Sir John Jamison (1776 – 29 June 1844) was an Australian physician, pastoralist, banker, politician, constitutional reformer and public figure.
Thomas Jamison was a Northern Irishman, who arrived in New South Wales, Australia, with the First Fleet in 1788, aboard HMS Sirius, as a surgeon's mate.
Soon afterwards, Thomas was sent to the auxiliary British colony of Norfolk Island, where he served as principal medical officer during the 1790s - while accumulating wealth on the side as a maritime trader.
Then, in 1801, after taking leave in England, Thomas was promoted to the position of Surgeon-General of New South Wales due to his intelligence, administrative competence, driving ambition and gift for cultivating useful patrons in London.
He was a founder of the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, and established himself as one of the most prominent (and wealthiest) men in Australia, enjoying a reputation for lavish entertaining and hospitality at Regentville, his magnificent rural estate near the town of Penrith.
In November 1824, he was included in the list of ten men recommended for a colonial council; but some 12 months later, Governor Brisbane withdrew the nomination on account of charges made by Jamison that female convicts had been sent to Emu Plains for immoral purposes.
In 1830, London's Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce awarded him the large gold medal "for his successful method of extirpating the stumps of trees".
[4] During the mid-1830s, he held office as founder-president of the Australian Patriotic Association, which strove to liberalise the colony's political and legal institutions as Sydney evolved from a penal settlement into a thriving, mercantile port.
Jamison established a cloth mill at Regentville in 1842 to supplement the estate's earnings from its vineyard, horse stud, dairy, orchard and collection of grazing paddocks for sheep and cattle.
But he suffered the loss of a large proportion of his fortune around this time due to the effects of a protracted drought and an economic depression, which had sent many of the colony's farmers and businessmen broke.