AustLit

'In January 1864 George Elphinstone Dalrymple, and a group of about 20 settlers, landed at Rockingham Bay in north Queensland. His chief purpose was to establish a town and a track across the rugged coastal range to his station, Valley of Lagoons, 130 kilometres to the west. The local Indigenous people, not surprisingly, resisted this invasion of their land, making life for the new-comers difficult, with violence occurring on both sides. Included in the first group to land at Rockingham Bay was John Dallachy, a botanist employed by Ferdinand von Mueller, director of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, with the brief to collect plant specimens for the Gardens. Over the next seven years Dallachy provided the first significant collections from the area we now know as the 'Wet Tropics'.  (Introduction)