John McDouall Stuart is one of the most famous australian explorer. And one of those who spent the most time discovering the outback. <\/p>\n
Born in Scotland, the 7 of september 1815, he’s the youngest boy of a family of 9 children. He studied at the Scottish Naval and Military Academy as a civil engineer, before he moved to Australia in 1838, at 23. He’s a slight delicately built man, about 168cm tall, and weighing less that 55 kg. When in arrived in South Australia, in 1839, there’s nothing to find there. He worked as a surveyor, in the semi arid scrub of the newly settled districts, making out blocks for settlers and miners. If life in camp is hard, Stuart quickly get a reputation of being someone extremely precise. <\/p>\n
In 1844, Captain Sturt took the young Stuart with him on an exploration journey to the Simpson Desert, one of the aridest part of South Australia. When the commandant in second died, Sturt appointed Stuart in his place. They finally managed to came back to Adelaide, but Sturt will never totally recover from the expedition, and it took Stuart one year to be able to work again. It’s only a few years later than Stuart will start heading expedition by himself. <\/p>\n
Because of its small seize, Stuart looks very friendly to aboriginal people, who quiet often help him, as they seems to find him less dangerous than the other white people. Known to be alcoholic, with sight problem, his body was still able to suffer lots of privation, and he had a very strong will. With not so many friend, he tried to avoid crowd as much as he can. He didn’t really matter what we was wearing, our how people saw him. He had everything of a sociopath, but seems to be highly trust for his survival skills in the outback. <\/p>\n
He had already lead two majors expeditions -leading them almost to what’s now the border between the Northern Territory- when Australian government starts the telegraph contest, with a 2,000 pounds price to win. The objective is to find a way to build a telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin. Darwin is already connected to Indonesia and, from there, to London. The idea of this telegraph line is to connect Sydney to the mother land. A few expedition was held, including the famous one by Burke and Wills (more details to come about this one too). <\/p>\n
Stuart lead a few expeditions north, going a little bit further each time. Traveling as light as he can, taking with him only a few men and dozen of horses. Going as far as he can, and then coming back. At his third attempt after the beginning of the contest, he finally reach Darwin area on the 24th of july 1862. He came back to Adelaide, where the price won’t be given to him. Known to be a drunk sociopath, he instead had a rent. The price went, instead, to a search program. Half blind of all this time spent in the desert, he finally came back to scotland, where in died on the 5th of june 1866. Story says that there was only one person to attend the funeral of this man who explored so much of Australia. <\/p>\n
The telegraph line was finally built following his advice. What of the constraint was to be able to find water source often on the road, to be able to build repeater office. Later, the Ghan railway follow part of the same trail too. As did the road, the Stuart Highway, that links Adelaide to Darwin. Some of the roadhouse, where you can often stop during the drive, are actually at the same place the old repeater office were\u2026 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John McDouall Stuart is one of the most famous australian explorer. And one of those who spent the most time discovering the outback. Born in Scotland, the 7 of september 1815, he’s the youngest boy of a family of 9 children. He studied at the Scottish Naval and Military Academy as a civil engineer, before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quelques-mots-sur-la-route","category-australia-northern-territory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4209"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4210,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4209\/revisions\/4210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/pourquoi-pas.info\/Tetenbas\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}