Mount Marshall

Distinguished and Famous people from Mount Marshall

🧭 John Septimus Roe

John Septimus Roe travelled through the Mount Marshall district during his 1836 expedition east and north of the Avon Valley’s settled districts. As Western Australia’s first Surveyor-General, he recorded country that would later become part of the Wheatbelt’s farming landscape. The shire’s history credits that expedition with naming Mount Marshall and Lake McDermott after early Swan River settler Captain Marshall McDermott. Roe’s connection is the survey journey itself, not residence in the later town of Bencubbin. The places already had Aboriginal histories; the expedition added colonial maps and names. Roe’s wider career included naval surveys of Australia’s coast and the early surveying of Perth and Fremantle, linking this inland journey to a much larger body of mapping work.