People Australia

Robert Dalrymple Ross, c.1870

State Library of South Australia, B 5556

Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross (1828–1887), army officer and politician, was born around 1828 on the island of St. Vincent in the West Indies.[1] He was the youngest son of politician John Pemberton Ross (1786–1846) and his wife Eliza Anderson, only daughter of Alexander Anderson, superintendent of the St. Vincent Botanic Gardens.[2] Robert had three siblings: John Wilson (1818–1887), Isabella Augusta (1820–1900), and William Andrew (c.1823–1893).[3] Their father, John, was solicitor-general and speaker of the House of Assembly of St. Vincent.[4] He owned a plantation and enslaved people on Nevis, which had been left to him by his uncle Robert Pemberton in 1802.[5] In 1817 he owned 118 enslaved workers on the Belmont Estate.[6] Surviving deeds from 1809 show that he also bought and sold enslaved people.[7] He made four claims for compensation during 1836–1837 and was successful in one claim for an estate on Nevis, receiving £151 11s 7d in 1837 for eleven enslaved people. [8]

The Ross children had deep connections to slavery through both sides of their family. Their paternal grandfather, Andrew Ross (?–1793), owned the sugar plantation known as the Belmont (Mount Scratch) Estate in St. Vincent, which he left to their father in his will.[9] Their paternal grandmother, Bridget Pemberton, and her father, Robert Pemberton of Nevis, also owned enslaved people.[10] The Ross siblings had family links to the colonisation of Nova Scotia though their maternal line too. Their mother was a descendant of Sir William Alexander, the first Earl of Stirling, who received a grant of the territory of Nova Scotia in 1621. He was authorised to divide the land into one hundred lots and to sell these for £200 each to raise money for its colonisation.[11]

Robert Ross was educated in England and later joined the British army as a clerk.[12] He served in the Crimea War before returning to England, where he was awarded the Turkish medal and received a commission. In 1856 he volunteered for service on the West Coast of Africa where he served as a commissariat officer. [13] During this time he was based at Cape Coast Castle, a building formerly used to hold large numbers of captured Africans as part of the Atlantic slave trade.[14] He was also a member of the Gold Coast Legislative Council and acting colonial secretary.[15]While there he took part in a military offensive against the Krobo people, spending six months in the field organising the movement of the Transport Corps and of large quantities of ammunition.[16] In 1859 he returned to England before being sent to China. Three years later he was sent to South Australia to take charge of the Commissariat Department. The colony became his home until his death in 1887. He later served as aide-de-camp and private secretary to Governor Dominick Daly. In 1864–5 he was sent to New Zealand to support the war between the British military and the Māori.[17]

With an interest in agricultural pursuits, Ross was president of the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia.[18] While in Africa in 1858 he wrote to the Cotton Supply Association in Britain extolling the benefits of exporting cotton from Africa: ‘Mr Ross thinks the Africans would readily profit by instruction, and that Africa would before long compete well with the slave States of America.’[19] He also advocated cotton plantations in the north of Australia, worked by Chinese labourers, to supply the cotton mills of Lancashire, stating in 1870 that the area could hold ‘to Lancashire a relative position to that of Carolina and Georgia before the American war.’ He was at pains to specify that European labour in the cotton plantations would not be required: ‘Mr. Ross does not wish it to be inferred that he would advocate the employment of white men in cotton cultivation when cheap Asiatic labour could be easily secured.’[20]

In 1865 Ross married Mary Anstice Baker (1845–1876), daughter of John Baker, politician and former premier, in Adelaide.[21] They had two children: Alfred Ernest Albert and Isabella Eliza Mary Anstice.[22] John Baker presented the couple with Highercombe Estate near Gumeracha in the hills outside Adelaide on Peramangk Country as a wedding gift.[23] It boasted eighty-six acres of orchards and forty-four of vineyards. Ross imported plants from around the world, including several species of tomato from the West Indies. He experimented with cider-making, olive growing, and fruit-drying.[24]

Ross was elected to Parliament in June 1875 as the Member for Wallaroo after being defeated in his bid for the seat of Gumeracha four years earlier.[25] In 1877 he was offered the position of agent-general in London but declined.[26] He was elected speaker of the Assembly in 1881: a role he held until his death.[27] In 1884 he was elected to the seat of Gumeracha on the retirement of William Haines.[28] Ross campaigned strongly for a transcontinental railway from Adelaide to Darwin and supported schemes to lay a cable from England to Australia.[29] He opposed property tax and supported the reduction of exemptions from land and income tax.[30] He was governor of St. Peter’s College, a member of the Adelaide University Council, chairman of the Adelaide Steamship Co., chairman of the Mutual Life Association of Australasia, and a member of the Empire Club in London.[31]

Ross was knighted on 21 June 1886.[32] He died on 27 December 1887 in Adelaide, leaving an estate worth £12,000.[33] His privileged position as the member of a family made wealthy by the labour of enslaved people allowed him opportunities in the military, in parliament, and in the ownership of land. His advocacy of non-white labour in the production of cotton seemingly echoes these familial precedents. These opportunities enabled him to further the colonisation of South Australia.

[1] ‘Death of Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross,’ South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 28 December 1887, 5; Martur, ‘A Late Australian Statesman,’ Australasian (Melbourne), 7 January 1888, 8.

[2] St. Doulagh’s Cemetery, Ireland Genealogy Projects Archives, accessed 17 September 2025,

https://www.igp-web.com/IGPArchives/ire/dublin/cemeteries/st-doulaghs.html; Albert Eugene Casey, Volume 06: Historical and Genealogical Items Relating to North Cork and East Kerry (Birmingham, Alabama: Knocknagree Historical Fund, 1963), via Ancestry.

[3] ‘Obituary,’ Times (London), 1 June 1887, 10; Isabella Augusta Ross, baptism, St Marylebone parish registers, P89/MRY1/093, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), via Ancestry; Gunthorpe, Isabella Augusta, England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, 1901, Principal Probate Registry, London, via Ancestry; England Census, Westminster St James, 1851, HO107 1484 198  55, The National Archives (TNA), Kew, via Ancestry; Brompton Cemetery Records; Work 97 176, TNA, via Ancestry.

[4] G. Le G. Norgate, revised by Megan A. Stephan, ‘Ross, John Wilson,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004).

[5] Slave Registers, 1831, T 71  499, TNA, via Ancestry; Kenneth Morgan, ‘EAP345: A Survey of the Endangered Archives of St Vincent, West Indies, during the Slavery Era’, British Library, https://eap.bl.uk/sites/default/files/legacy-eap/downloads/eap345_survey.pdf

[6] Slave Registers, 1817, T 71, 493, TNA, via Ancestry.

[7] Morgan, ‘EAP345’.

[8] ‘John Pemberton Ross’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 29 October 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/23793; ‘Nevis 72A&B’, Legacies of British Slavery, accessed 29 October 2025, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/claim/view/23735.

[9] Morgan, ‘EAP345’; Charles Shephard, An Historical Account of the Island of St Vincent (London: W. Nichol, 1831), xi; Slave Registers, 1831, T 71  499, TNA, via Ancestry; Morgan, ‘EAP345’.

[10] Robert Charles Boileau Pemberton, Pembertons of Nevis and St Christopher [unpublished], The Library of Congress, accessed 29 October 2025, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/gdclccn/23/01/40/01/23014001/23014001.pdf.

[11] The ‘Register’ Guide to the Parliament of South Australia (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas & Co, 1887), 38; D. C. Harvey, ‘Alexander, William, Earl of Stirling,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1 (University of Toronto: 1966), accessed 22 October 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/alexander_william_1577_1640_1E.html.                                                                                                 

[12] Charles Alexander Harris ‘Ross, Sir Robert Dalrymple,’ Dictionary of National Biography vol. 49 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1897), 277; Marc Brodie, ‘Ross, Sir Robert Dalrymple,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), accessed 15 October 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24132.

[13] ‘Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 31 May 1886, 6; ‘The Ashantees—Lecture by Mr. R. D. Ross,’ South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 6 December 1873, 2. 

[14] Noel Hayman, ‘Ross, Sir Robert Dalrymple (1827–1887)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, accessed 29 October 2025, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ross-sir-robert-dalrymple-4510/text7377; ‘Forts and Castles, Volta, Greater Accra, Central and Western Regions’, UNESCO, retrieved 29 October 2025, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/34.

[15] Marc Brodie, ‘Ross, Sir Robert Dalrymple,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), accessed 15 October 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24132.

[16] ‘West Coast of Africa,’  13 December 1858, Morning Post (London), 3; ‘The Ashantees—Lecture by Mr. R. D. Ross,’ South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 6 December 1873, 2.

[17] ‘Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 31 May 1886, 6.

[18] ‘The September Show,’ Evening Journal (Adelaide), 19 September 1879, 3; ‘The Farmers’ Movement,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 27 February 1880, 4.

[19] ‘Foreign Intelligence,’ Caledonian Mercury (Edinburgh), 22 July 1858, 2.

[20] ‘Cotton From Northern Australia,’ Queensland Times, Ipswich Herald and General Advertiser, 1 February 1870, 4.

[21] ‘Family Notices,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 14 August 1865, 2.

[22] Ross, Isabella Eliza Mary Anstice, 1867, Adelaide, 33/710, Genealogy SA; Ross, Alfred Ernest Albert, 1868, Adelaide, 55/363, Genealogy SA.

[23] Marc Brodie, ‘Ross, Sir Robert Dalrymple,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), accessed 15 October 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/24132; ‘The Peramangk’, Adelaide Hills, accessed 22 October 2025, https://www.visitadelaidehills.com.au/heritage.

[24] ‘Highercombe,’ Pastoral Times (South Deniliquin), 6 May 1871, 4.

[25] ‘Kadina Memos,’ Yorke’s Peninsula Advertiser and Miners’ and Farmers’ Journal, 8 June 1875, 2; ‘Gumeracha,’ Evening Journal (Adelaide), 1 December 1871, 3.

[26] ‘Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 31 May 1886, 6.

[27] The ‘Register’ Guide to the Parliament of South Australia, 38.

[28] ‘Further Particulars,’ Evening Journal (Adelaide), 9 April 1884, 2.

[29] ‘House of Assembly,’ Adelaide Observer, 2 October 1886, 39; ‘Mr. R. D. Ross on Telegraph Communication with Australia,’ South Australian Register (Adelaide), 25 February 187, 5.

[30] ‘Gumeracha,’ Adelaide Observer, 12 March 1887, 37.

[31] The ‘Register’ Guide to the Parliament of South Australia 1887, 38; ‘The Adelaide Steamship Company,’ Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 2 February 1886, 3; ‘The Mutual Life Association of Australasia,’ South Australian Chronicle (Adelaide), 22 August 1891, 7; ‘Empire Club,’ Morning Post, 27 October, 1881.

[32] ‘Birthday Honours,’ 29 May 1886, Times (London), 9.

[33] ‘Death of Sir Robert Dalrymple Ross,’ South Australian Advertiser (Adelaide), 28 December 1887, 5; Extracts from SA General Registry Office (GRO) Information, Adelaide Hills, accessed 29 October 2025, https://localwiki.org/adelaide-hills/GRO_Merge_%27Rob%27_-_%27Rz%27.