William Bland

William Bland (5 November 1789 – 21 July 1868) was a prominent public figure in the colony of New South Wales. A surgeon by profession, he arrived in Australia as a convict but played an important role in the early years of Australian healthcare, education and science. Bland was born in London and became a surgeon in the Royal Navy, serving on the East Indies Station. He was convicted of murder in 1813 after killing a crewmate in a duel in Bombay. He was sentenced to penal transportation, initially to Van Diemen's Land and then to New South Wales, where he was assigned to work at the Castle Hill Lunatic Asylum. He received a pardon in 1815 owing to the lack of qualified medical practitioners in the colony. As one of the few surgeons in New South Wales, Bland practised medicine in Sydney for over 50 years. He developed new surgical techniques and improvised surgical instruments, publishing papers in The Lancet and later in the Australian Medical Journal. He was the founding president of the Australian Medical Association in 1859 and also had a long association with the Benevolent Society. Outside of medicine Bland was a co-founder of the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts and served terms as treasurer and president of Sydney College, a forerunner to the University of Sydney. He was also an inventor, receiving a patent for a fire suppression device and designing an experimental steam-powered airship. Bland became politically active shortly after his arrival in New South Wales and in 1818 was sentenced to a year in prison for libelling Governor Lachlan Macquarie. He aligned himself with other emancipists and supported William Wentworth's calls for representative government and expanded civil rights for ex-convicts. Along with Wentworth and fellow former surgeon John Jamison, he was a key figure in the creation of the Australian Patriotic Association in 1835. Following constitutional reform, in 1843 Bland became one of the first elected members of the New South Wales Legislative Council. He served multiple terms in parliament where he supported land reform and opposed the interests of the Squattocracy.