Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Anderson, Joseph
ANDERSON, JOSEPH (1789–1877), lieutenant-colonel, a veteran officer and leading colonist in Victoria, was born in 1789, and in 1805 was appointed to an ensigncy in the new 2nd battalion (since disbanded) of the 78th Highlanders, with which he served in Sicily, in the descent on Calabria and the battle of Maida in 1806, and in the luckless expedition against the Turks in Egypt in 1807. As a lieutenant in the 24th foot he fought in the Peninsular campaigns between 1809 and 1812, at Talavera, where he was wounded, at Busaco, at the defence of Torres Vedras, at Fuentes d'Onor, and in many minor engagements. In 1812 he was promoted to a company in the York chasseurs, a corps for West India service recruited chiefly from foreigners, and with it he was present at the recapture of Guadaloupe in 1815. The island had hoisted the tricolor on receipt of the news of Napoleon's return from Elba, and as the garrison refused to treat, the place was attacked and taken, after some sharp fighting, by a British force under General Sir J. Leith, seven weeks after the battle of Waterloo. Lieutenant-colonel Anderson was subsequently in the 50th foot, with which he served long in Australia and India. He was many years military commandant and civil governor of the penal settlement at Norfolk Island, and commanded a brigade in the Gwalior campaign of 1843, where he was wounded at the battle of Punniar. After forty-three years' hard service he retired from the army in 1848, and became a squatter on the Goulburn river soon after the erection of Victoria into a separate colony in 1850, and was made a member of the legislative council of Victoria in 1852. He died at his residence, Fairlie House, South Yarra, on 18 July 1877. His son, Colonel William Acland Anderson, C.M.G., who was once a subaltern in his father's regiment, was for some time commissioner at the Gold Fields, and succeeded the late Major-General Dean Pitt as commandant of the volunteer forces of Victoria.
[Hart's Army Lists; Heaton's Australian Dictionary of Dates.]