[2] His deceased mother, Anne, was the sister of William Stewart (1769—1854), who until 1827, was Lieutenant-Governor of New South Wales, under Governor Ralph Darling.
In 1827, William took up a land grant at Larbert in the Braidwood district, which was named Arnprior,[7] after the childhood home of his father's second wife, Isabella Cassels.
[10] William Ryrie had been a member of the exploration party that had first identified a possible route for that road, from Nerriga to Jervis Bay, in 1831.
[15] In 1837, William, with a party including his younger brothers James and Donald, drove livestock from Arnprior to Yering, near Melbourne.
The first vines planted were brought from Arnprior and were later supplemented by cuttings from James Macarthur's Camden Park Estate.
Ryrie's Yering landholding was purchased in 1850 by Paul de Castella, who greatly expanded the vineyards, from the 1850s onward, and is widely regarded as the father of the wine industry in the Yarra Valley region.
[17][18][19][20][21] Ryrie was appointed as a magistrate in Melbourne in 1840,[22] but earlier in the same year had been involved in a duel there, with Peter Snodgrass.