John McDouall Stuart, explorer and Freemason

Next meeting - Monday 25 June 2007 at 6pm - at Freemasons' Hall, Adelaide -

Guest Speaker from John McDouall Stuart Society ...

John McDouall Stuart (1815-1866)
Explorer and Freemason

Initiated in Lodge of Truth No.933 E.C. North Adelaide on 1 Aug 1859
(when the Lodge met in the present day "Belmont House")

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"In April 1860, during the second of his heroic attempts to cross Australia from south to north, John McDouall Stuart reached the almost waterless center of the continent... A thousand miles from anywhere, the spot was the very 'climax of desolation,' as Stuart's fellow explorer Ernest Giles once nicely put it, and Stuart and his men went through hell to get there. They were sick and ragged and half starved, and it had taken months, but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that they had become the first outsiders to penetrate to the brutal heart of the continent.

... So you may imagine Stuart's surprise when, in the middle of this baking nowhere, he and his party encountered three Aboriginal men who greeted them by making a secret sign of the Freemasons. Stuart didn't say in his journal what the sign was, but it was clear from his amazed description that it was unlikely to have been coincidental."

(from Bill Bryson's book 'In a sunburned country' p.240)

Also see entry from McDouall Stuart's journal for Sat 23 June 1860 ...

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The Stuart Highway, the main south-north highway of Australia is 2,834 kilometres or 1,761 miles long.

• John McDouall Stuart's biography is included in ADB online ...
• "McDouall Stuart a Mason" - article in the Register newspaper, Thursday 20 May 1920 (page 6h) and 21 May 1920 (page 6i).
• "Aborigines and Freemasonry: Where McDouall Stuart was Initiated" - article in The Mail (Adelaide, SA), Saturday 23 October 1915 (page 11i)
• McDouall Stuart Lodge No.219 in Alice Springs is named in his honour.

John McDouall Stuart is one of several Freemasons commemorated by statues in Adelaide:

statue in Victoria Square, Adelaide

Stuart has been the subject of several Australian postage stamps (1962 and 2012):