People/mooregf.html
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George Fletcher Moore
George Fletcher Moore (10 December 1798 – 30 December 1886) arrived 30 October 1830 per Cleopatra. (He was the uncle of William Dalgety Moore.) He was a prominent early settler in colonial Western Australia, and 'one [of] the key figures in early Western Australia's ruling elite' (Cameron, 2000). He conducted a number of exploring expeditions; was responsible for one of the earliest published records of the language of the Australian Aborigines of the Perth area; and was the author of Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia.
(That is a link to the complete text on this site. It also available through Wikipedia in Wikisource, the Internet Archive, Trove, and elsewhere, as well as being in print in two different versions, as below.)
Erickson:
MOORE, George Fletcher. b. 10.12.1798 (UK), d. 30.12.1886 (London). arr. 29.10.1829 [1830] per Cleopatra, m. 29.10.1846 (Perth) Fanny Mary Jane JACKSON b. 1821 d. 24.10.1863 (London), stepdtr of Governor Clarke. Selected 12,000 acres in 2 lots in Avon district & settled at "Millendon" Swan district. Lawyer by profession, he was apptd Comm. of Civil Court 1832 & Advocate General 1834. Director of WA Bank. Member & Secretary of Guildford Agric. Soc. Apptd. Col. Secretary of Colony 7.1846. MLC 1834-52 & JP. Left colony briefly 1841 & finally on 16.2.1852 per John Panter. Author of Diary of Ten Years. Commemorated in 1979 in a brass plaque in Perth pavement for year 1852.
References and Links
Barker, Michael 2023, 'Getting The Voice – Just as I'm sure George Fletcher Moore would have, I'm voting yes for The Voice', Fremantle Shipping News, 18 May: "Moore’s 1833 letters anticipated both the 1992 decision of the High Court of Australia in Mabo nearly 160 years later, and the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart calling for A Voice, Treaty, and Truth some 185 years later."
Battye, James Sykes 1924, Western Australia: A History from its Discovery to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth, OUP.
Cameron, James 2000, 'George Fletcher Moore', in Bob Reece ed., The Irish in Western Australia: Studies in Western Australian History, 20: 21-34. (See below.)
Erickson, Rica 1987, Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians, UWAP.
Hitchcock, JK 1929, The History of Fremantle, The Front Gate of Australia 1829-1929, Fremantle City Council.
Moore, George Fletcher 1884, Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia, and also a Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines, M. Walbrook, London; facsimile edition UWA 1978; introduction by Tom Stannage.
Moore, George Fletcher 2006, The Millendon Memoirs: George Fletcher Moore's Western Australian Diaries and Letters, 1830-1841, ed. J.M.R. Cameron, Hesperion Press.
Moore wrote three remarkable letters to the editor of The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal over the pseudonym of Philaleth (from the Greek φιλαλήθης, 'lover of truth'), as published 13 July 1833, 27 July 1833, and 10 August 1833.
O'Brien, Philippa 2023, No Stone without a Name: A Visual History of Possession and Dispossession in Australia's West, Ellenbook Cultural Foundation: 266-271, including Elizabeth Irwin's sketch of Millendon, etc.
Cameron 2000:
George Fletcher Moore, one the key figures in early Western Australia's ruling elite, was a man of many parts. Perhaps best known now as the author of the Diary of Ten Years of an Early Settler in Western Australia, he was, among other things, a successful landowner, small scale merchant, explorer and land evaluator, accomplished lawyer and legislator, a more than adequate poet, songster and amateur musician, and a pioneer recorder and interpreter of Aboriginal language and custom. He was a major contributor to the colonial press on a range of subjects and contributed to the wider colonial debate as a corresponding member of the London-based Western Australian Association and the Royal Agricultural Society. Even his Diary, drawn from letters and journals sent to his family Ireland and the most comprehensive account of Western Australia's first decade, is only a fraction of his surviving writings. Through them emerges a picture of a confident, outgoing man at ease with himself and the Christian principles he espoused, determined to make his way in the world and thus intolerant of weaknesses and flaws in himself and others.
Viewed from one perspective, Moore was the sort of person a young colony needed: knowledgeable, conciliatory and enthusiastic as well as ambitious and determined to understand the attributes of his new environment—people as well as place. Viewed from another, he represented the established order he had left behind in Ireland where master and servant had their proper place and where the role of law was to protect property and enforce morality and social station. Whether he was distinctively Irish is not for the non-Irish to say. His closest friends were Irish; his business links were Irish; there is an Irish cadence to his prose and a Celtic lilt to his poetry, but he aspired to membership of a Colonial Establishment whose roots were firmly English.
Moore was born on 10 December 1798 at Bond's Glen, Donemana, Co. Tyrone, the second son of Joseph Moore, farmer and merchant, and his wife Anne, née Fletcher. He was educated at Foyle College in Londonderry, where his father had his mercantile headquarters, and at Trinity College. Dublin, where he graduated in law in 1820. Dissatisfied with his prospects after six years service at the Irish Bar on its north-west circuit, he determined on a judicial career in the colonies. Swan River seemed infinitely preferable to Fernando Po* or the older well established colonies as it provided an opportunity to become a major landowner with a modest investment. Although he was in London in the first part of 1830 gathering information and reassuring himself that rumours of the colony's collapse were unfounded, there is no clear evidence of his having applied formally for a position. He did, however, obtain flattering testimonials to his abilities from the Chief Baron and Attorney-General for Ireland as ...
- Editorial footnote: In 1830, Fernando Po (now part of Equitorial Africa) was a Spanish colony. It was never part of the British Empire. GG
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 17 January, 2015 and hosted at freotopia.org/people/mooregf.html (it was last updated on 13 September, 2023). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.