sketcher, mural painter, army officer and settler, was born in Ireland on 11 April 1780, son of William Meares. He joined the Cavalry Corps in 1795 and fought in the Peninsular Wars at Vittoria, Toulouse and Waterloo, then later transferred to the 2nd Life Guards (1809-18). Captain Meares arrived at the Swan River Colony (Western Australia) on board the Gilmore on 15 December 1829 with his wife Ellen, née Seymour, their eight children and three indentured servants. He was granted 15,500 acres on the Peel, where he lived for a time. By 1856 the family was offering their home, The Bower at Guildford, for sale. A justice of the peace in 1837, Meares was government resident for the Murray district in 1840-41, then for York until 1862. He died at his home, Auburn, in York, on 9 January 1862.
In his article 'Early days in Westralia’, written for the Cornhill Magazine in 1897, Edmund Du Cane recalled Meares in somewhat facetious vein as 'one who sold his commission in the Life Guards, and among other possessions brought his carriage out with him. Too late he realised that it might be a long time before there would be any roads on which this vehicle could figure; so, as the story went, he turned it to the best account by building a chimney up against one door and used it as a dwelling house’. Du Cane added:
The same gallant old officer was an accomplished draughtsman, and when in due course he built himself a house with walls of rammed earth, as the manner was, he found that they formed an excellent surface for pictorial purposes, and so adorned one of them with a large and striking representation of a charge of the Life Brigades at Waterloo, led by Lord Uxbridge – in which he had taken part; and on another he depicted the battle of Pinjarrah, in which the colonists, led by Governor Stirling, had engaged in a stand-up fight with the natives of the country – an important event in the history of the colony.
Meares’s house has long been demolished. A drawing (on paper) of the old mill at York (1840s, private collection) is his only known work.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
