Mirror with a Memory Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery 2000

A new National Portrait Gallery of Australia is under construction in Canberra. No doubt the new spaces will display photographic portraits of convicts transported to Australia, as part of the country's rich history of migration. How will the National Portrait Gallery handle issues of attribution? Will the contradictions of the exhibition Mirror with a Memory in 2000 be repeated?



The NPG staged an exhibition from 4 March to 11 June 2000 titled Mirror With A Memory: Photographic Portraiture in Australia (director: Andrew Sayers).

On page 16 of the Catalogue, under the heading Portraiture and Power, Helen Ennis wrote:

The exhibition also includes a selection of cartes-de-visite portraits of convicts from the Port Arthur penal settlement in Tasmania. Research by [*] Chris Long and [*] Warwick Reeder has established that they were probably the work of Adolarious Humphrey Boyd, the Commandant at Port Arthur from 1871-1874, and a keen photographer.
Boyd's documentation of the convicts is systematic. The photographs are in a carte-de-visite format, nearly always vignetted; each convict is set against a neutral background and is photographed in a three-quarter view, his eyes averted from the camera and from Boyd [note 45].
The photographic transaction expresses and reinforces the power dynamics of the relationship between the Commandant and his charges. Rarely is there any engagement between them or any sense of the subject's investment in images of themselves that presumably they will never see.

[*] Neither Chris Long nor Warwick Reeder established this attribution to the Port Arthur Commandant A.H. Boyd, "probably" or otherwise. Their speculation about attribution has contributed nothing to the history of Tasmanian prison photography. The attribution to T. J. Nevin was established in 1977 without hesitation at the QVMAG which held a significant number of convict cartes stamped by Nevin, although several since seem to have vanished or been lost. Helen Ennis' later NLA publication Intersections (2004) clearly attributed the Port Arthur convict cartes to T. Nevin.

Helen Ennis' "power dynamics" discursive turn of post-modern critical theory now looks dated, and of course, it carries no factual information whatsoever. Far from a lack of "engagement" between sitter and photographer, Thomas Nevin knew convict Michael Murphy (to cite ONE example) from the voyage out on the Fairlie in 1852. Both were boys. Nevin was accompanied by his parents and siblings as free settlers, Murphy was transported as a Parkhurst boy. Murphy was released from the Hobart Gaol in 1876. These are facts. Notice how the writer shifts the modality of uncertainty - "probably the work of ... Boyd" - to the modality of certainty - "eyes averted from the camera and from Boyd". With this slippage and sleight of hand, the reader is seamlessly co-opted to the "belief" generated by Chris Long (1995:36).

Another fact to escape Helen Ennis was the attribution of the carte of convict Mumford to support her statements in the catalogue to the exhibition. It was taken from the National Library Collection and attributed to Nevin. The majority of the convicts cartes in the Mirror with a Memory exhibition, however, were borrowed NOT from the NLA in 2000 but from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where the A.H. Boyd attribution was derived from confusion generated by researcher Chris Long in the 1980s.



William Mumford, per Agusta [i.e. Augusta] Jessie, taken at Port Arthur, 1874. nla.pic-an24612787, Nevin, Thomas J., 1842-ca. 1922.

There were two exceptions, borrowed not from the TMAG but from the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Both were unattributed BECAUSE their versos were pasted to the prisoner's record sheet, and dated to 1873 without explanation.

QVMAG items in the Mirror with a Memory exhibition:

1. Unknown photographer Henry Harris, criminal record, loose sheet c. 1873 albumen silver photograph on printed sheet 6.0 x 9.0 on sheet 22.0 x 34.5 Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

2. Unknown photographer Edward Wilson, criminal record, loose sheet c. 1873 albumen silver photograph on printed sheet6.0 x 9.0 on sheet 22.0 x 34.5 Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

The exhibition displayed images from the list below, including these two vignettes held at the Archives Office and correctly attributed to Thomas Nevin:



Convicts Harrison & Martin
AOT, photographed at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin
Ref: 30-3261c James Harrison; 30-2023c James Martin

Checklist for MIRROR WITH A MEMORY with wrongful attribution



A.H. Boyd was not a photographer, and not THE photographer of Tasmanian prisoners at Port Arthur in 1874. The National Dictionary of Biography dates his vacation of the office of Commandant to the end of December 1873. His final departure from the position was early February of 1874, although still on government pay, leaving Dr John Coverdale to take over sooner than his official appointment date of April 1, 1874.

Convict records in 1871 show 271 inmates at the Port Arthur site, but by 1873-4 many had already transferred to the prison and other locations in Hobart (AOT Guides to Convicts & Mitchell papers, Manuscripts B5, SLNSW, viz):

Title : Convict Department - Separate Prison Reports, 1867-1871
Creator : Tasmania.
Convict Department
Date of Work : 1867-1871
Some entries note, “Discharge to Hobart Town”, implying that the prison is elsewhere in Tasmania.There are pin holes evident in the pages indicating that there were additional notes and papers.Volume was bound in July 1933
David Scott Mitchell Collection. Prisons — Tasmania — Port Arthur. Call no. : B 5

As these transferees arrived from 1871 onwards at the Hobart Town Gaol, their records were updated, their photographs taken and pasted to their criminal record sheet. The photographer printed his stamp on the verso of several of these cartes - "T. J. Nevin, Photographic Artist, 140 Elizabeth St. Hobart Town" - and included the government Royal Arms insignia of the lion and unicorn rampant which appeared routinely on Police Department documents - but the majority were left blank. Those stamped verso by Nevin were used to register joint copyright under the terms of his commission.

The inscription and date "Taken at Port Arthur, 1874" is therefore misleading, although Nevin was at the site on May 8th of that year, and had photographed the prison personnel there between 1865-1873. The photographs of Tasmanian prisoners, whether transportees incarcerated at Port Arthur, or "native" local offenders, were taken over a period of years by Thomas Nevin, possibly with the assistance of his partner Samuel Clifford, but especially with his brother Constable John Nevin at the Hobart Gaol. The Sheriff's Office held the prisoners' records at the Gaol and others were held at the office of the Administrator of Charitable Relief (within the Chief Secretary's Department), but in 1887 the Deputy Sheriff complained of their filthy condition and asked that they should be entirely under the Sheriff's care. The bulk of the records were still in the custody of the Sheriff when they were transferred to the State Archives in 1951. John Watt Beattie acquired several records bearing photographs for his Port Arthur museum in Hobart ca. 1915 with the demolition of the old photographers' room at the Hobart Gaol.

The handwritten inscription "Taken at Port Arthur" and the date "1874" on the verso of several extant convicts' cartes which have no identifying photographer's stamp is in a style later than the 1870s. Someone has written this date on the verso of these cartes decades later, probably at the Beattie studios and convict museum from ca. 1900 onwards where they were exhibited before Beattie turned over the collection to the Launceston Council which then transferred the tonne of his convictaria collection to the Queen Victoria and Art Gallery in 1930. In the 1980s many of these "original" convict cartes bearing the date "1874" on verso were distributed piecemeal from the QVMAG to the TMAG (1987) the NLA (1982) and the Archives Office of Tasmania which also holds a dozen originals acquired from Radcliffe's museum, The Old Curiosity Shop, at Port Arthur (1930s). The Archives Office dates some of these cartes between 1870 and 1872.

The attribution to Thomas J. Nevin in modern times was founded on sound judgement and thorough research by the curator of the Convicts Portraits exhibition in 1977 at the QVMAG. In the 19th century it was common knowledge that Nevin worked with police as both photographer and bailiff, reported in the weekly police gazettes and the newspapers of the day.

A.H. Boyd was not a photographer. No photographs exist which bear his name as photographer. There is no evidence he even held a camera. Hearsay is not evidence. The "belief" and "interpretation" by Chris Long in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995:36) proffers guesswork, supposition, aesthetic and subjective tastes, non-sequiturs, and lack of knowledge of the curatorial and publication history of the Nevin attribution, but no factual evidence which can be substantiated, validated, proved, or even considered logical to support attribution to A.H. Boyd. The same applies to Warwick Reeder's discussion of these cartes (ANU thesis 1995:70). Reeder's discussion is descriptive rather than speculative, confused and inconclusive, and his biographical information regarding Thomas Nevin is seriously inaccurate. His segue into a discussion of Nevin and the QVMAG holdings of their convict cartes alerts the reader to the fact that the "belief" in A.H. Boyd originated with Chris Long:

Chris Long was the first to suggest that they [Port Arthur cartes 1874] might have been taken by A.H. Boyd.

Why were they misled? The cargo of photographic glass (288) allegedly ferried to Port Arthur in July 1873 was the red herring. Chris Long made a simple calculation which convinced him that convicts were photographed there: 288 plates, 271 convicts. However, by 1873 there were only 109  inmates of the criminal class at the prison: many had already transferred to Hobart from 1871 onwards (Mitchell papers on Separate Prison records). By July 15, 1873 a total of 60 prisoners of the 109 prisoners sent from the Hobart Gaol to Port Arthur since 1871 had already been relocated to Hobart, as stated by Attorney-General Giblin in Parliament on that date. Thomas Nevin and Samuel Clifford may have used some of these same glass plates to photograph a small batch of prisoners at Port Arthur in 1873, but it is highly unlikely. The prisoners were photographed, bathed, shaved and clothed on arrival back in Hobart, the transfer being completed by October 1873. Without the use of onsite photographic facilities at Port Arthur,  both photographers would defer photography until the inmates' arrival in Hobart.

The government schooner's cargo lists do not record the plates returning to Hobart in any quantity, although a Mr. Clifford (or Gifford?) is shown returning to Hobart on board the schooner Harriet on December 1st, 1873 with some very large boxes. Most of the plates might have been sent back to Hobart, some unused, some broken and defective, but there is evidence to suggest those plates never left Customs in Hobart. When Nevin printed the cartes from his glass negatives in his City studio and at the Gaol studio, he even printed some with  hand-colouring: two of these are held at the National Library of Australia. Nevin's mobility to and from the Tasman Peninsula was faciliated by his father-in-law, master mariner Captain James Day. Several Candahar transportees were at Port Arthur in the 1870s, but Nevin's photograph of Candahar convict Appleby which survives in the NLA Collection was taken at the Supreme Court on July 4th, 1871, the first of the many prisoners photographed at the Gaol adjoining the Supreme Court after or awaiting trial.

The presence of photographic equipment in government stores doesn't make Boyd a photographer. Samuel Clifford - Thomas Nevin's senior as the photographers "Clifford & Nevin" - might have been the passenger Mr Clifford who travelled on the same trip as the cargo of 288 photographic plates to Port Arthur on July 30th 1873 . Clifford has left a photographic record of his visits in images of the Government Cottage, the Church, the surrounding landscape, and so on. A large collection called The Clifford Album is held at the State Library of Tasmania with many photographs dated exactly to 1873. Commentators should look at these original documents and note what other cargo accompanied the photographic materials -drinking glasses, red bunting and braid etc - supplies for official functions attended by visiting dignitaries (eg the Governor of South Australia). To order 12 gross of photographic plates says more about the frustrations of early photography when significant waste, breakage, and errors were the norm.

You have to wonder at the logic of these commentators - photohistorians in particular - who wish to write out of the official records a professional photographer such as Thomas Nevin, whose association with these convict photographs cannot be disputed, and write in an accountant such as A. H. Boyd who has no reputation or body of work as a photographer, none whatsoever.

Essentialist ideas about 'authorship' are dear to photohistorians, despite a flirtation such as Ennis' with postmodern theory. " The author is dead" was the post-modern mantra of the 1980s, remember, so why did they pursue A. H. Boyd with an attribution? Unwittingly, several repeated Chris Long's and the TMAG's error in book publications, which is one explanation, and it is an error which is not easily undone. Because of professional jealousy, is another explanation. The attribution to Nevin as photographer of the Tasmanian convict photographs was the work of John McPhee, whose reputation and publications - of the highest standard in Australia - other photohistorians can only envy. His latest publication, titled simply Joseph Lycett ~ Convict Artist, recently published by the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (2006) is a sumptuous and meticulous work.



Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection
Ref: AG291
ITEM NAME: watercolour:
MEDIUM: watercolour, watercolour on card,
MAKER: Joseph Lycett [1775 - 1828] [artist];
TITLE: 'Mount Wellington near Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land'
DATE: 1823c

Two histories, two inscriptions: Tasmanian prisoners 1874

EXECUTION at the HOBART GAOL
Thomas J. NEVIN at PORT ARTHUR
ALIASES, COPIES & MISATTRIBUTION



Prisoner CAMPBELL, William as SMITH, Job
Vignetted copy (cloudy background)
TMAG Ref: Q15578 see also TMAG Ref: Q15572
Photographer: Thomas J. Nevin 1874



Prisoner BLORE, Samuel
TMAG Ref: Q15596
Photographer: Thomas J. Nevin



From the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection
Reproduced from page 36 of Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (TMAG 1995)
Photo © KLW NFC 2008 ARR

On the left, the verso of convict Job Smith's carte bears the simple inscription -:

Job Smith Alias Campbell Alias Boodle

- and in a very different hand, the verso of Samuel [Emanuel] Blore's carte bears the familiar inscription which appears uniformly across dozens of these "Port Arthur convict" cartes:

Samuel Blore per Ld Petre Taken at Port Arthur 1874

Both convicts' early transportation details (prior to 1853) are listed in the Archives Office of Tasmania Convicts Records data base.

Archives Office of Tasmania: Convict Transportation Records
65694 Smith Job 26 Dec 1844 Sir Robert Peel 09 Sep 1844 London
5559 Blore Emanuel 15 Oct 1843 Lord Petre 07 Jul 1843 London

Job Smith and his aliases
These two copies/duplicates from Thomas J. Nevin's glass negative taken at a single sitting with the prisoner Job Smith aka Campbell, are held at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.



Vignetted copy (cloudy background)
Prisoner CAMPBELL, William as SMITH, Job
TMAG Ref: Q15578 see also TMAG Ref: Q15572
Photographer: Thomas J. Nevin 1874



Prisoner SMITH, Job alias CAMPBELL alias BRODIE
TMAG Ref: Q15572
Photographer: Thomas J. Nevin 1874

The National Library of Australia holds a third copy/duplicate of the same photograph of Job Smith, catalogued with the alias William Campbell. It is one of three convict cartes (found to date) by Thomas J. Nevin which had been hand-tinted, probably at the time of the original capture, by Nevin's studio assistants.



Prisoner Job Smith alias CAMPBELL alias BRODIE
Photographed by T. J. Nevin, Hobart, February 1874
Vignetted copy (cloudy background) and hand-coloured
Photo taken at the National Library of Australia, 16 December 2016
Photos copyright © KLW NFC 2016 ARR



Verso:Prisoner Job Smith alias CAMPBELL alias BRODIE
Photographed by T. J. Nevin, Hobart, February 1874
Photo taken at the National Library of Australia, 16 December 2016
Photos copyright © KLW NFC 2016 ARR



NLA Catalogue
nla.pic-vn4270353 PIC P1029/53 LOC Album 935 William Campbell, per S. [Sir] R. [Robert] Peel, taken at Port Arthur, 1874 [picture] 1874. 1 photograph on carte-de-visite mount : albumen, hand col. ; 9.4 x 5.6 cm., on mount 10.4 x 6.4 cm.

The inscription on verso, "Taken at Port Arthur, 1874" was written by John Watt Beattie in 1915 when hundreds of these prisoner cdvs were copied from Nevin's original glass plate negatives and offered for sale at his convictaria museum in Hobart decades before the NLA's acquisition of their collection between 1964 (from Neil Gunson) and 1982 (from John McPhee). The two duplicates of the same photograph held at the TMAG (see first two above) are not hand-coloured.

Whatever the circumstances of each copy's deposit in public collections, it is the same single image of this convict with several aliases, taken by government contractor Thomas J. Nevin once and once only. All three items in these collections are evidence of use and re-use by police, and there were probably many more in existence at the time of Job Smith's - aka William Campbell's - hanging, given the notoriety of the case. Thomas Nevin's reputation for hand-tinted photography was reported in The Mercury, December 4th, 1880. See this entry for more information on Nevin's coloured convict portraits at the NLA.

POLICE RECORDS for Wm Campbell, hanged as Job Smith



Discharged as Job Smith and received at Hobart from Port Arthur, published 2nd December 1868.



Convicted again as Job Smith 4th September 1869 for larceny, three months at the Hobart Gaol.


Job Smith was a suspect for theft, published on 13th May 1870, at which point he changed his name to William Campbell.



William Campbell alias Robert Boodle (or Brodie) alias Job Smith was convicted on 19th March 1872 for uttering a forged cheque and sentenced to 8 years.



William Campbell was arraigned for rape on 11th May 1875, and hanged as Job Smith on 31st May 1875. Source: Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1875 Gov't Printer

William Campbell alias Boodle or Brodie was executed as Job Smith on 31st May, 1875. The Penitentiary Chapel Historic Site website gives this summary of the background to the case (after Ian Brand):

JOB SMITH - 31st May 1875
Job Smith was a prisoner at Port Arthur, who had served most of his sentence by 1875 and had conducted himself well while there.
Margaret Ayres was a housemaid and in the service of Rev. Mr. Hayward the Church of England clergyman there. Shortly before 5 p.m. on 27th February, 1875, she went into the bush to search for Hayward’s cow.
On the way she met Smith and asked him if he had seen the cow and he pointed out the direction in which it had gone. She noticed that Smith was following her so she began to go back telling him she was afraid of snakes. She then claimed Smith made improper advances to her and when she fell trying to get away, he raped her.
Smith was charged with rape in the Supreme Court on 12th May, 1875.
The defence claimed there was no evidence of rape, that any of six prisoners were free to commit the offence and that Ayres had not noticed her assailant had lost the use of one arm as Smith had.
The jury rejected these claims and found Smith guilty and he was sentenced to death.
Smith went to the gallows on 31st May, 1875 declaring his innocence, but this contradicted a written statement he left with Father Beechinor.

A letter in the Mercury the following day questioned whether rape should be a capital offence or whether Tasmania should not follow England’s example and find another punishment for that crime. Smith was the last person to hang for rape in Tasmania.

Job Smith aka Wm Campbell was photographed by Thomas Nevin either when Smith was one of sixty prisoners who had transferred back to the Hobart Gaol from Port Arthur before July 1873 (see W.R. Giblin's and the Inspector of Police's report of convicts tabled in the Parliament on July 17th, 1873), or just before Smith as William Campbell was returned to Port Arthur on May 8th, 1874 to complete his 8 year sentence, accompanied by Thomas Nevin in his role as police agent and photographer. Both were listed as passengers on the schooner Harriet's way bill:



Above: William Campbell accompanied by Thomas Nevin to Port Arthur
Passengers aboard the government schooner Harriet, May 8th, 1874.
Source: Tasmanian Papers Ref: 320, Mitchell SLNSW. Photo &copy KLW NFC 2009 ARR

Thomas Nevin would have carried at least two copies on his person of the prisoner's photograph, one loose and one pasted to the prisoner's record sheet, in the event of attempted escape in transit. Other copies remained at the Office of Inspector of Police, Town Hall, Hobart. Dr Coverdale, the Surgeon-Commandant at Port Arthur who had replaced A.H. Boyd by January 1874 deemed this procedure sufficient for security as a dozen or so prisoners were evacuated every week back to Hobart by schooner as soon as he assumed office. Clearly, Dr Coverdale's predecessor A. H. Boyd had nothing to do with this photograph of Job Smith, nor indeed with any other of these 1870s prisoner mugshots for the simple and very obvious facts that (a) Boyd was not a photographer and no photographs in any genre supposedly taken by him have been found extant nor ever will be found unless they have been faked, as for example, the image of the Port Arthur prison printed by the Anson Bros in 1889 (Kerr, Stilwell 1992); and (b) the commission awarded to Thomas Nevin to photograph prisoners was given in 1872 by the Attorney-General W. R. Giblin after the visit by senior prison official and politicians from Victoria to the Port Arthur prison. Just one image, reprinted many times, of Job Smith aka William Campbell is extant. Thomas Nevin photographed him once and once only, although at least three duplicates and copies are currently extant in State and National collections.

When Smith was returned once more to the Hobart Gaol to be arraigned in the Supreme Court, Hobart, his case was a cause celebre. The Mercury ran editorial commentary and letters from the public throughout May and early June 1875 concerning his innocence or guilt, questioning the mess of evidence, and Tasmania's continued application of capital punishment laws.

The last hours of Job Smith were reported in the press, and not without a note of pathos:

EXECUTION AT THE HOBART TOWN GAOL
The condemned criminal, Job Smith, recently tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death for a criminal assault, under brutal circumstances, on the girl Margaret Ayres, at Port Arthur,forfeited his life inside the Hobart Town Gaol yesterday morning.

At 8 o'clock , Smith, accompanied by Father D. F. X. Beechinor (the clergyman who attended him since his condemnation) and Mr Rothwell (Under-Sheriff) left the condemned cell, and proceeded to the place of execution, Father Beechinor being engaged in prayer along the way. Besides Mr. Atkins (the governor of the gaol), representatives of the Press, and a body of police, there were only two other individuals present.

From the cell to the gallows, Smith betrayed no physical emotion, his step being steady, and his demeanour apparently composed. On arriving at the drop, the Under-Sheriff asked the unfortunate man if he had anything to say. Smith replied, " I am not guilty ; I am an innocent man."The Under-Sheriff then read the following written statement:

" I was born at Bristol on the 23rd of November, 1819, and was a Protestant all my life. Became a Roman Catholic upon receiving sentence of death. I have left with my [spiritual] director a statement, which, in his discretion, I request him to publish wholly or in part."

The usual preliminaries having been arranged, the executioner, at a given signal from the Under-Sheriff, performed his duty, and the malefactor died without any apparent physical pain.It may be mentioned that Smith left a written document with Father Beechinor, which contains a statement in direct contradiction to his dying words.

During portions of Sunday night, Smith manifested much mental uneasiness, but as night wore on he became calmer. At an early hour of the morning, Smith requested to be served with some bread, cheese, and beer. The request was complied with, but at the time he left his cell for execution his refreshment remained untouched.

[Source: extract from  Launceston Examiner (Tas. : 1842 - 1899)  Thu 3 Jun 1875  Page 3  JOB SMITH.]

Thomas Nevin's original capture would have been reprinted and offered on sale as an image of infamy to remind the population of the swift course of justice. Given that photographs were not printed in newspapers in 1875, the Press in attendance may have used this photograph of Job Smith as an adjunct to sales.

The handwriting on the verso of Smith's carte is similar to the handwriting on dozens of Nevin's photographs held at the TMAG - for example, the landscape of Melville Street under snow, inscribed "W. Hobart, July 1868" .

Emanuel Blore



Prisoner Samuel BLORE
TMAG Ref: Q15596
Photographer: Thomas J. Nevin 1874
Emanuel (or Samuel) Blore's police record:



Source:Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police1871-1875 Gov't Printer

Emanuel Blore received a ticket-of-leave, 16th November, 1874. He was photographed on discharge from the Mayor's Court and Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall by Thomas Nevin per police regulations. This cdv of Samuel or Emanuel Blore was duplicated at least four times by Nevin at the time of the one and only sitting with the prisoner for future police reference, and inscribed verso with the number "119" when displayed by Beattie and Searle for sale in 1915 at Beattie's convictaria museum in Hobart. The number on the front "134" was inscribed in 1983 when the cdv was removed from the QVMAG for exhibition as part of the Port Arthur Conservation project.

Like so many of these cdvs of Tasmanian prisoners taken in the 1870s which bear numbers from one to more than 300 either on verso or mount, some with the inscription "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" on verso, the provenance of all these prints is from the QVMAG's Beattie collection of government estrays acquired from his estate there in 1930, from which the exhibition held in 1977 at the QVMAG was sourced and correctly exhibited as the work of Thomas Nevin's photographic portraits of 1870s "Port Arthur convicts".

Despite the attribution to T. J. Nevin in 1977, by the time about 120 cdvs had been removed from the QVMAG in order to be displayed at an exhibition at Port Arthur in 1983, at least 50 were subsequently returned instead to the TMAG (E. Wishart et al), where they were wrongly attributed to A.H. Boyd, apparently based on a whimsical rumour spread by a Boyd descendant and certain gullible Port Arthur employees. The photographs of prisoners Job Smith and Emanuel Blore were two of six cdvs of Tasmanian convicts displayed online at the TMAG until November 2006 and taken offline by 2007. The TMAG fortunately reserved the attribution to Thomas J. Nevin of all of their holdings of Tasmanian photographs of convicts and cast this Boyd misattribution as a misjudgment which was paraded as a "belief" rather than as a substantiated fact by the writer of their publication, Chris Long, in Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (Gillian Winter, ed: TMAG 1995).

RELATED POSTS main weblog

• Fraudulent pretensions: the Boyd misattribution at SLNSW
• Thomas Nevin's VIP commission 1872
• Rogues Gallery: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection
• ‘Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory’ (TMAG 1995)
• Anne-Marie Willis & Richard Neville on the A.H. Boyd misattribution
• The QVMAG, Chris Long and the A.H. Boyd misattribution
• Helen Ennis’ NLA publication ‘Intersections’ 2004
• Isobel Crombie and Helen Ennis: how misattribution can persist

Anne-Marie Willis & Richard Neville on the Boyd misattribution

Several photo historians have questioned - and dismissed - the suggestion by Chris Long in the TMAG publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995:36) that the Port Arthur Commandant A.H. Boyd was the photographer of the Port Arthur convicts in 1874. These include Joan Kerr and Geoff Stilwell, John McPhee, and Richard Neville among the more authoritative commentators.





Richard Neville's review (1997) of Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory contained these important observations on Chris Long's approach and judgement:

The entries of early photographers often have to be read in conjunction with Joan Kerr’s (ed.) The Dictionary of Australian Artists 1770- 1870 and [Davies & Stanbury’s 1986] Mechanical Eye as Long does not repeat its information. If Kerr and Davies are not simultaneously consulted then important information can be missed. As Long moves into the twentieth century he is forced to be more selective in the photographers he includes, so he lists only the “most notable” amateurs.

This is a potential and acknowledged problem: Long notes he had to make a judgment of the subjective worth of each photographer’s output, and he is much more prepared to offer aesthetic comments about the works of photographers than is Davies. To a certain extent this fairly minor point is the least satisfactory part of Tasmanian Photographers - his own preference for landscape photography is so obvious that one cannot help but be a little wary of his judgements. Indeed he says himself “Preferences and prejudices will be evident in some of my assessments of the work of Tasmanian photographers. These attitudes have evolved after lengthy consideration of the surviving photographs.” (p.x) Such an explicit admission of something that we all do is possibly refreshing, but it is also potentially problematic…

Sometimes the entries are not clear. His important argument that Adolarious Boyd, the superintendent at Port Arthur, was the photographer of the well-known portraits of Port Arthur convicts rather than Thomas Nevin is not found in the Boyd entry, but rather under “convict photographs”. No “see also” reference is provided to that entry - rather one is given to Charles Woolley for whom one can see no obvious link. It would be very easy, therefore, to miss the substance of his argument. To a certain extent the book has the look of something produced by desktop publishing, and it seems to have the usual infelicities and typo’s of that genre. Editor Gillian Winter’s description of its publication history suggests that it was a difficult birth, and indeed she describes it as a “draft publication”, which is not altogether reassuring.

Source: Richard Neville, Curator of Australian Pictures at the Mitchell Library, Sydney: published online 3rd March, 1997, James Cook University Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History.


Richard Neville raised the alarm here in 1997. It is beyond argument that Chris Long's "belief" and "interpretation" mustered in his cause for a Boyd attribution was founded in personal prejudice, lack of evidence, falsifications of sources and references, and a subjective aesthetic.

An earlier photo historian to question Chris Long's attribution of the Port Arthur convicts photographs to A.H. Boyd instead of T. J. Nevin was Anne-Marie Willis in her book Picturing Australia: A History of Photography (1988, Angus & Robertson):

She says on page 98:

It is not certain whether the Tasmanian penal authorities kept systematic photographic records of convicts ... The only convict photographs that have survived are some carte de visite portraits taken of Port Arthur inmates in 1874, two years before that penal settlement was closed (figs 59 and 60) -

Included on page 98 is this carte-de-visite of convict Blore from the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery Collection where the misattribution to Boyd has persisted. It is obviously a copy from an original forwarded to the TMAG ca. 1985-87 when copies were made and circulated by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery to the National Library of Australia, the TMAG and the Archives Office of Tasmania.

Emanuel Blore received a ticket-of-leave, 16th November, 1874. He was photographed on discharge at the Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall by Thomas Nevin per police regulations. This carte of Samuel or Emanuel Blore was probably reprinted, inscribed verso, and numbered by Beattie in the 1900s for display and sale at his convictaria museum in Hobart.



Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
Ref: Q15596
NAME: Photographic print:
MEDIUM:carte de visite,
MAKER: A H Boyd [Artist];
TITLE:'[Convict]: "134" "119 / Samuel Blore / per Ld Petre / Taken at Port Arthur 1874.'
DATE: 1874
HISTORY: It is thought that the commandant of Port Arthur, A H Boyd may have taken the convict photographs at Port Arthur. Boyd was a very keen amateur photographer and is known to have had a room at Port Arthur fitted up in his garden as a studio and darkroom. Notes contained in the Mitchell Library's Tasmanian Papers refer instructions given to Boyd to photograph the convicts prior to the closure of Port Arthur and to photographic equipment sent to Boyd in 1873.

The TMAG catalogue entry for all convict portraits digitised and online until November 2006 contained this "History" re Boyd, including the fictions created by Chris Long about a studio and darkroom in his garden, together with the Mitchell Library reference. Clearly the cataloguist has taken the information from Chris Long's entry in Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995:36), but with the added gloss that the Mitchell Library references cited by Long include "instructions given to Boyd" which they clearly do not. On page 36 Long cites three cargo or way bills of photographic equipment: examination of the original documents (Tasmanian Papers Ref: 320) revealed that they contain no such instructions. No other document held at the Mitchell Library has ever been cited by Chris Long. However, eleven more "convict" or prisoner photographs taken by Nevin, two stamped verso with his name and the Supreme Court's Royal Arms seal, are held there in the Mitchell Collection.

Anne-Marie Willis continues:

"Some of these were attached to the same kind of information sheets used by New South Wales prisons at the time." (note 49).

[The NSW State Archives has prisoner George Miller's record sheet with attached carte online.]

In Note 49 she says:

This would suggest that the documentation was undertaken for the same instrumental reason as the New South Wales prison photographs. More would be known about the intended function of these images if their authorship was certain. Examples held by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, had until recently been attributed to T. J. Nevin a Hobart photographer who had worked with Alfred Bock. Chris Long suggests that they were taken by the Commandant of Port Arthur, A. H. Boyd (Davies & Stanbury, op. cit. 201).

It was only a suggestion, unsupported by evidence, and cited by Davies & Stanbury in a footnote on page 201. The "intended function" and the "authorship" of the Port Arthur convict photographs were known, documented, publicised, published and talked about by Geoffrey Stilwell, Joan Kerr and John McPhee, the curators and researchers of the 1977 exhibition of Thomas J. Nevin's Port Arthur convict cartes held at the QVMAG. Nevin's role as prisons and police photographer was common knowledge in the 19th century.

Additional research now indicates a further purpose: to expose corruption during A.H. Boyd's tenure. In July 1873, Dr Crowther called for the immediate abolition of Port Arthur, and drew the Parliament's attention to the anomaly of prisoners with light sentences being sent to Port Arthur from the Hobart Gaol to inflate prisoner numbers there. Men with more than one alias, men with lengthy sentences to men with less than a six months' sentence sent to be imprisoned with hardened criminals, and men sent as labour to work the prison site: their numbers ensured the perpetuation of the prison site and its costly maintenance. Above all, it guaranteed the livelihood of its chief official, A. H. Boyd, who had been investigated (so the Parliament was reminded) during an earlier accusation of corruption (1855) while employed at the Port Arthur prison as the accountant. The use of photographs was a means to monitor this trafficking in prisoners. On July 15, 1873, A. H. Boyd's brother-in-law Attorney -General W.R Giblin tabled in Parliament the names of 109 prisoners sent to Port Arthur from 1871, and noted - to placate the criticism - that 60 of those prisoners had already been returned to the Hobart Gaol. The rest were returned by October 1873 and photographed by Nevin at the Hobart Gaol. They were not photographed at Port Arthur prior to their return.

The 300 or so extant cartes of "Port Arthur convicts" - i.e. Tasmanian prisoners - are simply random estrays of a much larger and lost or destroyed corpus of prisoner photographs numbering more than a  thousand (1000) taken by Thomas Nevin and his brother Constable John Nevin at the Hobart Gaol, at the City and Supreme Courts, and at the Town Hall Municipal Police Office between 1871 and 1886. The men whose images survive in these extant examples may have been transported and incarcerated at the Port Arthur prison before 1853, but they were photographed not because they were transportees per se but because they were repeat offenders, habitual criminals in and out of jails and listed by police as suspects. They were photographed on arrest, at trial, on remand and sentencing, arraignment and discharge per the amendments to Penal Discipline legislation enforced in Victoria and Tasmania 1871-1873.

The few convict cartes held at the TMAG which were catalogued with the Boyd misattribution with no other authority than the unsubstantiated hypothesis presented by Chris Long have been used by photo historians and curators for their exhibitions and publications, often compromising their publishers and their own credibility in the process (e.g. Helen Ennis, Andrew Sayers, Isobel Crombie, Warwick Reeder). Whatever the reason for choosing to use a handful of convict cartes from the TMAG for this exhibition and not the other extant convicts' cartes by Nevin - 300 or so currently held in the other major public collections (NLA, AOT, QVMAG) - the effect is the perpetuation of historical misinformation.

Aesthetic assumptions about photography as fine art may explain why these sorts of errors occur. The debate about the "authorship" of these convict portraits is first and foremost a debate among photo historians and founded on essentialist notions of the "artist". Warwick Reeder explicitly uses the literary term "author" in his promotion of Boyd based on Chris Long's "belief" (MA thesis, ANU 1995). Neither Long nor Reeder, nor indeed Ennis or Crombie checked the source of the story about the "darkroom." The story was in fact written in the 1930s as a children's fictional tale by a niece of Boyd, with no mention of either Boyd by name or prisoner photographs, but Long and Reeder have cited this piece of fiction as if it can function as historical fact.

"I PREFER THE REAL THING"

Australian historical accounts of photographic practices generally have worked from

"the unstated and unquestioned assumptions about the primacy of photography as fine art, technology, or record,"

says Anne-Marie Willis in her Introduction to Picturing Australia: A History of Photography, 1988.

She outlines these three most common approaches:

1. Selecting a canon of "great photographers", stylistic tendencies and movements, and dealing with photography as a sub-branch of conventional art history. Heroes and canons of outstanding practitioners are the goal of discovery.

2. Telling a story of technological progress and scientific advancement of the medium, with no other primary interest.

3. Treating photographic documents as unproblematic and self-evidently transparent records of historical events and thematic meanings.

Each of these approaches has its flaws. Anne-Marie Willis sets out instead to give an account which looks at -

"photographs in their original context, to discover the ordinary and the typical and to come to an understanding of the dominant uses of photography in each historical period. However, outstanding individuals, technology and social history have not been altogether ignored. Instead of being given prominence, they have been woven into an account informed by the active role that photography has played across a range of institutions in constructing specific values and attitudes - both about photographic practice itself and about Australian society generally." (page 3).

Anne-Marie Willis' concern with the "ordinary and the typical" is central to our examination of how these Tasmanian prisoners photographs affected the family life and professional practice of the photographer, Thomas J. Nevin during and after his contractual engagement and civil service with the Municipal Office and Prisons Department to take them, together with his brother Constable John Nevin at the Hobart Gaol who died prematurely in 1891, aged 39 yrs.

To accord a prison manager such as A.H. Boyd any attribution as THE photographer is to enlist one of those mythical fictions in "hero" discourses beloved of administrators: middle-class power. Another commentator, Carolyn Strange, found on her visit to the Port Arthur Historic Site in 2000 that “1860s photographic images of real convicts " were displayed with audio voice- overs telling of stories of convict lives that were fictionalized .One visitor said to Carolyn Strange on leaving the display, “I prefer the real thing”.

The Old Curiosity Shop, Port Arthur, Tasman Peninsula

DARK TOURISM FICTIONS
PORT ARTHUR HISTORIC SITE Tasmania

An early pioneer of dark tourism, William Radcliffe published a guide to the ruins of the Port Arthur prison site in the 1930s with photographs by John Watt Beattie taken in the early 1900s. The shame of convict heritage, a keenly felt stigma of the times, required concealment of real names. On page 25, he advised:

In consideration of relatives who may be living, the actual names have been omitted. If any doubt of the facts is occasioned in any way, the records may be seen on application at my museum at Port Arthur.
W. RADCLIFFE

Photos copyright © KLW NFC 2007

William Radcliffe (193-?) Port Arthur guide: historical facts
Publisher: [Port Arthur [Tas.]
Printer: (Hobart : Cox Kay)
. Description: 47 p. : ill., facsims ; 19 cm.
Notes: "From original records at The Old Curiosity Shop, Port Arthur."

If William Radcliffe was inclined to fictionalise his account of the "historical facts" in the 1930s for reasons of discretion, the present Port Arthur Historic Site "interpreters" have no such qualms. Fictionalisation is the MO of the theme park. Carolyn Strange reported her experience in 2000 in these terms:

Proceeding off from the workers’ display area is a room set aside for a slide show that combines 1860s photographic images of real convicts with voice-over fictional recollections of real-life convict Bewley Tuck. Inspired by the experiences of this man, who served sentences at Port Arthur between the 1830s and 1870s, the script is a salty tale about the penal regime and the changes at the site (particularly the introduction of the separate silent prison) in the post 1840s era. Visitors can learn more about the post-convict period (the 1880s to the present) if they move beyond this bare chamber to a story board area that explains how Port Arthur was transformed from a somewhat shameful curiosity into a carefully preserved historical site vying for world heritage status.

Carolyn Strange, 2000. ‘Place of Misery’ to ‘Lottery of Life’: Interpreting Port Arthur’s Past.
Copyright © Open Museum Journal Volume 2: Unsavoury histories, August 2000
https://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume2/strange.pdf (broken link)
Read Carolyn Strange's article here

Naively conceived fictions by "interpreters" at the Port Arthur Historic Site continue to resound around the ruins of facts. In "vying for world heritage status" there seems to be no limit to fictiveness. Those "1860s photographic images of real convicts" were taken by a REAL PHOTOGRAPHER, the contracted Hobart photographer Thomas J. Nevin. Just as the Port Arthur Historic Site "interpreters" have dreamt up fictional recollections as a voice-over to accompany one of Nevin's prisoner photos, that of Bewley Tuck's, they've also attempted to suppress Thomas J. Nevin's identity as the photographer. Resistant to facts, and unwilling to distinguish fact from belief, they would wish the public to join in their fantasy of a Commandant-photographer, none other than the Commandant of the Prison, A.H. Boyd, himself accused twice of corruption. That's keeping it in the family! A "mere" jobbing photographer (aesthete Chris Long's derogatory epithet, 1995:36) from Hobart, as Nevin was in the ordinary course of his duties as prison photographer, must seem too mundane for a site "vying for world heritage status." While William Radcliffe's Old Curiosity Shop might raise a laugh now, it is nothing compared to the fictions the present PAHS management is foisting on the public.



Webshot of AOT record for convict Bewley Tuck per Lotus
Photographed at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin
Archives Office Tasmania Ref: 30-3186c

POSTSCRIPT 2008
The above article on Radcliffe's convictaria museum at Port Arthur which he namedThe Old Curiosity Shop, first published by us here online on October 12, 2007, provided yet another inspiration this year to this individual, Julia Clark, "interpreter" at the Port Arthur Historic Site to freely plagiarise OUR research, claim our ideas as her own, and then use and abuse them for her shallow self promotional interests.*

It is no secret that the Port Arthur Historic Site is experiencing financial difficulties (see the PAHSMA Annual Report 2007-2008), and that commercial imperatives lie at the heart of this revisionism of Tasmanian heritage, but it is unacceptable, duplicitous and dishonest indeed to revise history purely to lure tourists to the site with "interpretations" which have no basis in historical fact. In 2007 Clark attempted to convince the National Library to eliminate their long-standing sole attribution to Thomas J. Nevin as photographer of their Tasmanian collection called convict portraits in order to talk up the Port Arthur Commandant A.H. Boyd (1871-December 1873) - a non-photographer with no reputation or extant photographic work - as THE photographer instead. The extensive curatorial and published research over 30 years on Thomas Nevin's prison photography was piecemeal ignored or "rewritten" by Julia Clark in her "essay" submitted to the NLA, for whatever personal needs she has for gaining attention and by the financial needs of her employer. There is no doubt that the Tasmanian government is wasting money on funding this individual in such endeavours, and should reconsider her involvement to be both an embarrassment and an impediment to gaining credibility for the Port Arthur Historic Site's world heritage nomination.

* Date: 8/4/2008 MER April 8, 2008: 130 Years of Tourism to the Port Arthur Historic Site exhibition, curator Julia Clark with an old guide to Port Arthur entitled Historical Facts Published: The Hobart Mercury - April 19, 2008 Page: B05 Edition: 17apr08 Keywords: Monuments and Heritage Sites. Pic. Leigh Winburn

Read more in this article with photographs about William and Dora Radcliffe's museum:



Source: ABC news 2019-03-24
The Radcliffe legacy lives on at Port Arthur


RELATED POSTS main weblog

• John Watt Beattie's Museum ca 1916
• Prisoner Bewley TUCK can speak for himself
• Prisoner Alfred MALDEN or MALDON 1874
• Julia Clark must face up to academic fraud
• The LONG con: our comments on Julia Clark's fraudulent thesis

John Watt Beattie's Museum ca 1916

BEATTIE, John Watt (1859-1930)
CONVICTARIA EXHIBITIONS 1900s
THE PORT ARTHUR BRAND

Beattie's Port Arthur Museum
John Watt Beattie located his museum in Hobart but called it the "Port Arthur Museum" where he sold any fragment of any item as historical artefact of Tasmania's convict and aboriginal past, including reproductions.



John Watt Beattie ca. 1920
Archives Office of Tasmania Ref:30-430c

A visitor to Tasmania in 1916 with the South Australian Commission became so affronted by John Watt Beattie's commercialism when he "wandered into the Port Arthur Museum" in Hobart, the visitor was moved to write a letter to the Mercury newspaper. His letter was published on 3rd February, 1916:

He wrote:

"There are three rooms literally crammed with exhibits ... The question which pressed itself on my mind time and again was, how comes it that these old-time relics which formerly were Government property, are now in private hands? Did the Government sell them or give them away? The same query applies to the small collection in a curiosity shop at Brown's River. Whatever the answer may be, I hold the opinion that the Government would be amply justified in taking prompt steps to repossess them, even though some duplicates may be in the State Museum. Today the collection is valuable and extremely interesting. A century hence it will be priceless. It would surely be unpardonable to allow it to pass into the hands of some wealthy globe-trotter which is the fate awaiting it, unless action be taken to secure it to the State."

The Mercury 3rd February 1916, letter to the editor
from Edward Lucas, MLC, Legislative Council, Adelaide.

This visitor on government business in Tasmania could hardly have envisioned that the State itself would never be able to do the collection justice, because Beattie had already violated the integrity of the originals, despite making "some duplicates" and lodging them in the "State Museum", by which he meant the institution now known as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. This was one means whereby the TMAG acquired duplicates of T. J. Nevin's prisoner photographs. Two other sources are likely: estrays from the central police registry at the Hobart Town Hall (next door to the TMAG) where Nevin worked as a full-time civil servant in the years 1876-1880 and which housed the Municipal Police Office, cells in the basement and Office of the Inspector of Police, in addition to the Public Library upstairs. Beattie also sourced a number of prisoner photographs from the Sheriff's Office at the Hobart Gaol when the old photographers' room was demolished in 1915. The other source is the "borrowing" of originals and duplicates by staff at the TMAG in Hobart from Beattie's donated collection at the QVMAG in Launceston for an exhibition held at the Port Arthur prison site in 1983-1984. The TMAG acquired hundreds of stereographs, cartes-de-visite portraits of private clientele, and Hobart Gaol prisoner mugshots taken by Thomas J. Nevin in the 1860s-1870s from these sources.



Beattie's Port Arthur Museum in Hobart
QVMAG Ref: 1986_P_1223

The rooms in Beattie's Port Arthur Museum, 51 Murray St. Hobart,  looked like this:



Room 1: the red arrow points to prisoner records with photos by Nevin attached.



Room 2: Death masks at John Watt Beattie's Port Arthur Museum, Hobart, Tasmania (TMAG Collection)

J. W. Beattie offered for sale a number of original mounted and unmounted 1870s cdvs of "Types of Imperial Convicts" as he styled them in his 1916 Catalogue which looked like this:



The Catalogue for Sale of items from
John Watt Beattie's Museum, ca. 1916
(photographed from the NLA Microfiche, September 2007)

From the catalogue below in which this advertisement appeared, the tourist and collector could choose from a range of relics, curios, and photographs salvaged from across the State. The curiosity about Tasmania's convict past in these early years of the 20th century ensured that Beattie's business flourished. His photographic reproductions, as both cartes-de-visite prints and lantern slides from negatives of prisoner ID photographs taken for the police and prison authorities by the Nevin brothers in the 1870s-1880s was a lucrative niche market. Those extant cartes from his museum which are now in public collections may well be those which he did not manage to sell, or which he donated as Nevin's duplicates to the TMAG and QVMAG. What needs to be underscored here is that John Watt Beattie was never the original photographer of the Tasmanian prisoners portrayed in the extant "convict portraits" taken by Thomas Nevin and his younger brother Constable John Nevin between 1871 and 1886 at the Hobart Supreme Court, Hobart Gaol and the Port Arthur prison. Beattie arrived in Tasmania in the late 1880s as an amateur photographer, primarily of landscapes, and did not become a commercial photographer with government endorsement until he joined the Anson Bros. in 1892.



Port Arthur Museum (Beattie ca 1916) ,
Catalogue, Room 1.
John Watt Beattie's Port Arthur Museum, Hobart.
Catalogue dated ca. 1916
SOURCE: National Library of Australia
Author: Port Arthur Museum (Tas.)
Title: Catalogue of exhibits [microform]
Edition: [2nd ed.]
Publisher: [Hobart? : The Museum?, 1916?]
Printer: (Hobart : Critic Print)
Description: 15 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: Cover title.
Reproduction: Microfiche. Canberra : National Library of Australia, 2004.
Call Number: mc N 2225 JAFp HIST 3072

TRANSCRIPT: Catalogue of Exhibits

ROOM NO. 1
1. Frame Containing Relics of Rev. R. Knopwood (20 exhibits),
2. Harmonium, bought at Sir Wm. Denison's sale.
3. Oil Painting of Old St. David's Church, Hobart, 1825.
4. Oil Painting of Macquarie Street, Hobart, 1825.
5. Frame of Needlework Figure Picture, from Rev. R. Knopwood.
6. Water Colour Picture, "Hobart from River," 1828.
7. Water Colour Picture, "Sandy Bay, Hobart," 1849.
8. Music Stand made by Convict for Rev. R. Knopwood.
9. The Organ used at the Church, Port Arthur.
10. Chair from Capt. Jas. Kelly's Residence (bought at Governor Arthur's sale, 1836).
11. Coloured Picture, Hobart from Kangaroo Point, 1856.
12. Ship's Figure Head, from a China Trader, broken up at Hobart.
13. Crayon Portrait of J. E. Bicheno, Colonial Secretary, under Governor Franklin.
14. Engraving of Hobart in 1822.
15. Engraving of Road to Richmond, by French artist.
16. The Port Arthur Church from the Avenue.
17. The Ground Plan, Port Arthur Church, 1835.
18. Longitudinal Elevation, Port Arthur Church, 1835.
19. Portrait of Bishop Nixon, First Anglican Bishop of Tasmania
20. Portrait of Bishop Wilson, First R.C. Bishop of Tasmania.
21. Brass Ornament from Port Arthur Church.
22. Picture of The Pulpit, Port Arthur Church.
23. Picture of the Tasmanian Rural Police, 1870.
24. Pottery Made at Port Arthur (40 exhibits).
25. Musical Clock brought to Australia is the very early times.
26. Key Stone Head, carved by a Convict. 1830.
27. Picture Frames, made at Port Arthur (7 exhibits).
28. Wood Moulds for Picture Frames, carved by a Convict (7 exhibits).
29. Bedstead from Doctor's Quarters, Port Arthur
30. Desk Top from Charge Room, Old Gaol, Hobart.
31. Despatch Box from Colonial Office, carved by Convict in Tasmania
32. Box from Port Arthur, the property of Captain Booth, the Commandant.
33. Wooden Bowl from the Hospital, Port Arthur
34. Chair from "Exile Cottage" Port Arthur, used by Mr. Smith O'Brien while confined at Port Arthur (3 exhibits).
35. Carved Ebony Desk, the property of Comptroller-General
36. Writing Desk, made at Port Arthur.
37. Tea Caddy, bought at Sir Eardley Wilmot's Sale

etc etc etc



Port Arthur Museum Catalogue (Beattie, ca 1916)

68. Glass Case containing -
1. Skull of the Macquarie Harbour Cannibal, Alex Pearce (Marcus Clarke's "Gabbet.")
2. Two Sketches made of Pearce after execution.
3. The Axe Pearce Carried, and with which the murders were committed.
4. Bolts and Lock Taken from the Cell where Pearce was confined, Old Gaol, Murray street.
5. "Sling Shot" taken from Matthew Brady, the celebrated Tasmanian Bushranger, when captured by John Batman in 1820.

69. Three Frames containing 40 photographs taken at Port Arthur, showing types of Imperial Prisoners there.
etc etc etc







Forty prints of 1870s Tasmania prisoners in three panels
Original prints of negatives by T. J. Nevin 1870s
Reprints by J. W. Beattie ca. 1915
QVMAG Collection: Ref : 1983_p_0163-0176

The originals of these forty (40) individual prints of Tasmanian prisoners photographed at the Hobart Gaol by the commissioned photographer Thomas J. Nevin in the 1870s, were intended to be pasted to the criminal record sheet of each prisoner. It was customary to photograph a person before conviction and after it, and again on discharge, by order of the Tasmanian Attorney-General from 1872 onwards, and since the men whom Nevin photographed were repeat and habitual offenders, the same glass negative was used again and again. The plates were handled repeatedly to produce duplicates for distribution to regional prisons and police stations, and for the many administrative copies required by the central Municipal Police Office at the Town Hall, the Supreme Court and the Hobart Gaol.

Photographs from the glass negatives were produced in various formats, first as uncut and unmounted prints as in these 40 prints, and again in carte-de-visite format within an oval mount, a practice which persisted in Tasmania through the 1870s, 1880s and into the1890s. The same cdv was sometimes overlayed again in an oblong mount when the glass plate became too damaged for further use. All three photographic formats appear on the criminal record sheets of prisoners bound together as the Hobart Gaol record books dating from the late 1880s onwards, held at the Archives Office Tasmania. Some of the earlier gaol record books of the 1870s have survived, now mysteriously missing the prisoners’ photographs. One possible explanation is that convictaria collector John Watt Beattie and his assistant Edward Searle removed the photographs or even destroyed the sheets in the early 1900s while trying to save the photographs, the bulk of which ended up at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, acquired through a donation from John Watt Beattie’s estate. The Mercury reported the QVMAG exhibition opening on 19 December 1928:

PORT ARTHUR RELICS MUSEUM OPENED.

A further section of the Port Arthur collection of relics of early Tasmanian days which was purchased by the Launceston City Council recently from Mr. J. W. Beattie, of Hobart, and which is housed at the Victoria Museum, Launceston, was opened yesterday by the Mayor (Mr. R. M. Osborne). Among those present were Sir John Hewett and Mrs. St. John Atkinson, who arrived in Launceston by the Nairana yesterday as a delegation representing the St. John Ambulance Association.
The Mayor welcomed the visitors, and said that there was nothing more interesting than the history of the fore-fathers of Tasmania, who had settled in and developed the State. Valuable as the collection was, with the passing of time it would be increasingly so. He said that few persons realised the smallness of the staff with which the museum was conducted, and paid a tribute to the work of Mr. H. H. Scott, the curator.
The rooms were then declared "open." Keen interest in the collection was shown by Sir John Hewett and Mrs. Atkinson, to whom Mr. Scott explained the history of many of the exhibits which, in the new section, comprised chiefly the handwork of convicts, and the personal belongings of Sir John and Lady Franklin, in addition to other objects of early historical Interest.

Source: Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954), Wednesday 19 December 1928, page 7

Intercolonial exhibitions on the "Success" 1900s
The glass plates themselves seem to have been disappeared altogether. They may have been shipped to Sydney, NSW, in March 1915 for an exhibition held at the Royal Hotel, Sydney to be displayed – reprinted and even offered for sale – as Port Arthur relics, alongside relics and documents associated with the fake convict hulk, Success. This newspaper report of the exhibition clearly states that the exhibitors – and this would have included John Watt Beattie as the Tasmanian contributor – collated original parchment records with duplicates, and also photographed original documents when duplicates were not available. Amongst the one ton of Port Arthur relics were dozens of original 1870s mugshots taken by T. J. Nevin, still attached to the prisoner’s rap sheet; many more were removed for re-photographing in various formats as Beattie prepared for this exhibition. Each mugshot chosen for display from prisoners with Supreme Court sentences was transcribed verso with the factually incorrect claim, "Taken at Port Arthur 1874".   The association of Marcus Clarke’s notes and novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, published in 1874 with these photographic records was marketing de rigeur by 1915.



TRANSCRIPT

CONVICT RELICS. DOCUMENTS OF THE EARLY DAYS.
MEMORIES OF THE SYSTEM,
There is at present at the Royal Hotel, Sydney, an interesting collection of relics of early convict days. It has been brought over here by Mr. Fred McNiel, a member of a very old West Maitland family. Those relics are not exactly heirlooms, though they were handed to the family by a gentleman who had much to do with showing the world the social conditions of Australia 70 or 80 years ago. Mr. McNiel's uncle was Mr. John McNiel, who was associated with the infamous hulk Success when it was turned into a floating exhibition. It will be remembered that on the old convict ship many of the most notorious men who left England for England's good were caged like wild animals in a menagerie, and treated with a greater degree of severity by men who were more inhuman than the creatures they were called upon to guard. After a checkered career in Australia the hulk was taken to London and anchored in the Thames, when many people got their first ideas of Australian history from a visit to it. From there it was taken to America, and sank in New York Harbor.
Mr. John McNiel foresaw what would be the ultimate end of the old craft and its historical relics, so he gathered together all the duplicate copies of documents in the collection, and what were not duplicated he had photographed, He left this secondary collection with his nephew, together with a great mass of material relating to those early days which were the first links in our chain of history.
Included in this collection are innumerable instruments of discipline used in the penal establishment at Port Arthur, Tasmania, now a crumbling mass of ruins. These relics weigh almost a ton. Less awful in their construction than those of mediaeval ages and the days of the Inquisition, they are nevertheless evidence of the barbarism which existed a hundred years ago. Not the least interesting items in the collection are a number of absolutely, original parchments, age-stained, convict transportation notes, signed by the officers in charge of the ships. They were originally tied with blue tape-a material which is never used now either on legal or Government documents. It is interesting to read these documents and to note the triviality of the offences for which men and women were transported to penal servitude. There is one which tells of a man who got 14 years for poaching a rabbit! There is another which shows that an unfortunate housemaid was sent out for seven years for picking up a sovereign and claiming that finding was keeping. These documents were supplemented by others on the arrival of the ship at Van Diemen's Land....
 ... Marcus Clarke's book, "The Term of His Natural Life," originally appeared in serial form in the "Australian Journal" in 1870. The complete story in a bound volume is in this collection, and readers will find much to interest themselves in it, for it contains a mass of material which does not appear in the book. Some of the notes and many of the chapters do not attempt to conceal the characters of the story. In this connection it is interesting to point to relices of Martin Cash, who served long periods of time in Port Arthur and at Norfolk Island. The adventures of this man without doubt gave the material to Marcus Clarke for the chief character in his story. Cash died in 1877, a highly respected member of a community among which he lived the last years of his life as an orchardist ...etc etc

Source: CONVICT RELICS. (1915, March 13). Preston Leader (Vic. : 1914 - 1918), p. 5. Retrieved August 5, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article92072991



The prison hulk Success at Hobart 1900
Photo: John Watt Beattie 
NLA Ref: nla.obj-140386032-1 

Heads of the People Exhibition
National Portrait Gallery (Australia) 2000
These three frames of 40 photographs in total were included in the exhibition Heads of the People, held at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, June to October, 2000, with a doubly erroneous attribution. Beattie's name appears as the source, giving the impression that these are indeed his photographs, and that they were re-created by him "after" an earlier source, Adolarious Humphrey Boyd, the accountant and Commandant at the Port Arthur site from 1871-1873.



Although the contributors of these 40 images, Warwick Reeder and Tim Bonyhady, were fully aware that the A. H. Boyd attribution was merely idle speculation on the part of researcher Chris Long, originating as a rumour spread by Boyd's descendants and without substance, and to this day, without proof of any kind, his deference to Chris Long at that time (Reeder, MA thesis ANU 1995; Long, TMAG 1995) ensured that A. H. Boyd joined the revered ranks of 19th century "artist photographers", to be credited as the reputed photographer of convicts, and clearly that is a false premise based in deception.

Neither J. W. Beattie, who was a photographer nor A. H. Boyd who was not, was the original photographer who stood there in front of these men who were all photographed in the 1870s. Their photographs came into existence at the behest of the Attorney-General W.R Giblin, Thomas J. Nevin's family solicitor, as well as the Inspector of Police Richard Propsting at the Hobart Town Hall, and the Superintendents at the Hobart Gaol, John Swan, Thos. Reidy and Ringrose Atkins. Prisoners were photographed not because they had once been "Imperial Convicts" per se back before 1853, but because they became known as "Supreme Court Men" (The Mercury, 8 July 1882), active criminals with convictions in the Supreme Court who re-offended on a regular basis. They were photographed again on discharge with various conditions. They had become the responsibility of the Colonial Government by 1871, not the Imperial Government. Beattie selected their photographs on the basis of their notoriety with an eye to the tourist trade. He used Supreme Court convictions records in the first instance but the person who transcribed the wording "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" onto so many of the extant cartes originally taken by Nevin, merely used a generic date for all the versos, and Port Arthur as the generic prison, neither date or place according with the facts of each prisoner's date of conviction or place of incarceration at the time of the sitting for his photograph.

These photographs, one of which was pasted to the criminal's record (a blue form) were kept in a bound Hobart Gaol Records books, with duplicates circulated to police stations on the prisoner's discharge. More duplicates from Nevin's original negative taken at a a single sitting with the prisoner were kept in the Photo Books as a supplement to the police gazettes, called Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police. It was Beattie who salvaged these records from the Sheriff's Office at the Hobart Gaol in the 1900s, saw their commercial potential and reprised over 300, reprinting an unknown quantity. In doing so, he divorced the original photographs from their contemporaneous references to the prisoner's criminal record sheet and references to other registers used by police, displaying them in his museum with the verso transcription "Taken at Port Arthur" to enhance their historic appeal to tourists visiting his museum and the Port Arthur prison site where the first film of Marcus Clarke's 1874 novel, For The Term of His Natural Life was in production in 1908, and the second full-length feature in 1927.

Some of his acquisitions remained intact as complete records bearing the prisoner's carte, many were loose duplicates of cartes or became loose once he had removed them from the paper criminal sheet, and some were Nevin's glass negatives. A.H. Boyd had nothing to do with these photographs. He was not a photographer, he had no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, nor subsequently, no works by A.H. Boyd are extant today, and no official documents exist which associate him with a personal mandate to photograph prisoners.

HEADS of the PEOPLE Exhibition NPG 2000



Wrong attributions: Heads of the People exhibition, National Portrait Gallery,
Canberra, June-September 2000. Titles and attributions by the NPG curators.

Only these 40 photographs of "Imperial convicts" appear in the 1916 catalogue for Beattie's Port Arthur museum, although more can be seen in the top photograph lining the walls. Those on the walls were still intact, pasted to prisoner record sheets. The collection was acquired by the Launceston Council ca. 1927, donated to the QVMAG and exhibited in 1934 at the Mechanics Institute; this set of 40 resurfaced as a doco-artefact at the NPG in Canberra, 2000. They were re-photographed at the QVMAG in 1985 as uncut black and white prints from Nevin's original sepia negatives. They are now online at the QVMAG (2010).

The phrase "Taken at Port Arthur" is Beattie's wording here in the 1916 catalogue, and it is also the wording of the inscription on the verso of dozens of surviving cartes of Tasmanian prisoners: the date "1874" which appears together with the wording on many of the extant cartes, however, is missing from the catalogue, which is unusual as other items are meticulously dated. This small detail of the missing date may prove to be significant: if not recorded by Beattie here for his display, when was it written on the verso of so many cartes? After 1916, it seems. Several cartes by Nevin in the QVMAG, NLA and Mitchell Library NSW collections lack the reference to Port Arthur on the verso (e.g. Nutt, Smith, Mullins, Ogden etc) probably because these were acquired by private collectors before 1907 (eg. Davis Scott Mitchell, SLNSW Mitchell Collection). After 1916, Beattie and others in the business of tourism such as William Radcliffe at his museum called "The Old Curiosity Shop" at Brown's River in the 1930s ensured these prisoner photographs were hyped as photographs of the original "convicts" transported to Port Arthur in the grim days before transportation ceased in 1853. The ordinary facts of the prisoner's criminal career in the 1870s would not have sparked the same fascination. In other words, the date "1874" is a generalised date written decades later on the verso of the Tasmanian prisoners' photographs known now as "Convict Portraits, Port Arthur, 1874" (the title devised by the NLA cataloguist from inscriptions on the versos of most of their collection of 84 mugshots).



Verso of a cdv by Nevin of prisoner John Fitzpatrick
NLA Collection (carte inserted for display here).

The Port Arthur Label
With the intense promotion of Tasmania's penal heritage in the early 1900s, due largely to the release of the first of two films based on Marcus Clarke's 1874 novel, For The Term of His Natural Life (1908, 22 minutes), many Tasmanian prisoner ID photographs taken by Thomas J. Nevin on government contract to police and prison authorities in the 1870s were salvaged by John Watt Beattie and Edward Searle for display in Beattie's convictaria museum in the 1910s, called The Port Arthur Museum, although it was located in Hobart and not at Port Arthur.

Three prisoner photographs which were removed from the blue record sheets used by the Hobart Gaol were pasted into one of Edward Searle's family albums, devised as a memento of his work with Beattie 1911-1915. Searle captioned the images as "Types of Convicts - Official Prison Photographs from Port Arthur" such as this one of convict William Lee per the Neptune,taken on a prisoner discharge from the Brickfields Depot, Hobart, October 1873. He was regularly discharged thereafter as a pauper in 1874 and 1875.

The album leaf is labelled with the wording - Official Prison photographs from Port Arthur- which both Beattie and Searle used to hype the commercial value they saw in promoting the penal heritage of both their museum objects and the State’s history. Just as they used the name of Port Arthur for the Hobart Museum, they used photographs such as this one of William Lee with the label “Port Arthur”. It had become a brand name, much as it is in today's aggressive promotion of the Port Arthur Historic Site as Tasmania's premier tourist destination. The very ordinary facts of Lee’s life as a prisoner and pauper in a city welfare depot would not have the same appeal without the caption, the brand name. The unspoken appeal to the tourist imagination, through their contemporary fascinations with character typologies, phrenology and eugenics, and the Tasmanian "convict stain", was to suggest that despite such humble beginnings, a transported felon could do well in the colonies, but a pauper's end-of-life story, if revealed, offered nothing.



Three unmounted prisoner mugshots of William Meagher, Charles Rosetta and William Lee,
Tasmanian convicts originally photographed by Thomas J. Nevin in the 1870s for gaol records
From Tasmanian Views, Edward Searle's album ca. 1911-15
Photos taken at the National Library of Australia, 7th Feb 2015
Photos copyright © KLW NFC 2015 ARR Watermarked.

The National Library has photographed and catalogued as single items the three photographs which appear on a single page in Searle's album. The other two photographs pasted with William Lee's are of prisoner William Meagher and Charles Rosetta, The original photographs were taken by Thomas Nevin between 1874-1876. These three photographs, unmounted, were originally pasted to a Hobart Goal Records book of sheets which has been lost, according to the Archives Office of Tasmania. Perhaps Beattie and Searle destroyed the original criminal sheets while trying to save the photographs.



National Library of Australia
Portrait of William Lee [picture].
Date1911-1915.
Extent 1 photograph : b&w, sepia toned ; 9.4 x 6.9 cm.
Context Part of Tasmanian views, Edward Searle's album of photographs of Australia, Antarctica and the Pacific, 1911-1915 [picture].
Photographer is uncertain. Possibly E.W. Searle.
Part of the collection of photographs compiled by Australian photographer E. W. Searle while working for J. W. Beattie in Hobart during 1911-1915.
On the photograph held, the image including the name of the subject appears in reverse.
"Official Prison Photographs from Port Arthur" and "Types of Convicts"--Inscription on page of album, below photograph.

T. J. Nevin's carte-de-visite of William Lees' original 1870s photograph printed in an oval mount is not recorded in the holdings of the QVMAG, the NLA, the TMAG, or the Archives Office of Tasmania, and the reason is this: it may never have been printed by Nevin as a mounted carte-de-visite, because paupers, as William Lee was in the 1870s, were not a police priority. William Lee was a pauper, detained only for a short time in 1872 for being idle and disorderly, and thereafter housed at the Brickfields depot in Hobart where he was discharged every year because he was too old and unfit to work. The police gazette gave his age in 1872 as 78 yrs old.