Havelock Ellis first visited Sydney, New South Wales, briefly in 1866 when he arrived with his father, a sea captain, on the Empress. He returned with his father on the Surry in 1875. He started a journal on the Surry voyage in which he recorded his experiences, irregularly, over the next four years.
After his father sailed for home, Ellis stayed in Sydney teaching at a private school. In 1876 he worked as a tutor to a family at Goonawarrie near Carcoar. He returned to Sydney at the end of that year to register to matriculate at the University of Sydney, but left again for country New South Wales and became the teaching assistant in a private school in Grafton. In 1878 he trained to become a teacher for the New South Wales Council of Education, passing the examination, and was posted to Sparkes and Junction Creek schools in the Scone area of New South Wales. He spent three days a week teaching at Sparkes Creek and two days at Junction Creek. K. J. Cable, in his entry on Havelock Ellis in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, writes that during this period Ellis read widely. ‘In particular he re-read Life in Nature by James Hinton, a physiologist and amateur philosopher, and consulted Ellis Hopkins's edition of Hinton's Life and Letters. Hinton's exposition gave the questing Ellis a belief in the inherent righteousness of the search for artistic and scientific truth. The best avenue for his search, Ellis thought, was a medical and not a clerical career.’
Ellis decided to return to study medicine in England and left Sydney in January 1879.
K. J. Cable writes that Ellis consulted his journal of his time in Australia for his novel Kanga Creek (1922) and that ‘he later used a few incidents in his clinical studies but not, he claimed, in his autobiography begun in 1899 and published as My Life in 1940.’
Ellis never returned to Australia although Cable notes that a ‘photograph of Sparkes Creek … stood by his bedside in his last years.’
Sources: K. J. Cable, 'Ellis, Henry Havelock (1859–1939)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ellis-henry-havelock-3479/text5327, accessed 9 December 2013; Sharon Veale, Remembering Country : History and Memories of Towarri National Park, Hurstville, NSW: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (2001) : 21-23
