James Hardy Vaux (born 1782) was an English-born convict transported to Australia on three separate occasions. He was the author of Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux including A Vocabulary of the Flash Language, first published in 1819, which is regarded as both the first full length autobiography and first dictionary written in Australia. Whilst banished to the Newcastle penal settlement for much of the period from 1811 to 1818, Vaux compiled two works. The first was a dictionary of 'flash' or cant language originally written for use by the commandant of the penal settlement in performing his magisterial duties. An edited edition by Simon Barnard was republished in 2019 as James Hardy Vaux's 1819 Dictionary of Criminal Slang.

James Hardy Vaux (1782-1840) was a British convict and author. He attended a boarding school in Stockwell. In 1789 he volunteered in the Navy and served in the frigate Astraea in the North Sea. After sometime he abandoned it and returned back to London. After working for an attorney in Bury St. Edmunds and for a Covent Garden clothing firm he was arrested in 1800 for pilfering from the latter. He escaped from the sentence and in 1801 he reached Sydney and worked as a clerk at the Hawkesbury. In 1811 he was sentenced to twelve months hard labour for receiving property stolen from the judge-advocate Ellis Bent. During that period Vaux compiled his slang dictionary A New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812), probably the first dictionary compiled in Australia, which gives a valuable glossary of London slang. He later wrote Memoirs of the First Thirty-Two Years of the Life of James Hardy Vaux, A Swindler and Pickpocket; Now Transported for the Second Time, and For Life to New South Wales (c1814).