JACKEY JACKEY (d.1854), Aboriginal guide, was a member of a tribe of the Merton district near Muswellbrook. He was probably little more than a boy when at short notice in April 1848 he was selected to accompany the explorer Edmund Kennedy on his expedition in Cape York Peninsula. He soon acquired a reputation for hard work, sagacity and superb bushcraft; as privation and disaster gradually overcame the party he steadily emerged as one of its strongest members. The worse conditions became the more it seemed that he could be relied on. Finally a rear party was left at Weymouth Bay; Jackey and Kennedy pressed on towards Cape York, first with three others, then alone, only to find that they were trapped by the mangroves and swamps of the Escape River within a few miles of the waiting supply ship. There blacks attacked them and Kennedy was killed; still in ...

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Australian Dictionary of Biography