Emily Caroline Creaghe (1860-1944), explorer, was born on 1 November 1860 in a ship in the Bay of Bengal, India, daughter of Captain George Cayley Robinson, Royal Artillery officer, and his wife Mary Harriet. Following Caroline's birth, Robinson took his family to England. They migrated to Australia in 1876. She married Irish-born Harry Alington Creaghe, a station-manager, on 7 December 1881 in St Paul's Anglican Church, Ipswich; they were to have three sons, the first of whom died in infancy.
In December 1882 the Creaghes left Sydney by steamer to join Ernest Favenc and his wife on Thursday Island. Favenc planned to explore a region in the Northern Territory bounded by the Nicholson River, Powells Creek and the Macarthur (McArthur) River. The two women were to be part of the expedition. Travelling by sea, the party landed at Normanton on 17 January 1883. There Elizabeth Favenc became ill and her husband escorted her to Sydney, while Caroline accompanied Harry and four other men on a two hundred-mile (322 km) ride south-west to Carl Creek station which they reached at the end of the month. Ten weeks later they retraced their steps as far as Gregory Downs station where Favenc and Lindsay Crawford were waiting. On 14 April the explorers set out westwards. Her journeys continued.
Peter Monteath, a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, teaches History in the School of International Studies at Flinders University, Adelaide. His recent books include POW: Australian prisoners of war in Hitler's Reich, Red Professor: The Cold War life of Fred Rose (with Valerie Munt), Interned: Torrens Island 1914-1915 (with Mandy Paul and Rebecca Martin), and the edited collection Germans: Travellers, settlers and their descendants in South Australia.