Thomas Harpur was a little-known colonial poet of Irish background. As Patricia Clarke discovered in her research on the family history of Rosa Praed (q.v.), Thomas Harpur's daughter Matilda was Praed's mother, and he is described in Praed's autobiography My Australian Girlhood. (Most biographers of Praed had wrongly assumed that she was a descendant of the poet Charles Harpur.)
After the death of his first wife Rosa, with whom he had five children (among them Matilda), Thomas Harpur remarried and emigrated with the whole family from Ireland to New South Wales in 1840. He farmed, first in Parramatta, then in Cecil Hills, the latter explaining the pen-name frequently attributed to him in catalogues and bibliographies: an inscription on the verso of the title page of the Mitchell Library copy of A Land Redeemed reads has a handwritten insciption: 'To Captain Weston / with the author's / very kind regards / Cecil Hills / June 17/47'. This might explain why the pseudonym 'Harmonides' has been attributed to a Cecil Hills rather than to Thomas Harpur who lived at Cecil Hills, now a suburb of Sydney. Clarke found family letters which prove that it was Thomas Harpur who published this long poem under the pseudonym 'Harmonides'. Harpur died after a short illness at the age of 51. His widow and the children of his second marriage returned to Dublin, and Matilda and the other two daughters from his first marriage all married Queensland squatters. (Source: Patricia Clarke, The Other Harpur, or: How I Stumbled Across an Unknown Colonial Poet q.v.)
