On 16 June 1915, just on a century ago, Reginald Windermere Fletcher set out from Darwin with the aim of riding by bicycle to Sydney.

Reginald, born in 1884, entered Newington in 1898 and was one of several brothers who attended the College in the 1880s and 1890s. Otherwise we know nothing about Reginald’s time at Newington. An older brother, Frederick William, had died in 1884 at Redfern Station on the way home from Newington, only a few weeks after starting school here.

Reginald had reached McMinn’s Bar, some 150 kilometres south-east of Katherine, en route to the Roper Mission Station, when he discovered that he had lost his bicycle pump. He had to walk his bicycle back to Maranboy, where he obtained a new pump, and then rode the 70 kilometres back to Katherine. He seems to have abandoned the attempt to reach Sydney, because he now headed back north towards Darwin.

Reginald was ‘evidently compelled to give in from exhaustion’, as the Northern Territory Times and Gazette reported, ‘and was picked up by a passing carrier and was brought to Pine Creek’ on 12 July. There he was admitted to the local hospital ‘in a very low condition, suffering from malaria and effects of the sun’. He remained largely in a comatose state until 17 July, when he died, with his brother, Rev Walter Fletcher, who had been called from Darwin, at his bedside. He was buried the next day, with his brother officiating at the funeral. It was reported that ‘a number of floral tributes was placed on the grave, and many of the residents of Pine Creek attended.’

Mr David Roberts
College Archivist