Australian Dictionary of Biography

Richard Thompson (1810-1865), journalist, born in England and baptized William Fane, was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for fourteen years for the theft of some silver spoons. On arrival in June 1834 he was employed by the government at Port Macquarie; in 1840 he received a ticket-of-leave and two years later a conditional pardon. While at Port Macquarie he published a brief account of the geography and geology of north-eastern Australia and tried unsuccessfully to set up a beef-salting plant. In 1842-43 he worked on newspapers in the Port Phillip district, and in 1843 moved to Sydney where he served on the staff of the Australian. In November 1844, when Robert Lowe undertook the publication of the Atlas on behalf of the squatters, Thompson was named editor, a title he held until March 1845 when a difference of opinion with the actual editor, Lowe, brought about his resignation. In 1846 Benjamin Boyd and Joseph Robinson decided that the squatters needed a new medium of propaganda and, with the help of William Bland, established another weekly, the Spectator, of which Thompson was made editor. At the end of the year, when the squatters' demands had been fulfilled by the British government, publication of the Spectator ceased. In 1847 Boyd bought a controlling interest in the Australian and installed Thompson as managing editor. With the collapse of Boyd's fortunes in 1848 the Australian ceased, and Thompson's career as a journalist seems to have foundered. In 1856 he edited the Report of the Proceedings at the National Banquet … to Celebrate the Establishment and Inauguration of Responsible Government in the Colony of New South Wales.

Thompson dabbled in the theatre in Sydney, furnishing scripts, translating librettos, and acting as critic. The pages of the publications which he edited reveal him as a skilful though unoriginal poet and an able editor. On 5 November 1846 he married Mary Ann, daughter of Charles Righton, an officer of the East India Co.; a son was born of this marriage in 1847. Thompson died in Sydney in 1865.