Pennefather River
Several smaller waterways, including Fish Creek, Turtle Creek, and Dingo Creek, combine in Yupunguthi country in the Port Musgrave estuarine wetlands to form the Pennefather River, which discharges into the Gulf of Carpentaria south of Mapoon on the western side of the Cape York Peninsula.
Despite its relatively short 11-kilometre course, the Pennefather drains a catchment area of 3,009 square kilometres, much of which (349 square kilometres) consists of tidal and estuarine wetland.
The river's estuary is relatively wide — approximately two kilometres at its widest point — and is probably the R. met het Bosch ("River with the Forest") which appears on the chart drawn by Willem Jansz, who encountered this part of Cape York Peninsula's west coast in 1606. As such, it probably marks the site of the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent.
After Matthew Flinders mistook the estuary for the Coen River (today's Archer River), named by Jan Carstensz in 1623, it appeared on 19th-century maps under that name until Captain Charles Edward de Fonblanque Pennefather established that there were two Coen Rivers charted in widely separated locations in 1880.
The Queensland authorities subsequently renamed the northernmost Coen River after Pennefather in 1894, although it remained the Coen on British Admiralty Charts until 1967.
