sketcher, carver, writer, army officer and administrator, was baptised in Clontarf, Dublin, son of John and Margaret Fyans. After attending school in County Louth he joined the British Army in England, serving with the 67th Regiment in the Peninsular War and in India and Burma. He was with the 20th Regiment in India until early in 1833, then joined the 4th Regiment in Sydney and was posted to Norfolk Island. He stayed, reluctantly, for two years, labelling this penal settlement 'a disgrace to England’. The following two years were spent as commandant of the Moreton Bay penal settlement (now Brisbane, Queensland).
Captain Fyans sold his commission in 1837 and moved to Port Phillip (Victoria) as first police magistrate of Geelong. He was appointed commissioner of Crown lands in the Portland Bay district in 1840. Having married Elizabeth Alice Cane (1816-58) at Geelong in January 1843, they settled at Bell-Bird Balyang on the Barwon River three years later. Fyans made the furniture for the house himself, reputedly including a desk in which concealed diamonds were recovered about a century later. Such concealments were but one of his eccentricities; 'A pretty place, but odd people’, wrote one woman visitor in 1854.
The lavish entertainments at Bell-Bird Balyang included regular balls with turbaned servants. Some were apparently held in fancy dress, for Fyans’s only known drawing depicts Miss O’Neil in the Character of Belvadera[?]/ now Lady Buckley (pencil and w/c, ML). Despite being an incomplete fragment, the head alone being finely finished in watercolour, this is a sophisticated, Regency-style drawing.
In 1853 Fyans began writing his memoirs (LT). They finally ran to 500 pages and are full of lively, opinionated incident. He lent many unattributed 'old paintings’ to the 1857 Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition but none of his own work. Fyans died at Balyang on 23 May 1870.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
