Leonard Dyer (c.1759- ) was found guilty on 10 January 1786 at the Southwark Quarter Sessions of being found in a warehouse with an intention to steal. Sentenced to 7 years transportation, he was sent to the Ceres hulk by 16 August 1786, where he remained until he embarked for New South Wales on the Alexander in January 1787, arriving in Sydney in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet.
Dyer was sent to Norfolk Island on the Golden Grove in October 1788. He received 48 lashes for mutinous expressions and daring language to Mr Donovan in November 1788. By July 1791 he was subsisting on a one acre lot and was living with Amelia Harding. Dyer shot dead the runaway convict James Clark in the act of robbing his garden on 19 September 1792. He left the island for Port Jackson on the Kitty in March 1793. No further colonial records have been found for him. As his sentence had expired he may have returned to England.
* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), p 112
'Dyer, Leonard (c. 1759–?)', People Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/dyer-leonard-30870/text38229, accessed 1 September 2024.
c.
1759
London,
Middlesex,
England
Includes subject's nationality; their parents' nationality; the countries in which they spent a significant part of their childhood, and their self-identity.