James Larmer

Larmer was born in Reigate, Surrey, England and arrived in Sydney in October 1829[2] to take up his appointment as a survey draftsman.

[3] Title deed information, from his time in Australia, shows his full name as James Gulley Larmer.

[2][6] During 1835, Larmer was second-in-command of Thomas Mitchell's second expedition,[7] which attempted to follow the Darling River downstream to its confluence with the Murray.

Larmer, in command of the main party, left Parramatta and met Mitchell at Boree, east-northeast of modern-day Cudal.

It was Larmer who led a party that searched for him for a number of days, finding his dead horse and other evidence of his likely demise.

[11] The expedition stopped to the north of the Menindee Lakes, due to the risk of attack by hostile Aborigines, falling short of their objective—but in no doubt that the Darling continued to the Murray—and then retraced their route to return.

His plan for Larbert would prove disastrously inept, after the site was inundated by the Shoalhaven River flood of July 1853.

[21][22] An economic depression in the early 1840s led to government cost cutting, with surveyors’ salaries being reduced by a third.

[2] In 1844, Larmer was appointed as the Licensed Surveyor for the County of Murray and Commissioner for Crown Lands for the same area.

[31] He also laid out cemeteries at Yass and Goulburn,[6] In 1852–1853, Larmer was working on surveying the route of a road from Braidwood to Broulee, which was planned to run via Araluen to the Moruya River.

[37] James Larmer's last field notes date from 1859, and it appears that he retired completely from surveying around that time.

[41] His cases included some involving relatives and associates of the notorious Clarke brothers and other bushrangers, who were members of the Clarke-Connell extended family.

[44] In May 1867, Thomas and John Clarke, the surviving members of their gang, were remanded, at the Police Court in Braidwood, for trial in Sydney.

He is commemorated in the various 'Larmer' street names, in places in New South Wales such as Broulee, Bungendore, Howlong, Jugiong, Majors Creek, Narraweena, Nerrandera, and Sanctuary Point.

[55] James Larmer married, Martha Stoyles, widow of the licensee of the Royal Hotel, Braidwood, in 1861.

William was an early pharmacist in Sydney, president of the Pharmaceutical Society, and member of the Pharmacy Board of New South Wales, who after 1865 also became involved in homeopathy.