Thomas Jamison

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Thomas Jamison (1752/1753 – 27 January 1811) was an Irish-born surgeon, government official, mercantile trader and land owner of New South Wales, Australia.

Jamison was born in the seaside village of Ballywalter, on the Ards Peninsula, County Down, in 1752 or the very beginning of 1753. (He was baptised a Presbyterian on 10 January of the latter year.) Jamison came from tough Scots-Irish stock: his parents were William Jamison and Mary Jamison (nee Fisher). He married as a young man and joined the Royal Navy in 1780 in order to advance himself in the world. In 1787, he was sent to Portsmouth, southern England, and assigned to H.M.S. Sirius as an assistant surgeon. The Sirius was to act as the armed naval consort to the convict transport ships and supply vessels making up the First Fleet. The fleet's mission was to establish a strategic British penal colony in New South Wales, on the east coast of Australia. Jamison arrived safely with the fleet at its final destination, the future City of Sydney, in January 1788. Soon afterwards, the commander of the First Fleet, Governor Arthur Phillip, dispatched a band of convict settlers and naval personnel - including Jamison - to Norfolk Island, which lies in the Pacific Ocean, roughly half way between Australia and New Zealand. Here they were to plant an ancillary colony.

Jamison was appointed surgeon to the Norfolk Island colony, a role that he performed with success despite a lack of bureaucratic support. The island's remoteness from Sydney enabled him to live openly with a convict mistress and enrich himself by trading in pork, wheat and later sandalwood. (One of Jamison's business associates was the surgeon, explorer and entrepreneur George Bass [1771-1803].) Jamison remained on the island until 1799, when he was recalled to Sydney. Fearing that his career had stalled, Jamison went on leave and sailed for England. While there, he cultivated a number of influential patrons. In 1801, he was appointed Surgeon-General of New South Wales by the British Government, replacing William Balmain.^[1]

Jamison came back to Sydney in 1802. He proved to be a dilligent and capable principal surgeon, although his work was hampered by a paucity of supplies and assistants. Nonetheless, in 1804, he led the team which performed the first successful vaccination of children against smallpox in the colony. He also published Australia's first medical paper. In 1805, Jamison received a 1,000-acre (4.0 km²) grant of land on the Nepean River, west of Sydney, where he raised livestock. Later, he acquired another 1,300 acres (5.3 km²) of rural land at South Creek and on the Georges River. He also built a town house in Sydney itself.

Jamison possessed a hawk-like visage, a shrewd mind and a peppery personality. Following his return from England, he became a magistrate as well as a major player in a string of lucrative mercantile ventures. This was in defiance of government regulations which prohibited public officials from engaging in business enterprises. Jamison's extensive commercial activities brought him into conflict with the colony's new governor, the authoritarian William Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame), who sacked him from the magistracy in 1807, claiming that the Irishman was not of "upright" character and "inimical to the government". In 1808, Jamison joined forces with other disaffected colonists to oust Governor Bligh in a military coup d'etat known colloquially as the Rum Rebellion. Jamison served as Naval Officer (the forerunner of Collector of Customs) in the colony's temporary, rebel government. He was also restored to the magistrates' bench. This enabled him to take part in the committees which interrogated Bligh's supporters and scrutinised his private papers. (For more information about his role in the insurrection, see the article, "Dr Thomas Jamison: from Rum Rebel to Sydney Customs' Chief", by Stephen Gibbes, in the Australian Customs History Journal, Number Six, December 1994, pages 6-9.)

Jamison left Sydney for London in 1809 in order to testify against Bligh at any ensuing inquiry into the former governor's overthrow and, at the same time, secure his business interests. He leased a residence in fashionable Portman Square, dying there unexpectedly on 27 January 1811 before he was able to give evidence at the trial of one of the coup's ring leaders, Major George Johnston, which went ahead in June of that year. According to family research, Jamison was buried in the grounds of the Anglican Church of St Mary, Paddington Green, London. Jamison's wife, Rebecca, whom he had left behind in Ireland, survived him by 27 years. She received a government pension but only after prolonged lobbying by her son, Sir John Jamison (see below).

Alas, Jamison's headstone has vanished and the exact location of his grave in St Mary's churchyard (since converted into a park) is not known. The Jamison Centre in Canberra bears Thomas' name, however, as does Jamisontown near Penrith - the site of his first land grant.

Footnote: Thomas sired a number of illegitimate children as a result of daliances with convict women, including at least one son. Nevertheless, it was Thomas' legitimate son by his legal spouse Rebecca, namely, Sir John Jamison (1776-1844) - a brilliant Edinburgh University-educated Doctor of Medicine and a former naval surgeon who had seen action at Trafalgar - who came to Sydney, in 1814, to claim Thomas' property. (He did this under a formal, legal arrangement entered into shortly before Thomas' death.) Sir John had been knighted by the United Kingdom's Prince Regent (later King George IV) in 1813 in recognition of his life-saving medical achievements while attached to the Royal Navy's Baltic Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars. (He also received a knighthood from the King of Sweden for the same reason.) Sir John went on to become one of early Sydney's most significant landholders, public benefactors and political reformers. He established a showpiece agricultural estate in the Penrith district of NSW, which he called Regentville in honour of the Prince Regent. In 1823/24, he erected an impressive, two-storey, sandstone mansion on the Regentville estate. Here he pursued the lifestyle of a wealthy, energetic and scientifically-enlightened English squire. Sir John was appointed belatedly to the NSW Legislative Council in 1837 and died at Regentville in 1844. At the time of death, he was in seriously reduced circumstances due to a severe rural drought and an attendant economic downturn that had been crippling the colony's economy for the previous few years. The Jamison line has been perpetuated to this day through the descendants of Sir John's numerous children and grandchildren, some of whom entered public life like their famous forebear. Sir John's career, like that of his father Thomas, is dealt with succinctly in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume Two, edited by Douglas Pike, pages 10-13.