Robert Arthur Johnstone
Tasmanian-born Native Mounted Police sub-Inspector Robert Arthur Johnstone (1843 – 1905) was stationed at several locations around Ther North between 1867 and 1880, conducting punitive expeditions ('dispersals') against Indigenous clans who resisted settlement and participating in several expeditions investigating the region's resources, including those led by George Elphinstone Dalrymple.
Johnstone acted as Police Magistrate in various locations around Queensland after he resigned from the Native Police in 1880 before retiring from government service in 1891.
A number of geographical and zoological entities, including the Johnstone River and the freshwater crocodile, are named after Johnstone, whose reminiscences, Spinifex and Wattle, were serialised in The Queenslander between 1903 and 1905.
