How the Leichhardt and other Gulf river got their names

No European came to the Gulf via the land route until Ludwig Leichhardt's successful first expedition of 1844-45. Leichhardt followed the Dutch naming convention of known rivers while filling in the gaps where necessary. But Leichhardt was let down by poor maps in the maze of rivers and two of those he named were overlooked by those who followed. Upstream, one of those rivers flowed into what would eventually become Mount Isa and in a quirk of fate that river eventually named for Leichhardt himself, something he would never have done himself. The best explanation of how things went wrong is provided by Colin Roderick in his monumental life of "Leichhardt the Dauntless Explorer".

Leichhardt was an excellent navigator, but for his journey from west of Brisbane to the Cobourg Peninsula he was reliant on the 1838 map of Australia produced by English cartographer John Arrowsmith. Much of the area he and his group travelled through was blank on Arrowsmith's map though maritime surveys such as that of Flinders (1802) and the Beagle (1841) had determined coastal features visible from the sea and no navigator had seen the mouths of the many rivers he discovered. The first half of Leichhardt's journey log has disappeared but the second half in conjunction with his fieldbooks and rough maps enabled deputy-surveyor Samuel Perry draw a map which was refined by Arrowsmith to go with the 1847 version of the book of Leichhardt's travels: Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia from Moreton Bay to Port Essington.

Leichhardt took a circuitous route to get there, following the river systems of the Condamine and then north along rivers he himself named, the Dawson, McKenzie, Fitzroy, Burdekin, Lynd, and Mitchell. He finally found a Dutch-named river, the Staaten to break through the Gulf, though it was a fair way up Cape York and his party needed to go south-west before travelling west. But as he reached the southern shores of the Gulf, his whereabouts were misunderstood by Perry based on incorrect assumptions from Arrowsmith's earlier incomplete map.

The problems started in Cape York just days after one of the party, naturalist John Gilbert, was killed by Aboriginal people as they camped overnight, On July 9, 1845 Leichhardt camped at what Arrowsmith's map called the Van Diemen River. But it was in fact the river now named for Gilbert. Leichhardt gave that name of his dead comrade to a stream now called the Smithbourne River. The confusion continue as he travelled south-west into the Gulf.

On July 19, 1845 Leichhardt crossed a creek with a sandstone bed he did not name, what is now the Carron River. The Carron is a tributary of the Norman River which Leichhardt found later that day around 15km from the coast. "A fine river," he called it, "with salt water about 250 or 300 yards broad." They camped on a lagoon that night feasting on ibis and duck they shot, while carefully watched by the blacks so the whites were watchful too. The following morning natives approached the camp and invited Leichhardt to meet them. He presented nose rings to his hosts and they told him the stream was called the Yappar. Leichhardt adopted that name for the river. While Yappar did not survive, a street in Karumba now bears that name. Leichhardt crossed the river at Glenore Crossing and recorded the river as at latitude 17 54 or 55, longitude 140 45. His latitudes were only a minute or two out but his longitudes were 40-50 minutes too far west due to a mechanical defect.

His mapmakers knew about the defect but failed to rectify it for the expedition book. The problem was another river, named the Maatsuyker by the Dutch and renamed the Flinders by John Lort Stokes on the Beagle in 1841 was at 141 40. Stokes had sailed up to Burial Reach and named Bynoe Inlet after his ship's surgeon. Arrowsmith combined the two rivers for the 1847 book and gave it Stokes' name in honour of Matthew Flinders. Under the name in brackets, Arrowsmith placed "Yappar" to mark its headwaters, robbing Leichhardt of his first river. It wasn't until 1870, that the river was renamed as the Norman River for Commander William Henry Norman who carried supplies to the Albert River in 1861 for the Burke and Wills Expedition.

On July 22, 1845 the party crossed Stockyard Creek and Leichhardt's black companion Charley who had scouted on ahead told them another large river blocked their path ahead. They crossed the Bynoe effluent near its junction with the Flinders and according to Leichhardt camped at 17 49 35. Here Leichhardt lost his second river. Stokes had not only found the Flinders, he also found the Albert, which he followed for 70km into what he called the Plains of Promise and is at today's Burketown. Leichhardt was unaware of this discovery and his task was complicated by the failure of Flinders and others to find the ghostly Dutch-named Maatsuyker River. When on July 23 Leichhardt crossed this "fine broad river with a sandy bed, the banks with stunted mangroves , clayey salty water" he wrote next to it in his field book "Maete Suyker River?" and refrained from making the judgement. Roderick is convinced Leichhardt would have placed it as the Flinders had he known of Stokes' map.

On August 3 Leichhardt headed back towards the coast and that evening at camp Charley told them he had found another river barely 300 metres west away. This was the river later called the Leichhardt. The following day they kept to the right of the river and paused for a day to dry the beef they moistened after slaughtering a bullock. While they searched in vain for fresh water, they found a crossing at the site of the present Leichhardt Falls (77km from today's Burketown). After three parched days they found a waterhole. When they passed the Albert River (which goes through Burketown) on August 6, Leichhardt wrote in his printed journal: "The river, I am inclined to think, is the Albert of Captain Stokes, and the Maet Suyker of the Dutch navigators". But doubt remained. In a letter he wrote from Sydney in 1846 he added as a rider: "But I crossed another considerable saltwater river between both, which does not appear to have any connection with either." The confusion is no surprise, the Albert and the Leichhardt meet the sea within kilometres of each other and the constantly curving streams, brooks, creeks and anabranches were hard to keep on top of especially with so much travel still to do.

On August 18 they found a small river with palm trees and importantly, fresh water. This was at the present junction of the Albert and Barclay Rivers. The following day they moved north west and found "a fine brook, whose pure limpid waters flowed rapidly in its deep but rather narrow channel, over a bed of rich green long-leaved water plants. Leichhardt named it Beames's Brook after Walter Beames, a Sydney grocer who had donated stores to the expedition. Beames's Brook appears today on the map as a tributary of the Albert though initially the mapmakers thought it belonged to another river Leichhardt found only 3km north-west of it. That was the Nicholson (which flows through today's Doomadgee) which Leichhardt named for the English companion of his student years in Europe. Leichhardt crossed the Nicholson below its junction with the Gregory River which he never saw.

By August 29 Leichardt's party crossed into what is now the Northern Territory. Leichhardt named more rivers as he found them including the Calvert and Roper named for members of his party. On December 17 the bedraggled party made their way to Victoria, the British army settlement at Port Essington. They were among the last to visit it. It is possible Leichhardt may have tried to visit it again in 1849 as he and his party mysteriously vanished without trace on their planned trip to the Western Australian Swan River Colony. If they did they would have been bitterly disappointed, the British abandoned the settlement that year.

Many explorers set out looking for Leichhardt and his party, Among them in 1856 was Augustus Charles Gregory (the Gregory River was named for him by later traveller William Landsborough, who in turn got a highway). Gregory crossed one of the lost rivers of the Gulf when looking for the missing Leichhardt and by a happy choice he named it the Leichhardt. Residents of Mount Isa, Roderick concluded, should be gratified to know the river was in fact found in 1845 by the man whose name it bears.