sketcher, poet, maritime officer and farmer, was born on 9 November 1811 in Bridgeport, Dorsetshire, eldest of the thirteen children of James Templer and Catherine, née Lethbridge. Educated at a grammar school at Charmouth then at Charterhouse, at the age of fifteen he entered the maritime service of the East India Company. He was rapidly promoted and by 1835 was sailing for China as commander of his uncle’s ship, the Minerva . On his return the following year, however, he resigned his command and began trading in the East. This was unsuccessful and he left China for New South Wales, arriving at Sydney in 1839.
A prolific artist, Templer filled many sketchbooks in his lifetime. The Mitchell Library holds a copy of an Australian sketchbook (owned by descendants in England) depicting places with which the artist was most intimate, especially the landscape and buildings of the Penrith area where Templer’s uncle, Robert Copeland Lethbridge, had settled. Other works show the Port Stephens area where Templer stayed with another uncle, Phillip Parker King of the Australian Agricultural Company.
Templer had been given painting lessons by his mother at an early age and coastal profiles and precise topographical works in his sketchbooks indicate that he was also trained in naval draughtsmanship. He was an admirer of Conrad Martens , whom he had met in Sydney in 1839, and made several copies of Martens’s work, both after originals and from P.P. King’s copies at Port Stephens. At times he wrote disparagingly of his artistic efforts, but he was a competent painter of landscape, animal and genre scenes. He was said to possess 'an absolute passion for the horse and hound’ and his album contains some especially lively drawings of its colonial equivalent, the kangaroo hunt, in which Templer was an enthusiastic and regular participant. He had a keen appreciation of horseflesh and his journal documents his efforts to paint various horses from the stables of the Australian Agricultural Company for his 'Uncle King’. A finished watercolour of Beagle, an Australian Bred Horse, by Skelton, the Property of Captn P.P. King, R.N. , dated December 1839, is held by the Mitchell Library together with other watercolour portraits of horses, all drawn in a careful, rather naive style.
In 1840 Templer decided to pursue a career as a cattle-and horse-breeder at Erskine Park, Parramatta. Five years later he was killed returning from a picnic at Parramatta when his horse crushed him against a tree. His poems, some dating from his youth, were privately published in London in 1872 by his brother, John Charles Templer. They include the song 'Indemnity Gipps’, written at Erskine Park in July 1844 as a satire on Governor Gipps whose Whiggish policies Templer vigorously opposed. A poem about his bay pony Wilhelmine, who kept him company 'through the wild lonely bush, as I ride round my cattle’ is illustrated by a photograph of his watercolour of the horse. A rhyming letter of December 1844 on the merits of bulls is accompanied by a photograph of Templer’s watercolour of his bull Rajah posed in front of the Erskine Park homestead.
