Page:The Dictionary of Australasian Biography.djvu/395

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DICTIONARY OF AUSTRALASIAN BIOGRAPHY.
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Chief Superintendent of the convict settlement at Norfolk Island. Captain Maconochie had relaxed discipline and preached the gospel of kindness. This was totally foreign to Mr. Price's idea of convict management, and he gained a reputation for severity which always followed him. The chaplains who denounced him as cruel he dismissed, and gave the same short shrift to the officials who would have preferred milder measures. In 1853 he was appointed Chief Inspector of Convict Establishments in Victoria, and continued to show himself an inflexible disciplinarian. On March 26th, 1857, he was pelted with stones and masses of rock by eighty-two of the convicts employed on the jetty at Williamstown, near Melbourne, and died the next day from the injuries he received. Several of the ringleaders in the attack were executed.

Pring, His Honour the Hon. Ratcliffe, second son of Thomas E. Pring, solicitor, of Crediton, Devon, was born there on Oct. 17th, 1825, educated at Shrewsbury School, and entered at the Inner Temple in Nov. 1845, being called to the Bar in June 1849. He emigrated to Sydney in 1853, and practised with much success until 1857, when he was appointed Crown Prosecutor at Brisbane, in Queensland, where he was made Q.C. In 1860 he was elected to the first Legislative Assembly of Queensland for the district of East Downs, and served under Mr. (now Sir) R. G. W. Herbert as Attorney-General in the first Ministry formed under responsible government from Dec. 1859 to August 1865. In the second Herbert Ministry he filled the same office from July to August 1866. He was also Attorney-General in the Mackenzie Ministry from August 1867 to Nov. 1868; in the Lilley Government from Nov. 1869 to May 1870; and in the first McIlwraith Administration from May 1879 to June 1880, when he accepted a puisne judgeship of the Supreme Court of Queensland. Mr. Justice Pring died on March 22nd, 1885. In 1863 he was offered the position of first Chief Justice of Queensland, over the head of the late Judge Lutwyche, but declined the post, and Sir James Cockle was appointed.

Prout, John Skinner, a well-known artist and nephew of Samuel Prout, who became famous as a painter of the churches, streets, and market-places of Normandy, was born at Plymouth in 1806. He early developed artistic tastes, and turned his attention to water colours, in which he was mainly self-taught. In conjunction with Mr. Müller, he published in 1836 "The Antiquities of Bristol," in which city he resided for a number of years. He went to Sydney in 1840, and followed his art with good results, several of his water colours being still in the local galleries. In 1845 Mr. Prout visited Tasmania, and subsequently issued his "Tasmania Illustrated" in four series. Mr. Prout returned to England in 1850 and became a member of the Institute of Painters in Water Colours, at whose exhibitions he was represented till his death on August 29th, 1876, at Camden Town, near London. After his return from Australia he wrote to the artistic periodicals on the development of Australian art. He also exhibited his Australian sketches at the Crystal Palace.

Pugh, Theophilus Parsons, was born in Nov. 1831, at Turk's Island (Caicos group), and educated at Old Kingswood School, near Bristol, and at Wesley College, Taunton. He joined the staff of the Southern Times at Weymouth in 1852, after a short apprenticeship to the printing business, and was afterwards attached to the Mirror at Salisbury and the Herald at Swansea. In 1855 he emigrated to Australia, arriving in Moreton Bay in June of that year. Mr. Pugh acted as local correspondent for Sir Henry Parkes' paper, the Empire of Sydney, and was editor of the Moreton Bay Free Press from Oct. 1855 to Oct. 1859. When Mr. T. B. Stephens bought the Moreton Bay Courier, then a bi-weekly paper, in 1859, Mr. Pugh accepted the editorship, and brought it out as a tri-weekly in November, and as a daily in May 1861. After leaving what is now the Brisbane Courier in 1863, Mr. Pugh went into various journalistic ventures, becoming editor of the Brisbane Telegraph, then newly started, in Oct. 1872. This post he resigned in Nov. 1873. Pugh's "Moreton Bay (Sheet) Almanack for 1858" appeared at the end of 1857, followed by the first book almanack for 1859 in 1858. These developed into the now well-known publication, Pugh's "Queensland Almanack" in 1860, which has been published continuously ever since, with

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