Tarlton Rayment was a poet, novelist, naturalist, illustrator, and expert on Australian bees. He was the youngest son of Commander Albert Rayment, R. N., musician, and his wife Rose, nee Darling (said to be a descendant of Governor Sir Richard Darling). Rayment was the youngest of seven children, educated at an Anglican school where he demonstrated he was a brilliant scholar with a gift for painting. Trained as an artist and an architect initially, his fascination with bees led him to natural history. He came to Melbourne, Australia via India in 1902 to stay with his uncle in Ballarat, earning money as a commercial artist. He took up beekeeping in Leongatha and married Clarice Harbeck Begg on 16 April 1909. They had one son. In 1908 Rayment moved to Briagolong where he set up three hundred hives. This was followed by a move to Sandringham in 1922 where he spent most of his time researching on native bees. From 1923 he also gave talks over 3AR radio station which were very popular and a few years later collaborated in the founding of Everett's Business College.
Kenneth Walker (1988) describes Rayment in the 1930s as follows: 'He was president of the Entomological Society of Victoria (1930-31) and an associate of the Royal Society of Victoria (1930-34). For his many publications he was elected in 1931 a fellow of the Entomological Society, London. His best-known work was A Cluster of Bees (1935), for which he received world acclaim. He lectured, broadcast and published widely on natural history, and made three films, including The Cliff Dwellers (1933)' about the Australian native bee for Frank Thring. Rayment continued to write prolifically on bees with about five hundred publications including descriptions of over 1,000 species of bees. In 1951 he was awarded the Natural History Medallion of Australia and in 1952 became honorary entomologist for the National Museum of Victoria.
It was in the 1930s and 1940s that Rayment made a name for himself as a fiction writer, encompassing children's stories, a novel and poetry. Lynette Young (1969): 95 asserts that Rayment wrote Golden City of Bees (1921), a Whitcombe and Tombs School Reader, but it is not listed in Ian F. Mclaren's Whitcombe's Story Books: A Trans-Tasman Survey (1984) or any national bibliography or library catalogue. Rayment was a constant contributor to Walkabout from 1939 to 1950, illustrating his own articles with wash-drawings and micro-photographs. In 1938-39 Rayment was Australian correspondent for the German newspaper, Allgemeine Zeitung.
(Source: Kenneth L. Walker, 'Rayment, Percy Tarlton (1882 - 1964)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 11, MUP, 1988, pp 338-339; Lynette Young The Melody Lingers On: Biography of Tarlton Rayment, F.R.Z.S. (1967) )
