Christie Palmerston
Explorer and prospector Christopher "Christie" Palmerston (a.k.a. Cristofero Palmerston Carandini, 1850 – 1897) led several expeditions during the through the 1870s and 1880s, discovering the route from the Hodgkinson goldfield to the coast along the Mowbray River, which led to the founding of Port Douglas (April 1877) and another from Mourilyan Harbour to Herberton (late 1882).
Despite suggestions that he was Lord Palmerston's natural son, Palmerston was Italian nobleman Jerome Carandini's second son. His mother was an English opera singer.
After a stint working on a station near Broad Sound and a spell in the Brisbane jail, Palmerston joined the Palmer River gold rush in 1873-4, then made his name as a pathfinder, cutting tracks between the region's mining fields and the coast through precipitous jungle-clad ranges.
Palmerston subsequently settled in Townsville, married an architect's daughter and leased the Metropole Hotel on Townsville's Ross Island before moving to Borneo and Malaya, where he contracted fever and died at Kuala Pilah in January 1897.
Although he was widely respected as a consummate bushman on "unusually close terms" with Aboriginal people and a pathological hatred of Chinese miners, Palmerston had a well-documented propensity for extortion and frontier violence.
Links to add:
Broad Sound
Herberton
Lord Palmerston
Metropole Hotel
Mourilyan Harbour
Mowbray River
Palmer River gold rush
Ross Island
Townsville
