The named Bourke Isles include: The islands were named in mid-1836 by Charles Lewis, the Commander of the schooner Isabella from the Colony of New South Wales, in honour of Richard Bourke, at the time, the Governor of New South Wales.

[1] In June 1836, the colonial schooner Isabella was despatched from Sydney under Captain Lewis[5] to search for survivors of the barque Charles Eaton,[1] which had been wrecked on the Great Detached Reef, part of the Great Barrier Reef near the Sir Charles Hardy Islands on 15 August 1834.

It turned out that most of the crew and passengers who had survived the wreck and sailed on rafts to the Torres Strait, had been killed by Torres Strait Islanders from Mer, but a cabin boy and infant boy had been spared and lived with the Mer people for two years.

After burning the village to the ground, the men found a dilapidated shed, and in it a huge mask made of a single decorated turtle shell surrounded by human skulls of Europeans.

Lewis and his men took the skulls and mask, and set fire to everything on the island, including plantations of tobacco.