Writer, artist, civil servant, and amateur anthropologist, Douglas Smith Huyghue enjoyed a career that spanned two continents. Known in Canada primarily as a novelist and a defender of native culture, Huyghue enjoyed a reputation in Australia as an artist and eyewitness to the Eureka Stockade uprising in the Ballarat goldfields in 1854.

Born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where his father, Lt. Samuel Huyghue, was stationed with the British Army, Samuel Douglas Smith Huyghue was christened in honor of the province's governor, Charles Douglas Smith. By 25 October 1817 his father was a half-pay officer living in Saint John, New Brunswick. Douglas Huyghue was probably educated at the Saint John Grammar School, but by November 1840 he seems to have been living in Halifax, where he submitted poetry to the Halifax Morning Post & Parliamentary Reporter under the pseudonym "Eugene." However, between October 1841 and January 1843 he was back in Saint John and, using...