He had been sentenced to transportation for highway robbery in March 1800; at the time of Harpur's birth, he was parish clerk and master of the Windsor district school.

[7][8] In February 1835 he published parts of his first play, The Tragedy of Donohoe, in The Sydney Monitor, a radical newspaper edited by Edward Smith Hall.

[12][13] He acted in three plays at the Theatre Royal in October 1833: The Mutiny at the Nore by Douglas Jerrold, The Miller and His Men by Isaac Pocock, and The Tragedy of Chrononhotonthologos, a farce.

[13] His acting career ended ignominiously, when he unsuccessfully sued Barnett Levey, the proprietor of the Theatre Royal, for unpaid wages.

During these years, Harpur befriended many of Sydney's prominent literary and political figures, including Henry Parkes, Daniel Deniehy, and W. A.

They were my chief advisers in matters of intellectual resource and enquiry, when the prospect before me was opening and widening, often with many cross lights and drifting clouds, but ever with deepening radiance.

[10] In 1866, Harpur's position was abolished at a time of retrenchment, and in March 1867 he had a great sorrow when his second son was killed by the accidental discharge of his own gun.

[26][27] In the twentieth century, however, editors such as Charles Salier, Elizabeth Perkins and Michael Ackland greatly improved the situation, by publishing wide selections of Harpur's poetry in book form.

... [H]e should paint her primarily through his imagination; and thus the striking features and colors of many scenes, which lie permanently gathered in his memory, becoming, with their influences, idealised in the process, will be essentially transfused up a few, or even upon one scene—one happy embodiment of her wildest freaks, or one Eden-piece embathed with a luminous atmosphere of sentiment.

Some scholars argue that this gothic depiction of the Australian landscape implies that Australia was a terra nullius, and that Harpur's poetry therefore supports the expropriation of Aboriginal lands.

[31] The first principle was personal experience: in his poetry, Harpur describes the Australian bush based on his own observations and interactions with Aboriginal people.

[31] Through such "sublimation" or "compression", the poet could reveal the workings of the human mind, and expose the spirital or divine aspect of the natural world.