Sketcher, songwriter, surveyor, soldier and public servant, was born in New South Wales, son of Major Edward Abbott and his wife Louisa, daughter of Admiral Smith. Between 1789 and 1810 his father served with the NSW Corps and in 1815 was appointed the first Deputy Judge-Advocate of Van Diemen’s Land. By 1824 John was clerk to the Hobart Town bench of magistrates. Four years later, after applying for a position with the VDL Survey Department, John Abbott moved to Sydney and joined the NSW Surveyor-General’s Department under Thomas Mitchell . By 1832 he was assistant surveyor in charge of the approaches to the new Lennox Bridge at Lapstone in the lower Blue Mountains.
Abbott later returned to Van Diemen’s Land where he was registrar-general of births, deaths and marriages in 1840-57. In 1842 he acquired 640 acres at Gordon on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and built a house that he named Rookwood. Abbott never married. He devoted considerable time to gardening and to his various cultural interests, including painting watercolour sketches and writing the words for the 'Song of the Fair Emigrant’, published as sheet music by the Hobart Town lithographer R.V. Hood in 1854.
Towards the end of his life Abbott sent three entries to the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition: a watercolour view of the locale of the coal on his property; a Book of Tasmanian Scraps, from an Australian Native ; and Busts of Tasmanian Natives . He certainly executed the first two, but was probably only the exhibitor of the third (possibly busts of Truganini and Woureddy by the Tasmanian sculptor Benjamin Law ). His Book of Tasmanian Scraps was awarded a medal and was subsequently shown at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition where he also showed a watercolour of D’Entrecasteaux Channel (possibly the same 1866 view) and another of his drawings, Dogs , was exhibited by C. Barrer.
Abbott died in Hobart Town on 10 July 1875, aged 71. His only painting held in a public collection is a monochrome watercolour dated 1828, The Boat Harbour of Woollooderra [now Ulladulla, New South Wales], as seen from the S.W. , which was transferred from the Lands Department to the Mitchell Library in 1921. Other sketches survive with descendants.
- Writers:
- McDonald, Patricia R.
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
