People Australia

Edward Flinn was found guilty on 14 January 1784 at the Old Bailey, London, of stealing 11 pairs of breeches for the use of sailors. Sentenced to 7 years transportation to America he was among the prisoners who mutinied on the convict transport Mercury in April 1784. Recaptured, he was sent to the Dunkirk hulk in June 1784. He was discharged to the Friendship in March 1787 and arrived in Sydney in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet.

Flinn married Sarah Ault on 28 September 1789 at Port Jackson. The couple were sent to Norfolk Island on the Sirius on 4 March 1790. They left the island separately in August 1795 to return to Port Jackson — Sarah on the Fancy and Edward on the Francis on 14 August. 

Sarah is recorded as having 'left the colony' in 1801. Edward remained in Sydney and in August 1803 prosecuted two men for failing to repair his boat. He was probably the Edward Flynn renting a 10-acre farm at Caddi on the Hawkesbury in 1806 in partnership with John Rossiter.

In 1810 as Edward Flynn his death sentence for burglary of the house of John Cox at the Hawkesbury was commuted to life transportation within New South Wales. In 1814 he was working as a convict servant for D'Arcy Wentworth. By 1825 he had received a ticket-of-leave and was a labourer at Sydney. In 1828 he worked as a fisherman. A man of this name died in 1837 aged 78.

* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), pp 129-30