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sketcher, ship’s surgeon and author, was an unmarried, peripatetic surgeon on board the South Australian Company’s barque South Australian which came to Australia in 1837. He had been appointed ship’s surgeon in England on 9 October 1836 and embarked in December, according to the autobiographical travel book he published at London in 1839, Reconnoitering Voyages and Travels, with Adventures in the New Colonies of South Australia; a Particular Description of the Town of Adelaide, and Kangaroo Island; and an Account of the Present State of Sydney and Parts Adjacent, including Visits to the Nicobar and Other Islands of the Indian Seas, Calcutta, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena, during the Years 1836, 1837, 1838 . Landing at Kangaroo Island in April 1837, Leigh spent five tedious months mainly thinking about food and shooting possible meals, to judge by his book. He then visited Adelaide and Sydney, returning to England on 12 June 1838 and 'my own rural cot in Warwickshire’. He also published a novel after his return, The Emigrant: A Tale of Australia (London 1847).

Leigh’s travel book, he stated, was 'Embellished by Numerous Engravings’ (i.e. eight lithographs) based on his own sketches, including The Natives Who Found the Kangaroo and A Night Scene in the Bush. Kangaroo Island . All the Australian subjects include comically crude and physically impossible Aborigines, the most peculiar being The Murderer of the White Man, as He Appeared When Chained to the Deck , a crudely-drawn, boneless European-Indian meant to represent the Aboriginal 'scoundrel’ who allegedly murdered the man he was guiding across country between Encounter Bay and Adelaide: 'and a more truly ferocious villain I never beheld … nearly eaten away by syphilis’. The frontispiece to the book, An Australian Warrior, Prepared for Battle , is an equally crass but more comical decorated doll.

Leigh wrote his book, he said, largely to counter the ignorant propaganda and foolish expectations about South Australia then circulating in England, yet his own stories of the perils awaiting the newly arrived are often as unreliable as his illustrations. (He was especially susceptible to tales of cannibalism among both blacks and convict whites.) He concludes by suggesting that his reader 'profit by my example, and never stir from his snug home, in search of ideal happiness in a wilderness’.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011