sketcher, clerk and settler, was established as a settler and magistrate’s clerk in Campbelltown, New South Wales, by 1828, the year he dated a watercolour view of his home, Agar Cottage (Campbelltown and Airds Historical Society). It shows the small hut where Scarr’s servant lived and the hut of a tenant farmer on top of one of the background hills, while Scarr’s substantial weatherboard cottage with full-length front verandah and pair of brick chimneys features prominently in the foreground. Scarr himself, in a high black hat, is leaning over his picket fence conversing with one of five passing Aborigines (two women wearing blankets tied over one shoulder, one with a small naked child, and two men dressed in pieces of cast-off European clothing and carrying spears). According to an extract from a letter accompanying the picture, the man speaking to Scarr while 'making one of his polite bows’ is asking: 'Got any Coppers master?’
Scarr was active in local affairs, including a proposal to build a water reservoir at the township’s expense in 1832 (successfully completed the following year) and urging the formation of a separate district council for Campbelltown in 1843 (defeated in the New South Wales Legislative Council). In the 1840s he held a squatting licence over 40 000 acres on Marengo Creek, near Young in southern New South Wales.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
