People Australia

Thomas Hilton Tennant (indicted as Philip Devine) (c.1762-1821) was found guilty at Chelmsford, England, on 6 March 1786 of the theft of two shirts, a woman's scarlet cloak, a pair of stays, two silver teaspoons, two steel razors, and a linen pillowcase from a house. Sentenced to 7 years transportation he was sent to the Ceres hulk and embarked for New South Wales on the Alexander in January 1787, arriving in the colony in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet.

As Thomas Tennant he was sentenced to 200 lashes on 16 January 1789 for selling a shirt. He was sent to Norfolk Island on the Sirius in March 1790. By 1791 he was subsisting two people on a Sydney Town lot. On 16 July 1791 he was flogged (as Phillip Devin) for using corn seed for food.

Philip Divine was named as the father on the baptismal record of Ann Doyle's youngest son Thomas and is likely to have been the father of her other three children. The couple separated sometime between the birth of Thomas in 1798, and February 1805, when Devine left Norfolk Island for Sydney on the Investigator taking one of their sons. They went on to Port Dalrymple on the Buffalo in March 1805 but had returned to New South Wales by 1806 where Philip Devine was recorded as a self-employed labourer. He was recorded as a landholder in Windsor in 1814. He was buried as Phillip Devine on 10 February 1821; his age was given as 59 years.

* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), p 352