being speared) his wife gave birth to my great grandmother. During the seven months of the ill fated settlement at Camden Harbour, 9 people died and were all buried on Sheep Island.
Dave, was he speared on the island or on the mainland and then buried on the island? anymore photos of the other grave stones if there? shane
The settlement was on the mainland (in the background of the boab pic). Walter & another policeman had gone off in search of an aboriginal man suspected of murder and he was speared in that encounter. Apparently he crawled for three days to get back to help before dying (probably from infection). Shortly after that the settlement was abandoned & Walter's widow and the 5 children suffered a horrendous trip back down to Fremantle and the whole ship were lucky to survive as they ran out of food and water and had terrible weather. There's a book, "There Were Three Ships" by Christopher Richards that tells the whole story. I think the dead were buried on the island to avoid them being dug up by animals (dingos) and the ground was probably much easier digging.
In July 2013, I snapped this pic of Samuel Johnson riding his unicycle past my front gate on his 364 day, 15,955km trip around Australia.
Looks pretty healthy compared to the canola crops we saw last week. Most of the stuff we saw was stunted, inconsistent in height and generally very poor, I doubt any of it would yield anything worth harvesting. From a distance it looked nice and yellow, but up close it was useless. It was the same around Lockhart this time last year when they were grtting ready to cut it for hay. Very sad to see.