His parents died when he was young, and he went to sea at 13 after persuading his guardian and was in the merchant service for 12 years.
[1] Leaving with a first mate's certificate, Barry came to Australia in the 1870s, and after working in Queensland at the gold diggings, spent some years as a drover, boundary rider and station manager.
He began writing for the press and contributed stories to The Australasian, The Sydney Mail, The Queenslander, the Town and Country Journal, the Pall Mall Gazette, and others.
[2] Barry returned to Australia after about six months in England and joined the staff of the Sydney Evening News, another collection of his stories was published, In the Great Deep: Tales of the Sea (1896).
Three collections of short stories followed, Against the Tides of Fate (1899), Red Lion and Blue Star (1902), and Sea Yarns (1910).