After losing his first job as a government surveyor in Sydney, Kentish managed the Sydney Times - an independent, pro-emancipist semi-weekly - from 1834 to 1838. He worked as senior surveyor in South Australia (1839-1840) and continued surveying work in Van Diemen's Land during the 1840s. Kentish then went to Port Phillip in 1849 where he was gaoled for horsewhipping newspaper editor George Cavenagh (q.v.). A controversial man who clashed with officialdom wherever he lived, Kentish spent the later years of his life in Sydney.
A prolific author and pamphleteer, he wrote several pamphlets justifying his conduct as well as two descriptive works, The Present State of New South Wales (1835) and The Political Economy of New South Wales (1838). He also wrote several verse essays and miscellanies, including commemorative anthems; for example, Commemoration Victorian-Australian Anthem, Separation: A Colonial Anthem and Commemoration National Anthem: Victorian-Australian 'Rule Brittania', all published as broadsheets by the author in 1851. Morris Miller (q.v.) has written that one of these, or Melancholic Storie of Maister Timothie Brown (1851) by George Wright (q.v.), may be the first recorded separate issue of verse written and published in Victoria.
Although he wrote a considerable number of poems, most of them are scattered among his works on other subjects. The Bush in South Australia was the only purely poetic work he attempted to publish. He repeatedly advertised his forthcoming The Austral-Asian Muse, in a prospectus that promised three volumes, but they never appeared (referred to in Ferguson, 11113a). However, a seventeen-page poem with the title, 'Essay on Capital Punishment', was included in a book by the same name, and was reprinted in The Bush in South Australia.
