14 November 1843                Adam Lindsay Gordon

Adam Lindsay Gordon, who was born in the Azores in 1833, arrived in South Australia in the Julia on 14 November 1853. He joined the mounted police and was stationed in the South-East at Penola and Mount Gambier for two years and for a time lived at Dingley Dell near Port MacDonnell. Renowned as a great horseman he rode in steeplechases on country racecourses and is said to have jumped his horse over a fence, and back, on a narrow section around the lake at Mount Gambier just where the ground falls away steeply. After leaving the police force he worked for a time a horse breaker and was persuaded to enter parliament. But he was not a good politician and only stayed a short time. He left South Australia in 1869 and lived on a pastoral property in Victoria. Described as a complicated and introverted man, one of his best poems The Sick Stockrider shows the inner depression which often gripped him, but also shows his love of the bush. The depression finally brought him to despair and he shot himself on a beach near Brighton in Victoria on 24 June 1870.

100 Famous Australian Lives, Paul Hamlyn, Sydney, 1969, pp.146-53.