Ernest Flint

Ernest Ebenezer Samuel Flint (c.1854 – 17 July 1887) was an employee of the Overland Telegraph Line who spend much of his life working in the Northern Territory.

Life in the Northern Territory

Little is known of Flint's early life except that he was born in Richmond, a suburb of Melbourne. At the age of 17, in late 1871, Flint began working for the Overland Telegraph Line and he travelled with a group of men from Adelaide to Alice Springs on horseback. Flint was the youngest of the group and they took with that wagonloads of equipment and stores. The party separated at Charlotte Waters briefly which led to the death of one of the members of the party, Carl Wilhelm Immanuel Kraegen, when they were unable to find water and Flint helped bury him on 20 December 1871. Kraegen was their head of operations and was to have been the station master at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. The party arrived in Alice Springs at the very close of 1871. Flint took no part in the reprisals that followed this attack, which resulted in the massacre of about 50 people, because of his injury. This death toll was not only made up of Kaytetye people but also Anmatyerre, Warumungu, Alyawarre and Warlpiri people who were living or travelling through the surrounding country.

In 1882 Flint took special leave from his role to lead an exploring party to the east, in the direction of the Plenty River, and he travelled with police officer John Shirley, an Aboriginal interpreter named Paddy and two stockmen from Undoolya Station; Harry Price and F Godlee. Their aim was to recover missing stock and search for traces of Ludwig Leichhardt's lost expedition.

On 26 January 1887 Flint married Florence Clementina Madley, an English woman, in Melbourne and they returned to Alice Springs in late May 1887. In marrying Flint became the first married man in charge of the Telegraph Station and Florence the first 'white woman' to live there. Headstone on grave, Ernest E. S. Flint, Alice Springs Telegraph Station. Flint died a short time later, on 17 July 1887, of rheumatic fever and is buried at the small cemetery at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station which he had established. He was the second person to be buried there.

Shortly after her husbands death Florence returned to England. Flint Street in Jingili, Northern Territory Mount Ebenezer, near Imanpa, Northern Territory