James Inglis

Born in Edzell, Forfarshire, Scotland, in 1845, James Inglis was educated in Scotland before heading abroad as a young man. He spent time in New Zealand and then in India, where he worked as an indigo planter and later in the tea trade. Those years gave him firsthand material for the travel and sporting books that made his name.

Inglis eventually settled in Sydney, where he became a merchant and also entered public life, serving in the New South Wales Legislative Assembly. Alongside business and politics, he kept writing, publishing works on India, hunting, travel, poetry, and Scottish wit. That mix of practical experience and literary energy gives his books an unusually vivid, wide-ranging feel.

He died in 1908, but his work still offers a window into the world of the late nineteenth century British Empire: its distances, ambitions, and everyday curiosities. Readers coming to him now will find an author who wrote from direct experience and who could shift easily between reflective travel writing and entertaining anecdote.