About

George Barrington was an Irish pickpocket, popular London socialite, Australian pioneer, and author. His escapades, arrests, and trials were widely chronicled in the London press of his day. For over a century following his death, and still perhaps today, he was most celebrated for the couplet “True patriots all; for be it understood, We left our country for our country’s good”. The attribution of the line to Barrington is considered apocryphal since the 1911 discovery by Sydney book collector Alfred Lee of the 1802 book in which the line first appeared.