Captain Wickham, whose name adorns streets, terraces and a park in Brisbane, held public office in Brisbane from 1842 until Separation in 1859, when he ceased duties as Government Resident and handed over to the Colony’s first Governor.
Surviving photographs show a thoughtful-looking gent with an impressive set of white whiskers almost obscuring the lower half of his face. Standard Local Worthy stuff. Nothing to suggest a fascinating past that encompassed voyages with Charles Darwin in the Beagle, marriage into the powerful Macarthur family, or even his years spent calmly dealing with the outrageous parade of stinking drunks and turbulent ex-convicts of old Brisbane Town.
Naval Career
John Clements Wickham was born in Leith, Scotland to a naval family, and enlisted in the Royal Navy in 1812, during the Napoleonic Wars. He served on the Adventure and the Beagle, charting various coastlines in exotic places, from Patagonia and the Galapagos Islands to the South Sea Islands, and north-west Australia. Wickham was held in great esteem by Charles Darwin and captained the Beagle from 1837 to 1841.
Wickham certainly knew how to win friends and influence people, especially those with a connection to the new country of Australia. One was Phillip Parker King, son of Phillip Gidley King, third Governor of New South Wales. King was a great friend and fellow naval officer, and the men became brothers-in-law, both marrying daughters of the very formidably named Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur. Of the very powerful Parramatta Macarthurs.
Moreton Bay and Newstead House
Ill-health from decades of arduous journeying at sea caused Wickham to resign from the Navy in 1841, and he travelled to New South Wales to marry Anna Maria Macarthur. With all those connections in The Colonies, he began a new career in the former convict settlement of Moreton Bay. He brought his new wife to Brisbane, and after roughing it for a while in the dilapidated Commandant’s Cottage, bought a property at Newstead from yet another brother-in-law, Patrick Leslie, of the very powerful Darling Downs Leslies.
Newstead House became the social and administrative centre of Brisbane, and gave the Wickham children a large semi-rural riverside property to grow up in. Wickham rode into town for work, and often took a scenic journey along the path on Windmill Hill, which became Wickham Terrace in his honour.
In 1852 Anna Wickham became ill and went home to Sydney to recuperate and enjoy a change of climate. According to brother in law, Phillip Parker King, Anna had rallied to the point where Wickham was on his way south to bring her home, when she suddenly took a turn for the worse and passed away.
Five years later, in 1857, Captain Wickham remarried to Ellen Dearing, a young widow from Dublin, who had taken up residence in Ipswich. The Wickhams had two sons.
Captain Wickham retired from public life in 1860, and after a series of skirmishes with the governments of New South Wales and Queensland about which body should pay his pension after such a long public service, he retired in disgust to France, passing away in 1864.
Besides the streets, terraces, parks and buildings of Brisbane, Wickham is commemorated in Tasmania, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Northern Territory of Australia, and in the Falkland Islands, Chile and the Solomon Islands.
One other member of the Wickham household lived at Newstead House. She was Harriet, a Galapagos tortoise, and a gift from Charles Darwin. She hatched around 1830, and lived from 1841 to 2006 in Queensland.
Harriet was gifted to the Brisbane Botanical Gardens in 1860, then transferred to Fleay’s Fauna Sanctuary in 1954. From 1987 her home was Robert and Terri Irwin’s Australia Zoo, where in 2005 she celebrated her 175th birthday by blinking wearily at all of the humans making a fuss of her. She passed away the following year.
Moreton Bay and More 
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