Grahame Jardine-Vidgen, head of the Jardine clan in Australia and a retired army officer, says history has been unkind to his famous ancestor, and he was no racist.
Jardine-Vidgen recounts how, in his early 20s, his great-grandfather, Frank Jardine (below), ran a herd of some 250 cattle and 42 horses from Rockhampton to the northern tip of Australia - an epic, five-month, 2,000-kilometre journey. Having negotiated swamps, rivers and rainforest, and survived the Battle of the Mitchell River (December 18, 1864), in which the expedition killed at least 30 Aboriginal assailants, Frank and his younger brother, Alexander, reached the settlement of Somerset.
Jardine-Vidgen insists Frank Jardine ordered his men to shoot only in self-defence, a position the brothers documented in their 1867 account of the expedition.
In Somerset, Jardine soon established himself as the successor to his father, the police magistrate. Until his death in 1919, he helped establish Cape York's first telegraphic wire, set up a successful pearling company, recovered a fortune in silver coins from a sunken Spanish ship and enhanced his reputation for bravery and generosity by rescuing and housing the survivors of numerous shipping disasters.
Historians point out that, in Somerset, Jardine made considerable efforts to protect the local Gudang tribe from aggression by other Aboriginal groups. 'But the greatest repudiation of this idea that Frank was a racist,' says Jardine-Vidgen, 'is the simple fact that he fell in love with and married a woman of colour; the Samoan princess Sana Solia.'