A Botany Bay Police Magistrate

William Fernyhough, sketcher, silhouette artist, lithographer and draughtsman, was born in Rugeley, Staffordshire on 17 March 1809, the youngest son of Captain Thomas Fernyhough and his first wife Susannah.

William and his new wife emigrated soon after marrying in mid-1836 and in Sydney, Fernyhough’s technical abilities in lithography and zincography enabled him to produce prints in both media judged by the Sydney Times of 17 September 1836 to be much superior in quality to those previously available in the colony and promising well ‘to embellish our colonial literature’. He seems to have introduced zincography to the colony, a technique only commercially viable in England from 1830.

One of Fernyhough’s most famous productions was A Series of Twelve Profile Portraits of the Aborigines of New South Wales. It is thought that Fernyhough was appointed a ‘surveyor and architect’ under Mitchell and worked as a governmental architectural draughtsman, drawing up the original plans for St Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, Church Hill, Sydney in 1840. Fernyhough died on 15 August 1849 at the age of 40, ‘leaving a wife and six children to lament his loss’. His death was attributed to injuries sustained after “falling down in a fit”.