Phillip Somer appears to have been the author 'Remos', who wrote the words to 'The Overlander', and a number of other bush ballads, which were first published in The Queenslanders' New Colonial Campfire Song Book (1865). He was the eldest son of Victorian pastoralist John Somer (d. 8 April, 1878), who in the 1850s managed Royal Bank station at Ulupna, on the Upper Murray, and later ran a cattle property near Lancefield, in Victoria.
Phillip Somer was one of perhaps hundreds of pastoral speculators who sought to make their fortune in the Australian colonies in the 19th century by establishing and selling sheep and cattle stations on the frontiers of European settlement. In February 1861 Somer joined an expedition led by George Elphinstone Dalrymple, which travelled overland from Rockhampton to Bowen, where he joined a smaller party, led by Edward Cunningham, which then explored the Upper Burdekin watershed in search of viable grazing land. He subsequently formed a partnership with his brother-in-law, the Victorian M.L.C. Matthew Hervey (1820-1873), and together they took up a number of pastoral leases in the Leichhardt and Upper Kennedy districts, in North Queensland. However, by about 1865, Somer and Hervey encountered financial difficulties, and their pastoral interests were placed in the hands of a receiver. Somer then appears to have spent a year or so gravitating between Melbourne and Sydney, where he briefly tried his hand as a stock and station agent, before returning to Queensland to manage St. Anne's station, inland from Bowen, which he and Hervey had established a few years previously. During the 1860s Somer also held a number of freehold properties at Bowen, and it appears that he might have used Bowen as a base for his pastoral operations, and perhaps even lived there at various points. Details of Somer's life after 1869 are unclear, however by 1876 he and his wife were living in Townsville, where he had a butchering business. According to the report of his death which appeared in the Townsville Times and North Queensland Advertiser on 30 June, 1876, Somer died following an accident at the Townsville saleyards, when the horse he was riding fell and kicked him in the head.
