sketcher, collector and writer, daughter of the Tasmanian author David Burn and Frances Maria, née Eldred, arrived with her father at Van Diemen’s Land from Scotland in May 1826. After David Burn had returned to Edinburgh and divorced his wife in 1830, the two settled in the Hamilton district, first at Ellangowan and then at Rotherwood. David Burn remarried in 1832 and Jemima married Charles James Irvine of Deer Park, County Tyrone, on 22 June 1843. In 1846 her husband was appointed senior assistant superintendent at Port Arthur. Her reminiscences, recounted in old age and reported in 1956 by von Stieglitz (who had heard them as a boy), painted an extremely roseate view of life in this notorious penal settlement. For instance, some of their convict servants 'had worked in the best houses in England. You can have no idea what good work they used to do and how much we came to like some of them … In those days there was charming society at Port Arthur … all [the officials, their clerks and their families] were intelligent, musical and altogether delightful people … We were very happy and so were many of the prisoners’.
Irvine, a great collector, filled her later home, Ingleside at Evandale, with shells, stamps and other objects. Von Stieglitz states that she also used to paint 'really delightful little studies of various things in watercolour, particularly of autumn leaves and flowers’. She lived at Ingleside until her death at the age of ninety-nine.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
