Background
Born at the family seat of Ballymoyer, Synnot settled in the colonies in 1836 with his father Captain Walter Synnot and brothers.
Born at the family seat of Ballymoyer, Synnot settled in the colonies in 1836 with his father Captain Walter Synnot and brothers.
A year later two elder sons crossed to Portuguese Phillip, followed in 1838 by the next two, Albert and the 12-year-old Monckton. They brought sheep with them and became pioneer landholders at Little River near Geelong, where they remained in various partnerships for about ten years. By 1852 they had scattered and Monckton, after a brief sortie with Albert to the Californian and Victorian goldfields, was the only one left in the Little River district, as sole owner of the 26,500-acre (10,724 ha) Mowyong, later called Bareacres.
In 1852 he assisted in the rescue of the survivors of the flood at the Wedge’s Werribee Station and rescued the granddaughter Annie Emily Lawrence (daughter of Robert William Lawrence and Anne Wedge).
The prize-winning superfine merino wools of the Western District had been extolled by the Thomas Shaws, C. H. MacKnight, J. L. Currie and others, but in the mid-1860s Synnot"s letters to the papers queried their real value and gave rise to a drawn-out and sometimes bitter battle of words. In 1873 he moved to Melbourne, living in Ballyreen, a mansion on Brighton Road, Street Kilda.
Synnot entered Melbourne wool-broking in prosperous and expansive times, when many firms were offering warehouse services, selling wool by auction or privately, or arranging and often financing its shipping for sale overseas. A pioneer of the wool trade with the East, he visited China, sent a consignment of woollen yarns to Hong Kong and arranged for silk and cotton weavers at Ning-Po to produce samples of woollen cloth, which were exhibited throughout Australia and New Zealand and at the Paris Exhibition of 1878.
His efforts failed at first, but later that year when the first Japanese Trade Commission visited Australia his ideas bore some fruit.
Synnot died on 23 April 1879 at Elsternwick, aged 52, and was buried in Street Kilda general cemetery.
He later bought the South Brighton sheep station in the Wimmera where, in 1862, he was a member of the first Horsham District Roads Board, and a councillor in 1862-1863.