Born August 22,1847, Bunbury, Western Australia
Died September 3, 1918, at sea, off the coast of Sierra Leone, Africa
John Forrest was born in the port city of Bunbury, Western Australia, on August 22, 1847. His parents were Scottish immigrants who had come to Australia as servants and had saved enough money to buy a farm. Forrest went to school in Bunbury until he was thirteen, when he attended a private school in the capital city of Perth. In 1863 he began an apprenticeship as a surveyor. Three years later he joined Western Australia’s Survey Department.
In 1869 Forrest was put in charge of an expedition into the interior of Western Australia, in search of the remains of German explorer Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig Leichhardt, who had disappeared with his party some twenty years earlier while trying to cross the continent. Forrest was to examine the skeletal remains that Aborigines (Australia’s native inhabitants) had recently come upon. Leaving from Perth in April, the surveyor and his group traveled in a northeasterly direction as far as Lake Raeside. He found no traces of the doomed expedition, and the bones the Aborigines had found turned out to be those of runaway horses from an 1854 exploration. Still, Forrest continued his expedition, going as far as Mount Weld on the western edge of the Great Victoria Desert. He crossed more than two thousand miles of territory, some of which had never been mapped. Among his discoveries were areas suitable for raising livestock, a growing source of wealth for the colony. Forrest returned to Perth in August.
In March of the following year, Forrest undertook a second expedition, this time to survey the coast of Australia’s southern bay—the Great Australian Bight—from Perth to the South Australia city of Adelaide. He and his party followed a route similar to the one taken by English adventurer Edward John Eyre in 1841, only they were crossing in the opposite direction: from west to east. Forrest arrived in Adelaide in August. Like Eyre before him, he found that most of the country was barren desert, although he did come upon some good grazing land. Later, in 1877, the route he mapped would be chosen for a transcontinental telegraph line. (The present-day highway across Australia’s Nullarbor Plain also follows Forrest’s course.)
After these successes, Forrest was put in charge of all surveying in the northern part of Western Australia. Thus he undertook a third expedition in March of 1874, hoping to make a complete crossing of Western Australia and then proceed into the continent’s largely unknown central region. Sailing from Perth to Geraldton, up Australia’s west coast, he and five others (including his brother Alexander) headed north, their provisions carried by twenty packhorses. They looked for the source of Western Australia’s Murchison River, which flowed into the Indian Ocean. They also explored the vast area bordered by the Gibson Desert on the north and the Great Victoria Desert on the south. Traveling through the barren land was difficult, and the men almost died from lack of water. At times Aborigines attacked them.
Continuing eastward, Forrest and his men explored the mountain ranges of central Australia: the Petermanns in the Northern Territory and the Tomkinsons in South Australia. They then proceeded to South Australia’s Alberga River and followed it to Lake Eyre. From there they knew they could find the new Central Overland Telegraph line, which stretched between the north coastal city of Darwin and Adelaide on Australia’s south shore. The weary travelers followed the line to the southern city, where they received a warm welcome in November of 1874. Only four of the expedition’s horses made it through. A year later Forrest published a book about his cross-country journey, titled Explorations in Australia.
As a reward for his efforts, Forrest received a land grant of five thousand acres. In 1876 he was named deputy surveyor general. Soon after, he led an expedition to survey Western Australia’s Ashburton River. Four years later he led another expedition to the Fitzroy River region that lay farther north. In 1883 he was appointed surveyor general of Western Australia.
After that, Forrest began an active political career. From 1890 to 1901, he served as Western Australia’s first premier. During much of that time, Australia’s separate colonies were drawing up plans to form a central government. Forrest played an important role in the difficult process. After Britain’s Parliament approved Australia’s new constitution in 1901, he held a number of posts in the national government. He became postmaster general of the Commonwealth in 1901. He served as the Commonwealth minister of defense (1901–03), minister of home affairs (1903–04), and treasurer (1905–07, 1909–10, 1913–14, and 1917–18). Forrest made several attempts to become the country’s prime minister as well, but those efforts ended in disappointment.
In 1918 Forrest became the first native-born Australian to become British nobility. In recognition of his lifelong service to his country, Britain’s King George V honored him with the title First Baron Forrest of Bunbury. The statesman traveled to England for the royal ceremony. Suffering from cancer, he died on September 3, 1918, as he sailed back to Australia.
Baker, Daniel B., ed. Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Detroit: Gale Research, 1993.
Explorers of Australia: John Forrest. [Online] Available http://werner.ira.uka.de/~maier/australia/explore/forrest.html, March 25, 1997.
Waldman, Carl, and Alan Wexler. Who Was Who in World Exploration. New York: Facts on File, 1992.
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