Charles Haynes Barlee was a journalist and civil servant. He came to Australia in 1839, and initially settled in South Australia. He later lived in Sydney, Brisbane and Gympie, and he might also have spent brief periods in Melbourne and New Zealand. Barlee lived in Brisbane from ca. 1860-1871, where he appears to have initially worked as a journalist, before joining the Legislative Assembly Hansard staff as a shorthand writer. He then spent a year or so at Gympie, where he was involved in a number of mining ventures, before returning to Sydney, where he found employment as a short-hand writer and secretary within the civil service. In 1878, he briefly ran and edited the shortlived journal the Sydney Once A Week.

Barlee was a brother of one-time West Australian colonial secretary, Sir Frederick Palgrave Barlee (1827-1871).