Geoffrey Amos Eagar, was a printer, newspaper printer and newspaper editor and proprietor in Sydney, Launceston, Adelaide, New Zealand and country New South Wales from at least the late 1820s to the late 1840s. The Australian Prints and Printmaking database has an entry for Geoffrey Eagar working as a printer in George Street, Sydney, 1826-1828.
Ian Wilson's report to a Book Collectors' Society of Australia, Victorian Branch, Members' Night, 25 January 2008, on the career of Geoffrey Amos Eagar is published on the Society's website:
'[Eagar] was active in Sydney in 1826–[18]27, where he printed The Gleaner [for Laurence Hynes Halloran] and Aurora Australis, a volume of verse for the Presbyterian clergyman John Dunmore Lang.
'He arrived in VDL [Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania)] in 1830. From 1833 till 1835 he was the proprietor of the Launceston newspaper The Independent, but went bankrupt in 1837. His wife died in Melbourne in 1839. In the same year Eagar was working in Adelaide as a printer, where he entered into an agreement with a Mr Quaife, a Congregational Minister, to set up a press in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. They sailed via Hobart, where they bought a press and a quantity of paper. However, Eagar’s promissory note for £150 was not properly honoured and this resulted in delays and eventually, in 1843, a court case in Hobart. But they were able to sail on to New Zealand and arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1840. Eagar printed the first newspaper there; it lasted six months. He then printed the unofficial New Zealand Government Gazette and, in 1841, the Auckland Chronicle.'
After Eagar's return to New South Wales he printed the Windsor Express and Richmond Advertiser (May 1843 - May 1844) and was printer and publisher for the Hawkesbury Courier and Agricultural and General Advertiser (1844-1846) and editor of the newspaper from 30 April 1846.
AustLit has not yet established the date of Eagar's death. The New South Wales Births Deaths and Marriages index has a death year of 1857 for a Geoffrey A. Eagar.
Sources:
Prints and Printmaking. Web. 13/10/2014
Wilson, Ian. 'Victorian Branch, Members' Night, 25 January 2008' The Book Collectors' Society of Australia. Web. (14/10/2014)
