John Forrest has been asked to lead…

John Forrest has been asked to lead an expedition in search of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, who had been missing since April 1848.

A few years earlier, a party of Aborigines had told the explorer Charles Hunt of a place where a group of white men had been killed by Aborigines a long time ago, and some time afterwards an Aboriginal tracker named Jemmy Mungaro had corroborated their story and claimed to have personally been to the location.

Since it was thought that these stories might refer to Leichhardt's party, Forrest has been asked to lead a party to the site, with Mungaro as their guide, and there to search for evidence of Leichhardt's fate.

Forrest assembles a party of six, including the Aboriginal trackers Mungaro and Tommy Windich, and they had left Perth on April 15, 1869.

They head in a north-easterly direction, passing through the colony's furthermost sheep station on April 26.

One of ten children of William and Margaret Forrest, who had come out as servants under Dr. John Ferguson in 1842, was born at Picton near Bunbury in the British colony of Western Australia.

Among his seven brothers are Alexander Forrest and David Forrest.

John had attended the government school in Bunbury under John Hislop until the age of twelve, when he had been sent north to Perth to attend the Bishop's Collegiate School, now Hale School, starting there in January 1860.

In November 1863, he had been apprenticed to a government land surveyor named Thomas Carey.

When his term of apprenticeship had ended in November 1865, he had become the first man born and educated in the colony to qualify as a land surveyor; he had then commenced work as a surveyor with the government's Lands and Surveys Department.