Edward Granville (Ted) Theodore was born in Adelaide, the second son of Basil Teodorescu, a Romanian immigrant, bleft school at 12 to work on the Adelaide docks and moved to Cairns in 1906 after an unsuccessful stint on the West Austrlian goldfields. He prospected for tin around Chillagoe nd worked in the Vulcan Mine in Irvinebank and formed the Amalgamated Workers' Association of North Queensland with Bill McCormack. Amalgamation with other unions saw it become Australia's largest union, the Australian Workers' Union (AWU). Wikipedia entry Australian Dictionary of Biography Ted Theodore: the proto-Keynesian Australian Trade Union Archives
Dr David Thomatis, the former headmaster of Townsville Grammar School, moved to Cairns to establish a banana plantation in the Freshwater Creek area in Redlynch around 1884. Around 1900 he turned his attention to cotton, found self-seeded wild cotton plants descended from unsuccessful plantings by a Chinese farmers in the 1880s. and crossed them with existing commercial species to develop a vigorous, disease-resistant cotton variety he named Caravonica which gained worldwide acceptance.
Luis Váez de Torres (c. 1565-?) made the first recorded navigation of the strait separating the continent of Australia from New Guinea on an expedition in search of the supposed southern continent led by Pedro Fernandes de Quirós. On the night of 11 June 1606 Quirós in the San Pedro y San Pablo became separated from the other ships and sailed to Acapulco, where he arrived in November 1606. Torres took effective command of the remaining two ships in the expedition, taking them south to 21° without finding land, and steered for Manila, passing along the southern coast of New Guinea, proving that the island was not the northern extremity of a southern continent. He reached Manila on 22 May 1607. The report of his voyage seems to have been filed and forgotten until the British occupied Manila in 1762. Thereafter his accounts were seen by Admiralty Hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple, who provided a sketch map which included the Torres voyage to Joseph Banks, who would have passed the information to James Cook. Wikipedia entry Australian Dictionary of Biography