painter and sketcher, was the eldest daughter of George Meredith, pioneer settler of the Great Swanport district in Van Diemen’s Land, and his first wife, Sarah Westall Hicks. Sarah was probably born in Wales but she lived mainly in England. She came to Van Diemen’s Land with her father, step-mother and other members of the family, leaving from London in the Emerald on 8 November 1820. Her view of The Old Cottage at Red Banks (the original wattle-and-daub cottage built by her father at Cambria in 1821) was copied in 1846 by her half-sister Fanny Meredith . It is now known only from the copy.
After her marriage to James Peck Poynter in the 1830s Sarah lived at Bathurst, New South Wales, where James managed the local bank. Her brother Charles and his wife Louisa Anne Meredith , a cousin whom she had known all her life, visited in October 1839 and met the Poynters’ first surviving son, Charles, born in March. The Poynters finally had a family of three boys and a girl. James died in 1847 and Sarah returned to England. She apparently paid a visit to her Tasmanian relatives in the late 1850s and seems to have been staying with her father’s family at the grander Cambria, Great Swanport, in 1858 when she exhibited her oil painting, Lake St. Clair, Tasmania , in the Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition (unless this was copied from a Prout drawing or engraving in England). She died in England in 1869.
Sarah Poynter’s original sketches are in the Crowther Library. In 1936 Violet Mace, the last of the George Meredith descendants to live at Cambria, made four crude pencil copies after Poynter drawings for the Royal Society of Tasmania. These depict Bothwell Church, two general views of Port Arthur and Sketch of Commandant’s House, Port Arthur Showing Point Puer in Distance (TMAG). The originals have not been located.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
