Abstract
Stewart Ryrie, who joined the Commissariat of the British army during the Peninsular War, came to New South Wales in 1825 with an appointment as Deputy Commissary General in Sydney. Ryrie brought with him the six children of his first marriage (to his cousin Anne Stewart) and his second wife, whom he had recently married. Isabella Ryrie was only a year or two older than her eldest stepchild, and she had another three children in quick succession in Sydney, making nine children in all. For Stewart Ryrie, these nine children produced 49 grandchildren. After only a few years in Sydney, Ryrie was granted land south of Sydney, at Braidwood, where his adult sons were also granted land, and where he built a house fit for a gentleman that he called Arnprior, after his second wife’s birthplace in Scotland. This lovely thirteen-roomed stone house, near the banks of the Shoalhaven River, has a front door flanked on either side by half pillars and a carved thistle above the fanlight.1 The house still stands, though no longer occupied by the family. Alexander Ryrie, one of Stewart’s sons, purchased Micilago,2 near Canberra, in 1859 and one branch of the Ryrie family remains there to this day. With the weight of numbers, the Ryrie family had a considerable impact in Australia, with the sons squatting on the Monaro and in the Port Phillip district (now the state of Victoria).
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Notes
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© 2011 Christine Wright
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Wright, C. (2011). ‘they make Ancestry’: Veterans as Officers and Gentlemen. In: Wellington’s Men in Australia. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306035_3
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