Barry went to sea at age 13, and was in the merchant navy for twelve years. He subsequently worked on the Queensland goldfields as a drover, boundary rider and station manager. Barry's varied and colourful life experiences were often used in his writing. (Miller and Macartney)
Barry came to Australia in his twenties, but after failure on the diggings returned to the sea till 1879, when he went on the land and became manager of a mixed station. Encouraged by Ernest Favenc, he began contributing sketches and stories to Australian and English periodicals. After a year in London in 1890, he returned to Australia to practice journalism and died in Sydney.
His first story collection, Steve Brown's Bunyip and Other Stories, appeared in London in 1893, with introductory verses by Rudyard Kipling for the first of three editions, the last issued in Sydney in 1905 and illustrated by Lionel Lindsay. In 1896 he issued a collection of sea stories, In the Great Deep, later followed by Against the Tides of Fate (1899) and Sea Yarns (1919), among others. He also published novels, The Luck of the Native Born (1898) and A Son of the Sea (1899), though Colin Roderick considers he was more at home with the short story form, to which he gave 'dramatic power ... lightened by a gleam of humour that sometimes becomes the dominating characteristic.'
He was the nephew (on his mother's side) of Dinah Craik (born Dinah Maria Mulock), a Victorian novelist best known for John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), a foundational work of aspirational English middle-class life.
See notes below for information about plagiarism queries, archival holdings, and untraced works.
