Richard Dry
Australian politician (1815-1869)
Sir Richard Dry, KCMG (20 September 1815 – 1 August 1869) was an Australian politician, the son of United Irish convict, who was Premier of Tasmania from 24 November 1866 until 1 August 1869 when he died in office. Dry was the first Tasmanian-born premier, and the first Tasmanian to be knighted.
Early life
Dry was born in Launceston, Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), the son of Richard Dry, an officer and pastoralist, and his wife Anne, née Maughan. The elder Dry had been transported from Ireland in advance of the 1798 rebellion. Although a Protestant and a Dublin woollen-draper, he had been a senior figure in the largely Catholic and agrarian Defender movement as well as being a senior United Irishmen.
Dry was educated at a Kirkland's private school in Campbell Town. Dry was a close friend of the diarist Anna Baxter who was the wife of the recently arrived British Lieutenant Andrew Baxter in the 1830s. In 1835 Dry voyaged to Mauritius and the British ports in India, on his return to Tasmania he managed his father's 30,000-acre Quamby Estate near Hagley which he inherited on this death in 1843. Encounters with the native Palawa people and reports of Europeans shooting them feature in the area's history and mythology. Stephen Dry, was reportedly speared by an aboriginal on a hill near Hagley.
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