Annegret Hall

William Redfern was a surgeon aboard HMS Standard during the 1797 Nore mutiny. For his involvement he was sentenced to death and spent three years in Coldbath Fields prison, England’s cruelest jail, before being transported to NSW. The opening chapters narrate Redfern’s training as a surgeon; the mutiny; his court-martial; imprisonment and transportation to NSW. Redfern is sent to Norfolk Island as a convict to work in the hospital. He spends seven years there during the turbulent times of Joseph Foveaux, John Piper and D’Arcy Wentworth. He earns an absolute pardon; returns to Sydney following the overthrow of Bligh and is appointed surgeon at the old George Street hospital. He treats the imprisoned Bligh, who was also in the Nore mutiny, and Macquarie makes him the health inspector of convict ships. Redfern becomes Macquarie’s personal physician and a close confidant. He helps plan Sydney’s “Rum hospital” and is the supervising surgeon there; runs a large private medical practice. Redfern resigns in 1819 after Commissioner Bigge inquires into Macquaries’ emancipist policies and viciously attacks him, cancelling his appointment as magistrate. The remarkably contentious years of 1800 to 1821 are revealed through Redfern’s personal life and medical experiences. The closing chapters describe Redfern’s successes in medicine, banking and agriculture. He becomes one of the richest men in the colony but, as an emancipist, is shunned socially. He fights for emancipist civil rights and sails to London to petition the British Parliament. Redfern enrolls in a medical degree at Edinburgh University aged 54. He never returns to Australia. This is the definitive biography of William Redfern with 1030 citations. He was Australia’s first medical graduate and his pioneering work in public health medicine is acknowledged by the William Redfern Oration given at the annual congress of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians.