Thomas Hudson Beare arrives among first on 'Duke of York' in 1836; after tragedy, starts farm in Netley, Adelaide
Thomas Hudson Beare's tent at Nepean Bay, Kangaroo Island, in 1836 – as sketched by William Light. Insets: The mulberry tree, brought out by Beare, planted on Kangaroo Island. Below: Arabella Beare (later Williams, pictured in 1881) was reputed to be the first from the first fleet to step ashore at Kangaroo Island in 1836.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Thomas Hudson Beare, who arrived on the Duke of York, first of the first fleet of South Australian settler ships at Kangaroo Island in 1836, was regarded as the colony's first storekeeper.
His daughter Arabella was cited as the first of the fleet to set foot on South Australian shores and his wife Lucy was the first white woman to die in South Australia.
Beare, from Netley in Hampshire, England, wife Lucy and their four children arrived at Kangaroo Island on July 27 or 28 1836. Lucy, who’d given birth on board the Duke of York to a daughter who died shortly after, died on Kangaroo Island within six weeks of giving birth again, this time to a healthy daughter.
Thomas Beare’s sister Charlotte, also on the Duke of York, married the South Australian Company’s colonial manager Samuel Stephens on September 24, 1836. This marriage, the colony’s second and prompting gossip because of their age difference, was performed by captain George Martin aboard the John Pirie, another of the first fleet, anchored at Kangaroo Island’s Nepean Bay.
Shortly after arriving on Kngaroo Island, Beare, with William Giles and Henry Mildred, had a batch of merino ewes imported from Van Dieman’s Land. Stock losses on the unusually long trip aboard the Cygnet were high.
After moving to the South Australian mainland, Beare in 1838 bought Section 101, Hundred of Adelaide, and named his property Netley, later to become the modern suburb.
Beare’s second marriage, in 1840 to Lucy Bull produced nine more children. Lucy Bull had emigrated with her brothers Joseph Bull and John Wrathall Bull and his family aboard Canton, arriving in South Australia in 1838.
Beare supported his brother-in-law John Wrathall Bull in his claim against John Ridley as the true inventor of the cereal stripper, having built the prototype. Thomas Beare’s son William (later a farmer at “Bungaree" station) used Wrathan Bull’s stripper, built by Samuel Marshall, to harvest wheat at his father’s Netley property, and he testified to Bull's prior claim to the invention.
Engineering acumen flowed to the last of Thomas’s Beare’s children with Lucy Bull. His namesake Thomas Hudson Beare, born in 1859, became an eminent engineer in Britain. Educated at Prince Alfred College and Adelaide University, Thomas Hudson Beare Junior won the first £200 South Australian scholarship for overseas study awarded by Adelaide University in 1897.
Beare didn’t return after completing his studies at University College London. He rose to professor of engineering at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh; then at University College, London; and finally regius professor of engineering at Edinburgh University. He occupied other eminent positions in various fields in the United Kingdom.
