Coen River
Formed by the confluence of Pandanus Creek and an unnamed creek near The Bend in the Great Dividing Range, the Coen River — known for a time as the South Coen River —flows west, crosses the Peninsula Developmental Road at Coen, then veers northwest and then west across mostly uninhabited country, including Mungkan Kandju National Park, to discharge into the Archer River.
The 217-kilometre river drains a 3,207 square kilometre catchment and receives the flow from ten tributaries:
- Pandanus Creek
- Lankelly Creek
- Sandy Creek
- Tadpole Creek
- Horsetailer Creek
- Emu Creek
- Margaret Creek
- Blackfellow Creek
- Mud Spring Creek
- Culliban Creek.
Jan Carstensz named a river — subsequently renamed the Pennefather — in honour of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies in 1623; Matthew Flinders seems to have confused today's Archer River with Carstensz's Coen River.
The name Coen has been irrevocably attached to a river (the COEN, de facto) rising near the Pacific coast in lat. 13° 50' and which falls into the still larger Archer River, which empties into the Gulf of Carpentaria in 13° 20'. GOLD was found in this river in 1876, by a party of prospectors, who erroneously identified it with Carstenszoon's Coen River. The establishment of a township named Coen, with a post and telegraph office, followed in due course. As it had become impossible to confer a new name on the Coen, de facto, the Survey Office has begun to call the river of the goldfield the SOUTH COEN, to distinguish it from the COEN, de jure, which it would be an historical injustice to omit from the map. It remains to be seen whether the name of South Coen will receive popular recognition.
Some 70 miles from its mouth, the Archer splits into two branches, and the southern and shorter has borne the name of the COEN since 1876, for the reason that the discoverers of a GOLDFIELD on its upper reaches believed it to be the head of the Pera's (i.e., Carstenszoon's) Coen. The Lands Department maps now call the river of the goldfield the SOUTH COEN.
(Robert Logan Jack, Northmost Australia, Volume I, pp. 49, 69)
Missing links:
Mungkan Kandju National Park
