From February 1841 Curr returned to the District to manage a handful of his father's sheep farming properties in northern and central Victoria, including several in the Goulburn Valley region.

Curr returned to Victoria in August 1854, staying in Melbourne for just a month before moving to Auckland, New Zealand, where he ran a business importing Australian horses.

Curr published many reports and several books throughout his career, including Pure Saddle Horses in 1863, an account of his travels through Europe and the Middle East in the early 1850s, and The Australian Race: Its Origins, Languages, Customs in 1886, an extensive work on the Aboriginal people, their habits and their dialects, compiled from numerous reports he had elicited from settlers, missionaries and others who had direct knowledge of Indigenous peoples of Australia, and who responded to his questionnaires.

[2] Curr also compiled the Australian Comparative Vocabulary,[3] drawing on information from a network of farmers and rural workers who provided him with Aboriginal words matching those on a list he circulated.

This work recounts Curr's experiences managing his father's properties in northern Victoria forty years earlier, including his interactions with the local Aboriginal Australians.