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H. Butler Stoney H. Butler Stoney i(A45005 works by) (a.k.a. Henry Butler Stoney; H. B. Stoney)
Born: Established: 1816 ; Died: Ceased: 1894
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: ca. 1852-1854 Departed from Australia: 31 Oct 1855
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BiographyHistory

Henry Butler Stoney was a captain in the 40th and 99th Regiments posted to Victoria and Tasmania during the 1840s and 1850s. He appears to have been Irish; the preface to Residence in Tasmania (1856) was written in Cork, Ireland and the Stoneys were a distinguished Irish family of scientists and engineers. One member of the family married William Fitzgerald, the Bishop of Cork and Cloyne (1857-1862). Also his novel, Reginald Mortimer (1857) was about the life of an Irish university graduate and army officer.

Stoney was promoted to a lieutenant in the 19th Foot Regiment in 1840 and captain in 1852 (The Times, 12 September 1840: 4; 29 May 1852:4) at which time he was on the unattached list. Segments of the 99th Regiment came to Tasmania in 1842 and the Regiment was located there from 1848 until its departure for England on 31 October 1855 which would explain Stoney's presence in Cork, Ireland in 1856. He returned to Melbourne as a member of the 40th Regiment in 1857-58 and was a member of the Royal Society of Victoria in those years

The 99th Regiment had been sent to New Zealand to engage the Maoris in 1845-46. It is not known if Stoney visited New Zealand at this point. It is more likely he did not come to Australia until the early 1850s as he was on the unattached list in 1852. Stoney could have visited New Zealand in April 1860 when four companies of the 40th regiment and two of the 12th were sent from Australia to New Plymouth, New Zealand as reinforcements during the Maori Taranaki rebellion. He wrote Taranaki: A Tale of the War; With a Description of the Province (1861). It is a novel describing the Maori war from official documents according to E. Morris Miller's Australian Literature from its Beginnings to 1935 (1940): 600.

(Source: Tom Gibson The Maori Wars: The British Army in New Zealand 1840-1972 (1974); W. B. Owen, 'Stoney, George Johnstone (1826-1911)', rev. James G. O'Hara, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, OUP, 2004).

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Last amended 20 Feb 2008 13:25:09
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