Fishing in the Murray River

Lacy arrived in Australia in 1842: 'wearied with the hollow conventionalities and grinning hypocrisies of a highly refined community ... and possessed with an uncontrollable desire to see men and nature in their primitive state, [he] bade adieu to Old England and sailed for the Antipodes'. He disembarked at Sydney on 6 July 1842 from the barque Wilmot and soon fell into bad company, being, as he later recalled, 'tolerably well fleeced'. (J. Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary of Australian Artists, Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1876, Melbourne, 1992, p.442).

He produced drawings on the New South Wales and Victorian Goldfields in the 1850s, illustrations for the Illustrated Sydney News, Illustrated Melbourne News and Sydney Punch in the 1860s, and published his reminiscences in the Albury (NSW) Southern Courier.