pastoralist and sketcher, was a son of the pioneer pastoralist Alexander Riley who had come to New South Wales as a free settler in 1804. After serving as government storekeeper, then deputy commissary, at the Port Dalrymple (Launceston) settlement in Van Diemen’s Land from 1809, his father ran sheep on his property, Raby, near Liverpool, New South Wales, exporting wool to England from 1812 onwards. Determined to rival John Macarthur’s Spanish merinos, Alexander Riley imported a flock of Saxon merinos. The first shipment arrived in 1825 in the care of his nephew Edward Riley junior, the second in 1828 with William. The Riley merinos won every possible gold medal awarded by the New South Wales Agricultural Society between 1827 and 1830 and William sketched two of the prize specimens with proprietorial pride. His drawing, Prize Ram and Ewe, Exhibited at Parramatta, October 1828, from the Electoral Saxon flocks of Raby , was published in London as a lithograph by Dean & Munday (possibly the later Tasmanian painter Henry Mundy ).
William Riley married Honoria Rose Brooks on 28 February 1833. They lived both at Raby and Cavan in the Argyle district of New South Wales. Riley died suddenly on 4 December 1836, the day fixed for the wedding of his wife’s sister, Maria, to Lieutenant Zouch . To celebrate the occasion, the groom’s friend Lieutenant Waddy fired a decorative cannon which exploded taking off Waddy’s hand. Waddy survived but Riley, who witnessed the accident, collapsed and died, presumably of shock. Among his papers (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW) is a signed drawing in pencil and sepia wash of a horse and carriage.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
