Phillip Parker King

Phillip Parker King (1793-1856), British naval officer who explored and mapped the northern and northwestern coasts of Australia. King was born on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific Ocean. He was the son of the island’s British colonial governor, Philip Gidley King, who later became governor of the colony of New South Wales, Australia. The young King spent his early years in England. He attended the naval academy at Portsmouth and in 1807 entered the British navy as a midshipman. In the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), he served with the British fleet in the North Sea, the Bay of Biscay, and the Mediterranean Sea. By the end of the war he had become a lieutenant.

According to some sources, the explorer Matthew Flinders, a family friend, introduced King to coastal surveying. In 1817 King was sent to New South Wales to explore the northwestern coast of the Australian continent between Northwest Cape, Australia’s northwesternmost point, and Arnhem Bay, on the northern coast. Most of the rest of the coast had been mapped, chiefly by Flinders. The British hoped King would find a navigable river from the coast that led into the interior of Australia. King had also been directed to collect information about the region’s animal and plant life, climate, and mineral sources and to make contact with the region’s Aboriginal people.

King sailed from Sydney in December 1817. The mission included British botanist Allan Cunningham, who later made significant explorations of the Australian interior, and the Aboriginal explorer and guide Bungaree. From February to June 1818, King made a detailed survey of 2400 km (1500 mi) of coastline between Northwest Cape and Van Diemen Gulf, on the north central coast of what is now Australia’s Northern Territory. Over the next four years, King made three more voyages during which he completed the mapping of most of Australia’s western, northern, and northwestern coasts. He also discovered a safe sea route from Sydney northward to Torres Strait through a channel west of the Great Barrier Reef. On a voyage in 1819 he took Australian explorer John Oxley to the mouth of the Hastings River, north of Sydney. His explorations, however, revealed no great navigable river flowing from the interior of Australia to the northern coast. He speculated such a stream might exist in northwestern Australia between Eighty Mile Beach and Buccaneer Archipelago—a part of the coast he had been prevented from fully exploring because of rough weather—but later exploration showed no such stream.

King returned to England in 1823 and was made a member of the Royal Society in 1824. His account of his explorations was first published in 1826. From 1826 to 1830 King commanded an extensive naval surveying expedition of the eastern and western coasts of South America, including the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego. He eventually settled in Australia in 1832 and became a leading executive with a major land development and coal mining enterprise. In 1837 and 1838 he led an expedition to the Murrumbidgee River, in western New South Wales, and in the 1840s he sponsored expeditions led by Thomas Livingstone Mitchell and Edmund Kennedy into the interior of northeastern Australia.