In 1827, Captain Murray, then a single father, decided to move permanently to New South Wales with Anna-Maria and Terence Aubrey, to take advantage of the free land grants being made to military officers by the colonial government.
[2] But the move failed when Murray was unable to enlist the support of sufficient Members of Parliament, a number of whom disliked him, finding him intellectually arrogant.
Substantial discrimination against Irish Catholics existed in the colony at that time, and robust Parliamentary debate involving aspersions cast against Murray's religion, can be found on the Hansard.
[2][failed verification] Murray also named his property Winderradeen after the notable Wiradjuri warrior and resistance leader Windradyne, who had been active in the Lake George area.
He owned an extensive library of books, a fine collection of furniture and other household possessions, and a comparatively liberal (if sometimes outspokenly opinionated) view of society and its institutions.
Murray was also an outstanding horseman and bushman who, at the same time, liked to pursue the comfortable lifestyle of a prosperous "landed gentleman", drawing rents from the tenant farmers who occupied a large portion of Yarralumla after the abolition of assigned convict labour in the early 1840s.
English-born Mary went to live with her new husband (whom she called "Aubrey") at Yarralumla homestead; but being a cultivated and gregarious young lady, she found it extremely hard to adjust to rural life in the lonely and uncouth Australian countryside.
At the time of Mary's wedding, Murray had settled a moiety of his landed property on her in case he should ever become bankrupt as a result of drought or economic depression.
(A third trustee, the politician, landowner and founder of the University of Sydney Sir Charles Nicholson, would return to England to live in 1862 and cease to be involved in Murray's affairs.)
Regrettably, the dispute over the protracted non-sale of Winderradeen eventually spilled over into the NSW Supreme Court in 1868, when Murray tried without success to oust the trustees and replace them with people more sympathetic to his needs.
Mrs Gibbes was particularly hostile towards Murray because she felt that he had contributed to her daughter Mary's early death by keeping her sequestered away on his country properties, far from Sydney and the better standard of medical care that was available there.
The trustees of Winderradeen finally consented to the sale of the property at the end of the 1860s, which perhaps reflected the changing situation for the Colonol and Mrs Gibbes, as well as Murray himself, who all died in the years following.
Murray's financial travails did not hamper the effectiveness with which he discharged his public duties, and he had a knighthood conferred upon him by Queen Victoria in 1869 for his services to the parliament and the people of NSW.
Although baptised a Catholic, a faith that he never renounced, Murray had agreed shortly before his death to be interred in an Anglican churchyard when offered a burial plot at St Jude's, Randwick—in Sydney's eastern suburbs.
They were: Following the loss of her husband in 1873, Lady Agnes Murray made ends meet by conducting a girls' school at Sydney's Potts Point.
She was also a founding committee member of the Sydney Foundling Hospital[12] (now The Infants' Home Child and Family Services) a refuge for unmarried mothers and their children.