Ogilvy was the son of James Balfour Ogilvy of the Bengal civil service and his wife Anne, nee Kinloch. He was a descendent of the Ogilvies of Inverquharity, Forfarshire. Educated in Calcultta and Wiltshire, Ogilvy migrated to Van Diemen's Land in 1851 after his parents died. He joined his uncle, Captain David Ogilvy, who had a large property near Richmond, and married Mary Camilla Letitia Needham on a visit to England in 1861. Ogilvy became a Justice of the Peace in 1862, a member of the Municipal Council, secretary of the Richmond Reading Room and Library and a chief district constable. He resigned in July 1876 and lived at Inverquharity near Richmond. Ogilvy received a share of his uncle's estate but disowned it in 1879 after reading Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879).
Ogilvy began writing on social and economic problems in 1886 and published The Land in Hobart and Adelaide. He became president of the Tasmanian Land Nationalisation Society and ran its paper, Land and Labour. In 1888 he went to England where he became vice-president of the parent society, lectured widely and wrote tracts on land nationalisation. In 1890 Ogilvy was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and read a paper in Hobart on 'Can strikes really improve the condition of the masses?'. In 1892 he published The Third Factor of Production and Other Essays and in 1894 The Cause of a [Financial] Crisis. Ogilvy was Chair of the conference at which the Democratic League, succeeded by the Tasmanian Labor Party, was formed.
By 1900 Ogily was less enchanted with Henry George and had become engrossed with evolution. His Elements of Darwinism was published in London in 1901. In this period he wrote novels and poetry; his last work, New Presentment of an Old Controversy on free trade and protection, was published posthumously, possibly in 1915.
(Source: Adapted from 'Ogilvy, Arthur James (1834 - 1914)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 5, MUP, 1974, pp 359-360).
