drawing teacher, surveyor and squatter, was the sixth and youngest child of Benjamin Smythe, surveyor and civil engineer, and his wife, Annie, from Liverpool, Lancashire. Henry arrived at Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land on board the Kate with his parents and sisters, on 3 March 1831. They had come from the Swan River settlement (Western Australia) where his father had been employed as surveyor to Thomas Peel but, never having been paid a salary, arrived destitute and without Henry’s older brothers, who remained in Western Australia to work off the debts. Henry and his father set up in Cameron Street, Launceston, as 'Land Surveyors, Civil Engineers, Architects and General Measurers’. For a time both were teachers too, Benjamin conducting a school while Henry advertised 'lessons in drawing’ at Launceston in April 1834. Since Henry was simultaneously announcing the continuation of his surveying and planning business, now an independent enterprise located in Brisbane Street, it seems certain that the classes he was offering were primarily of a technical nature, including cartography. H.W.H. Smythe’s map of Launceston was announced as being 'ready for the engraver’ in the Cornwall Chronicle of 8 August 1835.
Henry’s sister Martha married Captain William Lonsdale in 1835 and the following September Lonsdale was appointed first resident police magistrate at Port Phillip (Victoria), an event that changed the Smythe family’s fortunes. Known as 'Long Smythe’ (he was 198 cm tall) Henry moved to Port Phillip in 1837 and worked as a surveyor at Westernport, later being appointed commissioner of Crown Lands for the Murray district. He married Jessie, youngest daughter of George Allan of Allan Vale near Launceston, on 19 February 1841, and they settled on a property, Gowangardie, on the Broken River, 15 miles from Shepparton, Victoria. He subsequently became a founding member of the Melbourne Club, a justice of the peace, and a police magistrate. Then the wheel of fortune spun again. Smythe was drowned in the Broken River in 1854.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
