James Aquinas Reid, a musician and medical doctor, spent a period of about five years in the Australian colonies, at Sydney and Norfolk Island. Trained in Scotland and Germany, he led a cosmopolitan and peripatetic life that would eventually see him celebrated as a national hero in Chile (as the composer of the first national opera, and founder of the earliest Chilean fire brigade). About 1842, while a surgeon on Norfolk Island, Reid was responsible for collecting a number of convict autobiographies, now held in the manuscript collections of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
Born into a prominent Scottish Catholic family, from the age of ten Reid was sent to be schooled at the Scots College in Regensburg, Bavaria. During the 1830s Reid studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, and spent some time practising as a surgeon in Scotland, before sailing to New South Wales on the Augustus Caesar in 1839.
In Sydney Reid became noted for his musicianship, having some of his compositions performed at public concerts, and helped found the short-lived "Delantati Society." In January 1840, Reid contracted to buy the business of Andrew Ellard, a Music Seller; this turned out to be a disastrous decision which plunged Reid into debt. A few months later, in March, Reid took up a post as a assistant colonial surgeon at the convict settlement on Norfolk Island.
Reid was associated with the reformist regime of the Alexander Maconochie, commandant on Norfolk Island from 1840-1844. According to Graeme Skinner, Reid's association with Maconochie may have been partly brokered by the Catholic bishop of New South Wales, William Bernard Ullathorne, as Maconochie's reforms were held to be "a project of crucial importance to the Catholic party in Sydney." Reid may also have acted as the Norfolk Island correspondent for the Catholic newspaper The Australasian Chronicle. Reid and Maconochie eventually fell out over Reid's affair with Maconochie's daughter – though Reid would claim this was a pretext and that Maconochie wanted to blame the failure of his reforms on Reid. In late 1843 or early 1844, Reid left the Australian colonies for a new life in Chile. In Southern American literature he is generally known as Aquinas Ried.
