Normanton

Normanton is famous (at least to us) as the starting point of George Morrison's walk in 1882 from here to Melbourne some 3200km. His first person account of the trek can be found in the book, Australian Epic Journeys edited by Anthony Barker. Here is the introduction to the the story:

"Chinese" Morrison, the celebrated Times correspondent in Peking and political adviser to the nascent Chinese republic -- was an inverterate traveller and an epic walker. In 1880, when he was seventeen, he walked from Geelong to Adelaide, a distance of nearly a thousand kilometres, and years later made a journey, partly by boat but mostly on foot and on horseback, from Shanghai to Rangoon. After attending Geelong College, Morrison had begun medical studies at the University of Melbourne, but failing his second-year examinations he shipped aboard the blackbirder Lavinia to observe the evils of the kanaka traffic and subsequently wrote a series of influential articles for the Melbourne Leader. He then went to New Guinea on another vessel, transferred to a Chinese junk to work his way back to Australia, and eventually arrived at Normanton, on the Gulf of Carpentaria. He immediately made plans to walk across the continent to Melbourne. It was only twenty-one years since the Burke and Wills expedition, well-equipped and with camels and horses, had come to grief traversing roughly the same route; Morrison, not yet twenty-one years old and equipped with little more than a billy and quart pot, oilcloth and blanket, was about to attmept the journey alone and on foot. He set out from Normanton on 19 December 1882 and arrived in Melbourne 123 days later, having walked more than 3,200 kilometres. His account of the journey appeared in the Leader of 19 May 1883.