The Frolic crossing Gulf St. Vincent to Yorke's Peninsula, June 14 1850 by Edward J. Snell.

Edward John Snell was an engineer, artist and adventurer. Snell recorded his travels in South Australia and Victoria in his diary, with candid and humorous descriptions and sketches. Snell was on Yorke Peninsula from June to September 1850. The diary is a detailed account including a vocabulary of 'The Natives of Yorke's Peninsula' and a sketch map of the country traversed.

Before white settlement around 1840, Yorke Peninsula was the home to the Narungga people. Today the descendants of these people still live on Yorke Peninsula, supported by the Narungga Aboriginal Progress Association in Maitland, and in the community at Point Pearce near the northern end of Gulf Saint Vincent.

Edward Snell was born at Barnstaple in Devon in November 1820. Apprenticed at 14 to a foundry in Bath, he later was employed at the Swindon workshop of the Great Western Railway Company and progressed there to the position of head draughtsman and later assistant works manager. A financial crisis in 1848-49 affected wages at the works and Snell decided to emigrate to Australia.

He arrived in Adelaide on the Bolton on 29 November 1849 and spent the next two years in South Australia dabbling in surveying and painting, before deciding in 1852 to join the thousands of others trekking to the Victorian goldfields. Here he spent several months at moderately successful digging, before finding employment on the Geelong-Melbourne railway. He also undertook private work as a surveyor and engineer. From this work he made considerable money and in 1858 he returned to England. Edward Snell died in 1880.

During his time in Australia, Snell kept a diary which is profusely illustrated with detailed and humorous sketches of the world about him. Sketches of the scenes depicted in his watercolours can be found in the diary which is held by the State Library of Victoria and which was published in 1988. He comments on the events which motivated the drawings and which provide detail of the interaction with the local Aboriginal people.

Snell had sailed to the Peninsula from Port Adelaide on the cutter Frolic. After several false starts they were finally successful on 14 June. Snell wrote:

'... sailed at 8 o'clock with a stiff breeze from N.W. - got across this time and landed at Oyster Bay (Stansbury) at sunset- ...'

On the day recorded for the watercolour of the Surveyors' encampment on Yorke Peninsula he wrote that the Aboriginal people visited the camp with fish which they bartered for tobacco. Snell's diary records the details of his visit to their camp later that day when he watched a corroboree and later sang English songs to them.

Snell, Edward John, 1820-1880

Snell, Edward The life and adventures of Edward Snell: the illustrated diary of an artist, engineer and adventurer in the Australian colonies 1849 to 1859 / edited and introduced by Tom Griffiths with assistance from Alan Platt. North Ryde, N.S.W.: Angus & Robertson and the Library Council of Victoria, 1988

The Dictionary of Australian artists: painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870 edited by Joan Kerr Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 742

State Library of South Australia: Treasures Wall. Friends of the State Library of South Australia exhibition July 2007-

Gold! [Victorian Cultural Collaboration] See: Literature: Edward Snell: writer and illustrator

Yorke Peninsula, South Australia SA Tourism Commission

Yorke Peninsula, South Australia Wikipedia

Kadina, South Australia Wikipedia