Edwin Stow Berry ( 1845 - 1934)

Berry was a surveyor and explorer, who took a leading part in two important expeditions to the Northern Territory. Born in Glenelg, to William and Hannah Berry, née Watts (c. 1804 – 15 October 1880), of Ringmer, Sussex, who arrived in South Australia in September 1839 on the Branken Moor from London. They lived for a while at Glenelg, then Grenfell Street, Adelaide, then built the family home “Ringmer” in Burnside.

Edwin was educated at J. L. Young’s Adelaide Educational Institution and in 1865 he was taken on by the Government’s Survey Department> In the same year he joined George Goyder’s surveying team. He was a head of the survey team attached to Goyder’s 1869 expedition to the Northern Territory which laid out the plan for the town of Port Darwin, and lithographed by F. S. Crawford in 1869. The other surveyors were J. W. O. Bennett, A. Ringwood and W. M. Hardy.

He was chosen as second-in-charge for Major Warburton’s expedition which was to have left Adelaide in early September 1872 for Central Mount Stuart, and thence to Perth. That expedition was delayed almost a month and Berry was dropped from the party, and instead assigned to William Gosse as second-in-charge of his 1873 expedition to Central Australia, and whose other members were Henry Gosse (William’s brother, died 1888 in Darwin), Henry Winnall and Patrick Nilen (possibly spelled “Nilan”), three Afghans and “Moses”, an Aborigine from Peake. William Darton Kekwick, originally appointed the party’s “Collector”, was too ill to proceed and died 16 October 1872 on his return to Adelaide. Among their discoveries was the monolith Uluru which Gosse named “Ayer’s Rock”. The party reached a point 600 miles (970 km) west of the Transcontinental Telegraph Line and were forced to return due to lack of available water. ref; SLSA