John Eason (1799–1858) was a shipwright who worked in Van Diemen’s Land during the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s. According to Garry Darby’s William Buelow Gould, convict artist of Van Diemen’s Land (1980), Eason was an ex-soldier. He appears to have arrived in Hobart with his wife, Allison (1792–1874), in the late 1830s, when references to him first begin to appear in newspapers and other records. During the early 1840s, Eason conducted his shipbuilding operations at North West Bay on the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, the area and the nearby settlement of Snug having been established in the 1820s as a port and for timber milling. Here, Eason constructed ships “well adapted for the Coasting, Port Phillip or Sydney trade” as well as whaling vessels, one of which – the Scotia – was described in an advertisement for its sale as “one of the strongest colonial-built vessels”. By this time, as the censuses conducted in 1842 and 1843 demonstrate, Eason and his wife were living at 18 Watchorn Street, Hobart. Eason appears to have spent some time on the west coast of Tasmania in 1846 and 1847, during the period in which the former penal settlement at Macquarie Harbour was reopened briefly as a commercial shipyard. Tasmanian newspapers throughout the 1840s carry advertisements for several vessels of Eason’s design and construction, each considered to have been “constructed of the best materials, expressly for the colonial trade”. Eason died at his home on Watchorn Street on 2 May 1858 and was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, his death notice describing him as “for many years a shipbuilder of this city.”
