Person

Cadell, Francis (1822 - 1879)

Born
9 February 1822
Cockenzie, Scotland
Died
1879
Dutch East Indies
Occupation
Explorer and Navigator

Summary

Francis Cadell in 1853 was one of the first to navigate the Murray River from its mouth to Swan Hill in a steamer. In 1867 he led a South Australian expedition to the Northern Territory to choose a site for the capital and an area for agricultural settlement.

Skip to

Details

Born Cockenzie, Scotland, 9 February 1822. Died Dutch East Indies, 1879. Arrived Adelaide 1852; made the first successful steam voyage up the Murray 1853; active in navigation of the Murray and its main tributaries 1853-63; formed the River Murray Navigation Co., which ran the "Melbourne" and the "Albury"; company dissolved 1857, but Cadell and a partner continued to run the "Melbourne" and the "Albury" until the "Melbourne" was lost at the Murray mouth 1859; business failed 1861 and "Albury" sold; superintended steam transport on the Waikato river in New Zealand 1864; snagging on the Darling for the New South Wales government 1866; led an expedition appointed by the South Australian government to the Northern Territory to choose a site for the capital and an area for agricultural settlement 1867; whaling, trading and pearling in various areas 1870-79. Commemorated by Cadell Strait in the Northern Territory and by a settlement on the River Murray.

Chronology

1852
Life event - Arrived in Adelaide, South Australia
1853 - 1863
Life event - Navigating the River Murray and its main tributaries
1859
Career position - Member, Exploration Committee of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria
1859 - 1862
Career position - Member, Exploration Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria

Related Events

Archival resources

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

  • Francis Cadell - Records, 1846 - 1880, FM 4/1765; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection

  • Francis Cadell - Records, 1846 - 1880, M 464; National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection. Details

Published resources

Books

  • Painter, Gwenda, The River Trade: Wool and Steamers (Wahroonga: Turton and Armstrong with Pioneer Settlement Press, 1979). Details

Book Sections

Resources

See also

  • Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Technology in Australia 1788-1988, Online edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, 3 May 2000, http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/index_c.html. Details
  • Science and the making of Victoria, with Royal Society of Victoria, 2001, http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/smv/index_c.html. Details
  • Engineers Australia ed., Wonders never cease: 100 Australian engineering achievements (Barton, Australian Capital Territory: Institution of Engineers, Australia, 2019), 236 pp. p.96. Details
  • Serle, Percival, Dictionary of Australian biography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1949). Details

McCarthy, G.J.

Created: 20 October 1993, Last modified: 4 June 2019

EOAS ID: biogs/P000286b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by the Centre for Transformative Innovation, Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 February (Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#kooyang
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P000286b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260