Lady Mary Barker seems in her eighty years to have experienced just about every facet of the nineteenth century British Empire.  

Mary Stewart was born in 1831 in the then slave planation colony of Jamaica.  In 1833 the emancipation act was passed, but she would have still grown up in a society where the vast majority of the population were black ex-slaves.

Mary was schooled in England and returned to Jamaica when she finished her schooling.  In 1852 she married a British Royal Artillery officer Captain George Barker who distinguished himself in the Crimean War (1854-56) and in the defeat of Indian Munity (1857-58), being knighted.  

In 1860 she moved to India, having to leave her children behind to live with her husband in a colony where a very small number of Britons, with the help of many more Indians, ruled over a vast Indian population.  
In 1861 George died and Mary returned to Britain.  In 1865 she married again, this time to Frederick Broome who had been born to missionary parents in Canada (then British North America), but had later gone to farm sheep in New Zealand.  In 1866 they moved to run a large sheep farm in the South Island.

In 1869 they returned to England and both of them embarked on successful writing career including Mary publishing a book on her time in New Zealand under the penname Lady Barker, which was so successful that it was translated into French and German.

In 1875 Frederick was appointed Colonial Secretary for the British Colony of Natal where, unlike New Zealand, the white settlers were outnumbered by the native population.  

In 1877 they moved to the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean which originally had been uninhabited.  It was first discovered and colonised by the Portuguese, captured by the Dutch, then the French and finally by the British who imported Indian labour to work on sugar plantations.

From 1880 to 1890 Frederick became the last Governor of Western Australia.  Mary actively supported him in his bid to develop the colony and win representative government for it, which was granted by Great Britain in 1890.  Frederick was knighted during this period meaning that Mary was now Lady Broome as well as Lady Barker.

From 1891 to 1895 Mary returned to her West Indian roots as Frederick was pointed first governor of Barbados and then Trinidad.  They returned to England and Frederick died in 1896.  Mary continued her writing career with various articles and books being published.  She died aged 79 in 1911 having lived in Jamaica, England, India, New Zealand, Natal, Mauritius, Western Australia, Barbados and Trinidad.  She is buried in Highgate cemetery.