sketcher, clerk of the peace and farmer, was born in Plymouth, Devon. Migrating with his family in 1839, they settled on a 200-acre land grant at Jamberoo on the south coast of New South Wales. Perrott’s father had been an army surgeon and for a time Robert studied medicine, abandoning this to go to Bathurst as a government official in the early days of the gold-rush. There he met Fanny Raine whom he married in 1851. Later he was a clerk of the peace at Port Macquarie, until taking up a selection in 1861 at Kelly’s Plains near Armidale in northern New South Wales. The family, by then consisting of Robert, Fanny and five children, travelled by bullock-dray in 1862 from Port Macquarie to their property, called Haroldston after the Perrott family’s ancient seat in Wales. Six more children were born there. A devout Anglican, Perrott donated the land and assisted in the erection of St John’s Church, Kelly’s Plains.
Perrott’s duties as clerk of the peace took him all over the district: to Tamworth, Tenterfield, Grafton, Glen Innes, Newcastle, Hillston and elsewhere. He lived at Waratah, near Newcastle, in the 1880s. As well as collecting natural history specimens, Perrott sketched wherever he went and his life in Australia can be traced through his large collection of landscape drawings, nearly all now in the Armidale Historical Museum. Drawings of Broulee and Ulladulla date from the mid 1840s when Perrott was living on the south coast. A view of Fort Macquarie and Pinchgut, Port Jackson, was drawn in June 1850, while a sepia watercolour, The Crown Ridge [on the Bathurst Road] from Whence the Bathurst Plains Were Discovered , was sketched on 22 April 1855, 'on taking wife down country after marriage’.
Four watercolour sketches made at Port Macquarie in 1862 (ML) combine to form a panorama of the place. Another, From the Hill at S. Grafton, 1862 , was drawn near his new home. His view of Saumarez Station , near Armidale, was done in 1867; a sketch of some granite rocks was made on 10 April 1869 'about 4 miles from Deepwater on the road to Bolivia’. Two Clarence River watercolours were painted about April 1868, one a bush view with Aborigines, the other, South Grafton, from the Parsonage Gardens , showing the township. Both are now in Schaeffer House, headquarters of the Clarence River District Historical Society. Views of Moonbi (October 1866) and Ulmarra (June 1872) are in the Armidale collection.
A sepia wash view of Waratah taken from the hill near the Australian Agricultural Company’s fence reveals that he was in the Newcastle area in April 1882, while another watercolour of Waratah 'From the ridge at the back of Mr. Thomas’s’ is dated 31 December 1885. His watercolour Old Lambton (near Newcastle), showing the township with cleared trees and stumps, may have been completed later for it is precisely annotated 'finished 10 Feby. 1886’. An unidentified watercolour of a mine (presumably at Waratah) was made in November 1888. Perrott continued sketching until almost the end of his life. Chinaman’s Pump for Raising Water from the River Lachlan To Irrigate the Vegetable Garden at Hillston was drawn on 29 March 1894 and a watercolour view of Hillston showing 'Bend in the Lachlan River during flood’ dates from 2 October. He died on 12 August 1895.
