People Australia

John Owen was sentenced at the Old Bailey, London, on 10 September 1783, to seven years transportation for stealing a box containing 18 table knives and forks from a sideboard in a house. He was sent to the Censor hulk, on the Thames River, London, on 4 October. He arrived in Sydney aboard the Scarborough in January 1788 as part of the First Fleet. On 16 January 1789 he was ordered to receive 100 lashes for a 3-day absence from camp at Rose Hill. It appears he had a daughter, Charlotte Matilda Owen, with Mary Flanagan; she was baptised on 25 December 1791. He also had three children with Hannah East.

He may have been the John Owen who was granted 30 acres of land at Mulgrave Place in 1794 and was off stores in 1795. In 1800 this farm was recorded as leased to commissary James Williamson. Owen was recorded in 1801 as living in Sydney. He was later recorded as a seaman and labourer.

* information from Mollie Gillen, The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet (1989), p 270