Born in Colchester, Oscar Hughan had an adventurous early life. One obituary says, 'By turns, he has been soldier, sailor, schoolmaster, slave holder, having turned his hands to anything that came along' ('Vale!), and he lived in Canada, Mexico, South America, and South Africa / Namibia (Cape Colony) before arriving in Australia.
Born, according to the Lithgow Mercury, in 'the Hermitage, an old-time monastery in the Roman town of Colchester' ('The Late Oscar Hughan'), Hughan left England in 1846, aged fourteen, and went to Canada, and from there to Boston, where he remained for eight years. He began writing in the US, contributing to such periodicals as the Museum, Transcript, Carpet Bag, and the Waverley: he was said to be a friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne ('The Late Oscar Hughan').
Hughan left the US for Australia, joining his mother in Geelong in around 1851. There, he worked first for a local newspaper. In 1852, Hughan was sub-editor of the Spirit of the Age, a Geelong-based newspaper. A brother was the editor of a rival paper 'and sometimes the exchanges between the two papers in connection with "our contemporary" were, to say the least of it, very vigorous' ('Vale!'). In 1871, he was offered a position as sub-editor of the Town and Country Journal, but preferred to remain freelance.
In the early 1850s, fellow Geelong poet George Wright sent a succession of letters to the Geelong Advertiser accusing Hughan of plagiarising from, among other authors, Longfellow ('Evangeline') and Samuel Taylor Coleridge ('The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'). The initial flurry, centred on Longfellow, prompted Hughan to reply with the verse 'Dedicated, with Concern, to George Wright, Geelong'. The second flurry, centred on Coleridge, led to an enthusiastic exchange of letters between Wright and Hughan's supporters.
Hughan was also a bushman: on one occasion, he travelled solo from Bourke to Cunnamulla, a 250-mile ride ('Vale!'). He spent time in Adelaide, from where he travelled to Bourke and 'took a prominent part in the rescues in the great flood of '61' and organised a private mail delivery from the town to outlying homesteads (''The Late Oscar Hughan'). He also worked as a post-master in Ballarat: the local newspaper reports in 1875 that he received two parcels addressed to Warraweena station (a sheep station in the Flinders Ranges), and said to contain strychnine: the powder had spilt in such quantities that 'Mr Hughan was very ill from the effects of the stuff' ([Untitled]).
In 1896, after seventeen years in the Sheriff's department in Sydney (which he had joined in 1879), Hughan retired. Some sources say he moved immediately to Wentworth Falls (local newspapers called him 'The Grand Old Man of the Mountain'); others note that the move from Balmain to the mountains, necessitated by the 'grave illness of his son', took place in 1906 ('The Late Oscar Hughan'). He died aged 96, and was buried in Wentworth Falls cemetery. He left behind his wife (some thirty years his junior), a son (his elder son, Alan, had died in 1913, aged 34), and an invalid daughter ('Vale! Alan T. Hughan').
Sources:
'The Late Oscar Hughan', Lithgow Mercury, 24 November 1915, p.4.
[Untitled], Ballarat Courier, 7 June 1875, p.2.
'Vale! Alan T. Hughan', Blue Mountain Echo, 10 January 1913, p.8.
'Vale! Oscar Hughan', Blue Mountains Echo, 3 December 1915, p.2.
