Long regarded as a fishing mecca, visitors arrive here by boat, plane and chopper.
But the first European visitor was Abel Tasman himself, in the mid 1600s. He was followed
by Matthew Flinders... the HMS Beagle, of Charles Darwin fame... and explorer William
Landsborough. With a pedigree like that, the local history
of this little island is also bound to be colourful.
Jase and Simon head off to meet the Island's custodian, Tex... here, at the abandoned town
of Carnarvon. There's some old lookin' graves here, Tex.
Yeah this fella was, gunner James Frost, he was a gunner on her Majesty's colonial sloop
Victoria. The first ship built for the Victorian Navy. It was in the Gulf lookin' for Burke
& Willis in 1861 when they established the depot here on the Island. And gunner Frost,
pulled his gun from under the bed by the barrel to clean it, and it happened to be loaded
with a double charge of powder and swan shot, discharged shooting him in the hip,
and he died four days later from gangrene. Obviously he wasn't a great gunner.
(Laughs) He was a gunner and he shot himself. Yep.
So, these graves are here from the original, there used to be like a whole town on this.
Yeah, ahh he was, he predated the town, but there was a town here in 1866, town was known
as Canarvon, and it was as a result of a plague, most likely malaria hitting Burketown. When
they got over here they had no idea what caused the illness, they thought it was miasma, vapors
off the swamps. It was May and June, ahh cool whether and
no mosquitos, malaria ceased to be contagious. Yeah.
What happened to the town that was here? Well, probably, fires, cyclones, termites,
got rid of it. Just completely gone.
Just completely gone, there's nothing. Nothing left, nothing left.
Nothing left, ahh sometimes square nails, broken bottles, broken crockery.
Well that's pretty cool, lets go see what else we can find, Tex.
So apparently mate there used to be a big old tree standing here with names carved in
it. What's with that? Well, sometime ago, it fell over in a cyclone,
and they took it down to a museum down in Brisbane. But the tree, the tree was where
in 1802 Matthew Flinders carved his name in there as a reference tree, basically. And
he was the guy that circumnavigated Australia and drew all the maps up.
Yep. So that we could see today, the Australian
map of today, he was the guy that, basically he was the forefather of drawin' the maps.
And he came here to get water, or he found water here or something didn't he.
Yeah well they'd come ashore apparently and they noticed in this soak here beside us there
was some shells and a bit of a digging from the local indigenous tribes. And of course
they knew where to get water, so if you ever come to an island mate, you're always lookin'
for those hollows and stuff like that, and if ya dig down, there's a good chance you'll
get water. But, even though the tree's not here now...
Replaced by a rock. Yeah, this rock. Replaced by a rock, stays
in the next cyclone, well there you go mate. That's a, there's a bit of history in this,
this little island mate. It's not just all about fishin' mate.
So what else are we going to see, mate? What else did Tex reckon we got around here?
Well, Tex reckoned there's a cave, a limestone cave.
Yep. And it's got names in it, like people have
scribed there names in there, and it's very, very old, some old old stuff in there mate,
some old scratchin's. Let's go check it out.
Alright let's go. Check it out, where you goin'?
It's this way. Sure it's not this way?
Nah this way. You sure?
I don't know, ask Tex! Where is he?
We finally catch up with Tex, and he leads us on a bush-walk to the hidden cave.
That's not a bad lookin' cave. No, initials and dates everywhere.
That's all that you can see, you can start, you can make out a bit there.
Yeah if you stay here long enough you can make out clearly what some of them are.
1918 there. Yeah 1918.
As you can see, there are names and initials from way back as far as 1866 carved in the
wall. Some of them are pretty hard to read, and some are quite legible. There's one there
1911 by the look of it. But most of it, most of them date back to when the town of Canarvon
was on the Island here. One of them over there is C.H.L, Caroline Hollingsworth Landsborough.
Yeah. Caroline was the wife of Williams Landsborough,
explorer and administrator and the first man to walk across Australia from North to South.
He came up here looking for Burke and Willis and tried to track, back track and he went,
went right through to Melbourne, not long after Burke and Willis' demise.
And there's more, outside the cave. You can see the initials here J.F. And, Tex
was telling me a story about that. It's Jane Fraser, and ten years of age, she come across
from England in the boat and she met an Irish guy, and they ended up on this island and
they were married five years later, but ya had to be twenty-one to be married without
your parents' consent back in those days. And twenty-one sure enough on the marriage certificate.
The poor girl had aged about eleven years in five. But that's what it was like in those
days. You did what you did to survive. It's quite a contrast. Our biggest worry out
here is figuring out where we're gonna find the fish. Mate, I think we've got it pretty
good compared to how they did it in the old days.