sketcher, soldier and author, was born on 10 March 1804, eldest son of Major-General Godfrey Basil Mundy and Sarah Brydges, née Rodney. He followed his father into the army and had attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel when he arrived at New South Wales from London in the Agincourt in 1846, after periods of duty in India and Canada, to take up the position of deputy adjutant-general of the military forces in the Australian colonies. His cousin was the then governor-general of Australia, Sir Charles FitzRoy, whom Mundy accompanied on some of his tours around New South Wales. A vice-regal party consisting of Sir Charles and Lady FitzRoy, their son George, Dr and Mrs Dawson and Colonel Mundy arrived at Lake Innes outside Port Macquarie, the home of Major Archibald Innes and his family, on 3 March 1847. Five days later Innes’s niece, Annabella Boswell , who considered Mundy 'a gentlemanlike looking little man’, recorded in her diary that the sketch he had made from his bedroom window showing George FitzRoy asleep in the garden was so greatly coveted by all the young ladies for their albums that it was put up for domestic auction – 'I [unsuccessfully] offered a pen-wiper’.
Mundy had previously published Pen and Pencil Sketches, being the Journal of a Tour in India (London 1832), having served as aide-de-camp to Lord Combermere during the siege and storming of Bhurtpore. His pen and pencil were equally busy during his Australasian excursions through New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and New Zealand, resulting in the publication of Our Antipodes; or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian Colonies, with a Glimpse of the Gold Fields (3 vols, London 1852). Intended to be 'light’ but 'useful as well as amusing’, his book provides some of the best and most entertaining insights into life in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century. The review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in September 1852 ran to fifteen pages.
Its fifteen lithographic plates, executed by W.L. Walton after sketches by Mundy and his wife, Louisa Mundy , are, unfortunately, not as lively as the text. Mundy’s twelve landscapes and stylised action scenes, such as the frontispiece to the first volume, Mounted Police and Blacks , show him to have been a competent draughtsman, aware of the picturesque requirements of his period but chiefly interested in accurate observation. Nine proof plates for Our Antipodes are in the National Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library holds four of his original sketches. The best known of his illustrations depicts the convict railway at Port Arthur, the image of four convicts propelling an open box carriage being an irresistibly exotic subject for the English market. An oil painting after it was made by Haughton Forrest, probably in the 1890s, then photographed by John Watt Beattie to use in his lantern slide lecture on Port Arthur. It has since been widely reproduced.
Mundy left Australia on 24 August 1851 and was subsequently appointed under-secretary in the War Office during the Crimean War, then Lieutenant Governor of Jersey (UK). He continued to write about life in New South Wales; Bentley’s Miscellany published 'A tale of twenty years ago’ in two parts in its 1853 issue (vol. 34) and 'Bushranging facts’ in 1854 (vol. 35). He died in London on 10 July 1860.
