Dillon: The drove to Port Darwin

An epic of Australian Courage, Endurance, High Adventure … and Family Love.

Dramatic incidents of Australian History, strikingly recreated.

DILLON: The drove to Port Darwin 1872

Within this exciting true story of droving horses and cattle across the continent of Australia, re-discovered newspaper reports and diary notes depict real actual places and events. Thousands of pieces of lost information, like a smashed pain of window glass, when reconstructed into a facsimile of its original form, give us an image again through the window to Australia in the year 1872.

This enthralling story portrays the colonial enterprise of two Australian pioneers – Mathew Dillon Cox and that of his wife Catherine in 1872. Compiled with attention to detail by his great grandson James Cox, set in Rockhampton Queensland and later in the Northern Territory after Palmerston had been surveyed to become Port Darwin, this most northern Australian town grew alongside a tent camp for the building of the famous Overland Telegraph Line, from Port Darwin to Adelaide, South Australia’s greatest engineering and communications achievement.

James devoted 7 years of intensive research to write DILLON – The drove to Port Darwin 1872. His reconstruction is beautifully written, most importantly factual, accurate, interesting and indeed easy reading due to progressively dated stages of events – high adventure, love and devotion, gutsy enterprise, the lure of gold, encounters with the Aboriginal people, then battling and surviving brutal months of danger crossing the Northern Territory.

Our Australian colonial heritage. When you read this thrilling adventure you will want to read it through time and again.

About the Author: 

James Cox grew up in Melbourne, Australia. The youngest of three sons he has always been involved in the photographic industry. In his teenage years James became a member of the Vintage Driver’s Club and painstakingly restored his 1929 De Soto sedan to concourse condition. James marries, and together with his wife, designed and built their new home in outer Melbourne where their two children enjoyed country living and country schooling. 

From a box of old 1870’s family letters, photographs, and documents James began to learn about Dillon Cox, his forgotten pioneering great grandfather. Intrigued, and after much research, it certainly proved this untold story about Dillon needed to be written. James joined Writer’s Block to learn how to structure and write his book. He has meticulously recreated this thrilling story set in 1872, droving horses and cattle more than 2000 miles (3,218 km) across the Australian bush wilderness to the Overland Telegraph Camp, and on to Port Darwin in the Northern Territory. After seven years reconstructing Dillon’s drove James published his reflective narrative as hardcopy in 2021, and now for e-book readers to enjoy.