printer, bookseller, newspaper editor and politician, was born at Springbank, Glasgow, on 22 January 1819, eldest son of James McColl, a warehouseman of Springbank, and Agnes, née Cowan. After serving an apprenticeship to a Glasgow printer and bookbinder and working for fifteen years as a bookseller at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, McColl came to Victoria with his family in the Emigrant . His wife Jane, née Hiers, whom he had married at South Shields, Durham, in 1843 and with whom he had seven children, died on 2 January 1853, just as the ship entered Hobson’s Bay. In 1856 he married Mary, sister of George Guthrie of the Bendigo Potteries, at North Melbourne; they had six children.
McColl was listed in Melbourne street directories as a printer of 28 Little Bourke Street East in 1853, of 41 La Trobe Street East in 1854. In 1853 the Argus referred to him as an 'artist’, a category then defined very broadly. He may, however, have reproduced his own drawings when both printer and publisher of the Melbourne Banner and Diggers Advocate . McColl later managed a mine at Sandhurst (Bendigo). In 1874 he was appointed secretary of a utopian scheme to irrigate 6 million acres in northern Victoria—by the Grand Victorian North West Canal, Irrigation, Traffic and Motive Power Company Ltd—and travelled the country to promote this. (It never progressed beyond one canal in the Goulburn district.) At his fourth attempt he was elected parliamentary representative for Mandurang in 1880, from which position he continued to display his by then legendary 'water-on-the-brain’ obsessiveness. McColl died on 2 April 1885 at St Kilda and was buried in the Back Creek Cemetery, Bendigo.
