"Demarr arrived in New South Wales in 1839 on the immigrant ship Heber, having escaped from the drudgery of farm life in Yorkshire and the 'austere rule' of his father. He intended to gain experience working in Australia, with a view to investing at a later stage. He describes the inadequacy of the the emigrants' guides, which he relied on for provisioning, and gives a graphic description of the hardships of the voyage and the character of his fellow passengers. He travelled extensively in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland over the next five years, working as a storekeeper in Queanbeyan, as a stockman on a cattle station in the Snowy Mountains, as a shepherd in New England, and as a drover over landing cattle from Sydney to Port Phillip. Demarr writes vividly of the hospitality, transitory friendships and isolation of the bush, of the economic and social conditions of outback Australia, and of the terrors of travelling alone. In Queensland, he was unable to prove he was a free immigrant and was briefly detained as an escaped convict. A man of independent attitudes, he is contemptuous of British law and the transportation system. He expresses great sympathy for the convicts, with whom he often worked, and the Aborigines, concluding that 'what we call the civilisation has been no boon to the black natives of Australia, and to their mind must be associated with gunpowder, poison, hunger, disease and extermination'. Demarr set sail from Sydney for South America and England in 1844" (Walsh and Hooton 52).
Source
Walsh, Kay and Joy Hooton. Australian Autobiographical Narratives : An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra : Australian Scholarly Editions Centre, University College, ADFA and National Library of Australia, 1993.
19th-Century Australian Travel Writing
James Demarr (James Mann) (1816-1902), a Yorkshire farmer, travelled to Australia in 1839 and worked in various occupations. On his return to England, Demarr wrote his travel journals, completing them in 1846 and publishing them in 1893 with the title Adventures in Australia Fifty Years Ago. Demarr noted the wealth of Australian travel narratives that were clearly fictions overlying a substratum of fact, stating that there was nothing fictitious (excepting the names of characters) in his own work. An illustrated work, Demarr's adventures are accompanied by maps and drawings that were "not mere fancy sketches, but truthful representations." Demarr chronicles his journey from England to Australia, Sydney, the Interior, Melbourne, Queensland, extensively describing the Aboriginal population and customs as well as his daily experiences and travels. The ethnographic illustrations were taken from Sir Thomas L. Mitchell's Three Expeditions into the Interior of Australia.
