Australian Dictionary of Biography

John Harris (flourished 1783-1803), emancipist, watchman and innkeeper, was a labourer of St Marylebone, London, when sentenced to death on 15 January 1783 at the Old Bailey for stealing eight silver spoons. In February 1785 the sentence was commuted to fourteen years transportation to America, and altered the following month to deportation for life to Africa. His destination was finally changed to New South Wales and he sailed, with a life sentence, in the First Fleet in the Scarborough.

Harris was one of the first Jews in Australia. In the winter of 1789 he proposed to Judge-Advocate David Collins to establish a night watch, 'to be selected among the convicts for the purpose to stem the frequent commission of offences in the settlement'. This was agreed to. This first attempt at a police force in the settlement began on 8 August 1789, with Harris as one of its principal members. In 1790 he was transferred to Norfolk Island, where in 1793 he was put in charge of the police at Sydney Vale, Arthur Vale and Granville Valley. He was granted two acres (.8 ha), but deprived of them when Lieutenant John Townson and other officers chose the land for their leases. Disgusted by this treatment, Harris pressed Lieutenant-Governor Philip Gidley King for a pardon. This was granted by Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose before Grose left on 6 December 1794 and after Harris had returned to Sydney in February 1796 it was confirmed by Governor John Hunter on King's recommendation 'in consideration of good services as Principal of the Nightwatch at Norfolk Island'.

Harris went to the Hawkesbury district and squatted on some six acres (2.4 ha) at Mulgrave Place near Windsor, granted him in January 1798. He built an inn on it and in September received a liquor licence, which was one of the first in the colony. In 1799 he transferred his activities to Toongabbie, where he opened another inn, and soon became one of the trusted agents of John Macarthur in his trade.

When King became governor he asked Harris to return to the police force, but he declined, not wanting to abandon a lucrative trade which afforded him and his family a better living than a government appointment. Soon afterwards King declared that he had acted against government regulations by buying rations from convicts with liquor. He was taken into custody by Samuel Marsden, and while he was detained the governor had one wall of his house torn down, his liquor casks staved open and his spirit licence withdrawn; later he deprived him of his land grant. Harris was never formally tried, and was soon released, but he estimated the value of the destroyed liquor at more than £400.

Deprived of his livelihood and afraid of King, he decided to leave the colony. By this time a convict woman had borne him a son and two daughters, Elizabeth and Hannah. He left his daughters in the care of his fellow-Jew and relation, James Larra, and embarked with his son in January 1801 in the Spanish prize El Plumier, which Thomas Fyshe Palmer, one of the so-called Scottish Martyrs, had bought for his return to England. After an adventurous journey, during which they were shipwrecked at Fiji, and taken prisoners by the Spanish when seeking refuge on Guam, where Palmer died, they arrived in England about October 1803. Next month, backed by Macarthur, Harris sought relief from the Colonial Office, but his memorial apparently remained unanswered and the ultimate fate of Harris and his son is not known.

His daughter Elizabeth married Walter Lang of Glasgow; their son, John George, became Australia's first native-born novelist. After Lang's death, she married Joseph Underwood. Hannah Harris married Thomas Ritchie, captain of the Greyhound, and settled at Launceston.