author
John Arthur Barry
1851–1911
Drawn from years at sea and in the Australian bush, his stories have the rough honesty and lived-in detail of someone who really knew the worlds he wrote about. He is best remembered for vivid tales of sailors, diggers, and outback life.
1 Audiobook
Steve Brown's Bunyip, and Other Stories
by John Arthur Barry
About the author
Born in Torquay, Devon, and orphaned when he was young, he went to sea as a boy and spent about twelve years in the merchant service before making his way to Australia. There he worked in a remarkable range of jobs, including time on the goldfields and in the bush, experiences that later gave his fiction and journalism their strong sense of place and practical detail.
He became known in Australia as a journalist and storyteller, writing about maritime life, frontier hardships, and colonial adventure with an easy, readable style. His best-known work includes Steve Brown's Bunyip, and Other Stories, and his writing was valued for turning firsthand experience into lively, believable narrative.
He died in Sydney in 1911. Though not as widely read now as some of his contemporaries, he remains an interesting figure in Australian literary history because his work preserves the voices, occupations, and everyday risks of life at sea and on the land in the late nineteenth century.