Port Essington

Abstract

The 1840s military settlement of Victoria was established at Port Essington, the northernmost part of the Northern Territory and was the end point of Ludwig Leichhardt's epic journey in 1844-45. This settlement was the longest lived of three failed attempts by the British to establish a settlement on the northern coast of Australia before 1850. Its history reflects many of the dominant themes of wider colonial history - isolation, tropical disease, poorly equipped and inexperienced colonists, inept government bureaucracies and relations with the Indigenous population. By looking at both the material evidence produced by archaeological excavation and the written sources, Allen sought to integrate both sorts of evidence to produce an eclectic history that was neither social nor political nor economic in its primary emphasis, but combined all three. When his research was presented as a doctoral dissertation at the Australian National University in 1969 its main theoretical thrust concerned the problems of this data integration and this remains a central issue in the discipline of historical archaeology in Australasia.