History
Charles Sturt named the river in 1845 after Charles Cooper, the Chief Justice of South Australia. It was along Cooper Creek that the explorers Burke and Wills died in 1861. John King survived the expedition with the assistance of friendly Aborigines. Only ten years after the explorers' deaths, homesteads were being established on the watercourse. A station at Innamincka was the first permanent settlement in the area.
By 1880 the reliable water source had attracted more settlers to the point where the whole area was taken up and stocked with cattle. This led to the displacement of local Aborigines from their traditional lands. By 1900 the population had reduced to 30 survivors, just 10% of the original number, as influenza and measles took their toll.
Read more about this topic: Cooper Creek
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“We said that the history of mankind depicts man; in the same way one can maintain that the history of science is science itself.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)