Bremer's party arrived with a specific commercial purpose: to open trade with Malay merchants from Southeast Asia. The plan was reasonable on paper. Malay fishermen had long worked Australia's northern waters for trepang (sea cucumbers) and had established informal contact with the continent's indigenous peoples. A British trading post positioned to intercept and facilitate that trade might generate revenue and extend imperial influence. The party included 23 men of the 3rd Regiment, 26 Royal Marines, a surgeon, commissariat workers, three adventurous free men, and 44 convicts. During the first two years, the settlers never once saw a Malay trader. The trade routes they had come to serve passed elsewhere.

The Tiwi people of Melville Island had not asked for neighbors. Attacks on the fort became a regular occurrence — sometimes daily, according to British accounts. Two settlers were killed by spear. The fort's surgeon, Dr. Gold, was found dead with 31 spear wounds; seven spear heads remained in his body, one having passed through his skull from ear to ear. The storekeeper, John Green, sustained 17 wounds. British reports at the time described the Tiwi in the language of their era: people in the "most savage state of barbarism." What those reports do not record is the Tiwi perspective — that an armed foreign force had arrived uninvited on their island and begun building fortifications. The settlers could not penetrate more than 20 miles into the island's interior. They were, effectively, besieged.

Fort Dundas lasted from 1824 to 1828 — just four years. It was the first of four British attempts to establish a permanent settlement in northern Australia before the eventual founding of Darwin, then called Palmerston. The three subsequent efforts at Fort Wellington, Port Essington, and Escape Cliffs all also failed, though some lasted longer. In retrospect, South Australian governor Lord Kintore assessed Bremer's choice of location as ill-suited and "never satisfactorily explained." The selection of Melville Island — remote, without natural harbor advantages, distant from actual trade routes, and surrounded by a population that had no interest in British commerce — was a mistake that no amount of military discipline could correct.

Nearly 70 years after the fort was abandoned, remnants were still visible: a moat, stonework from what was thought to be a church, and grave sites. Early twentieth-century visitors observed earthworks, a partial stone wharf, a building, retaining walls. By then the cleared hillside had regenerated into bush. In 1938, relics of uniforms were recovered during a medical survey of the island; they eventually found their way to the Mitchell Library at the University of Sydney. A 49-day archaeological excavation in 1975 mapped the site and recovered a glass bottle and a brass Shako Plate badge from the 3rd Regiment — now held at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Stones from the original fort were used to construct a memorial at Darwin's garrison in 1945. The fort itself remained where it fell.