How misattribution can persist

TASMANIAN PRISONER PHOTOGRAPHS
MISATTRIBUTION in PRINT
Helen ENNIS (2000) and Isobel CROMBIE (2004).



MISATTRIBUTION
Isobel Crombie's book, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919-1939, published by the National Gallery of Victoria (2004) includes this original photograph of a Tasmanian prisoner taken by government contractor and professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin, dated 1874, with misattribution to the Port Arthur Commandant A. H .Boyd on page 39.

In a discussion which lies outside the dates of the book's title, Isobel Crombie attributes this carte-de-visite of convict Henry Smith per Rodney 2 to A. H. Boyd, an accountant promoted through nepotism to the position of Commandant of the Port Arthur prison site, a position he held until forced to resign in December 1873. A. H. Boyd had no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, and no works in any genre by him are extant.

The caption here gives the photograph's provenance from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's collection called "Portraits of Port Arthur convicts." It bears the number "128" directly below the oval image, a number which is absent on both the Archives Office of Tasmania (AOT) and Crombie's reproductions, which suggests it was copied either by Beattie ca 1916 when he lodged duplicates of Nevin's prisoner photographs with the State Museum (i.e. TMAG), or it was copied from the QVMAG Beattie collection for display at the Port Arthur Heritage Site in 1983-1984.  Together with 50 or more sourced from the QVMAG for that exhibition at Port Arthur, they were not returned to the QVMAG in Launceston; they were deposited instead with the TMAG in Hobart.

Convict Henry Smith with misattribution TMAG

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery catalogue with the Boyd misattribution:
Ref: Q15594
ITEM NAME: Photographic print:
MEDIUM: Albumen silver carte de visite,
MAKER: A H Boyd [Artist];
TITLE: '[Convict]: "128" "Henry Smith per Rodney 2 / 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 last paragraph, "HISTORY" is based solely on hearsay, rumour and speculation. Whoever wrote the caption to this photograph at the TMAG had not sighted the Mitchell Library documents. There is no document held at the State library of NSW which instructs A. H. Boyd to photograph convicts at Port Arthur. There is only a memo from the Colonial Secretary held in the Archives Office of Tasmania requesting photographs of absconders, dated January 1874. It in no way instructs Boyd personally to take photographs of prisoners himself. Those photographs of prisoners already in existence by December 1873 were taken by Thomas J. Nevin at the Port Arthur prison and at the Hobart Gaol, Campbell Street. Nevin was contracted by the Attorney-General R. W. Giblin to commence the provision of prisoner identification photographs from early 1872 on receiving advice of the former Premier of Victoria and the Solicitor-General while on a visit to Tasmania in January 1872. Nevin was contracted on that occasion to photograph the group on trips to Adventure Bay and Port Arthur.

REPEAT OFFENDERS
The photograph of prisoner Henry Smith per Rodney 2 is a copy of an albumen silver carte-de-visite (10.3 x 6.3cm) produced as a mugshot within conventional commercial practice. Another copy is held at the Archives Office of Tasmania (webshot below) with the historically correct attribution to Thomas Nevin, among at least 200 dated verso with the later incorrect transcription, "Taken at Port Arthur 1874".



PH30/1/3260; Title: Henry Smith
Date: 1874; Convict, transported per Rodney.
Photograph taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin

In the accompanying text in her publication, Isobel Crombie states:
The popularity of photography in enabling large-scale physiognomic projects was widespread, with scientists in most western nations embarking on archiving aspects of the human psyche. In Australia, A. H. Boyd used the accurate recording capabilities of photography to document the faces of Port Arthur convicts. As the Commandant at Port Arthur from 1871-74 he used the camera to take an inventory of the men incarcerated in the penal system in Tasmania ... [note54].
Isobel Crombie makes a fundamental error in this statement. She assumes an ethnographic purpose underlined the photographic documentation of Tasmanian prisoners in the 1870s, and completely ignores the most obvious purpose, viz. the pressing need for police to acquire accurate identification methods on a daily basis to keep track of habitual and repeat offenders at large. These photographs by Nevin were mugshots, taken on commission for police and prison authorities, most at the trials in the Supreme Court, and for the same reasons the police use identification photographs - mugshots - today. Thomas Nevin would have displayed these prisoner mugshots for the public to view at the Municipal Police Office, the central registry of criminal records at the Town Hall from the beginning of his commission in early 1872 and where he assumed full-time civil service as Town Hall Keeper from 1876 to 1880. He may have even displayed a few in his studio shop window while still working from his studio in Elizabeth Street, especially in the case of absconders from servitude.

POLICE NOTICES for Henry Smith per Rodney 2
The subject of this mugshot, Henry Smith, repeatedly offended in the 1870s. The weekly police gazettes published these notices:



Notice of arrest of Henry Smith per Rodney 2 was published in the police gazette of 18th August 1871. He was sentenced to 5 yrs for housebreaking at the Supreme Court, Hobart Town on 12 September 1871.



Henry Smith absconded and was arrested, per this notice published on October13, 1871



Source: Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police James Barnard Government Printer.

Henry Smith was arrested on 13th April 1873 at Oatlands, received at the Hobart Gaol and photographed by Thomas J. Nevin on arrival. Henry Smith was discharged on 13th September 1876.

Prisoner Henry Smith, photo by T. J. Nevin

Above: The original photograph of prisoner Henry Smith printed by Thomas J. Nevin from his negative, 1873.
One of forty prints of 1870s Tasmania prisoners in three panels
Original prints of negatives by T. J. Nevin 1870s
Reprised and offered for sale by J. W. Beattie ca. 1915-1916
QVMAG Collection: Ref : 1983_p_0163-0176

THE BACKSTORY
Isobel Crombie's misinformation and misattribution can be traced back to two earlier sources:

1. Helen Ennis' use of the TMAG catalogue entries of their Port Arthur convicts as curator of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, "Mirror with a Memory" in 2000. Note 54 to the Crombie chapter gives the following:
54. Ennis, Mirror with a memory: Photographic Portraiture in Australia , p.16, fn. 45, p.44.
2. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery's error in attributing their holdings of several 1870s photographs of Tasmanian prisoners to A. H. Boyd instead of T. J. Nevin, an error which persisted with confusion in their 1995 publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (ed. G. Winter). In that publication, writer Chris Long cites three way bills - lists of passengers and cargo travelling to and from Port Arthur on the government schooner Harriet as evidence that Boyd was the likely photographer in 1874 (1995:36). A. H. Boyd was a career accountant from 1853. He was sacked from the position of Superintendent at the Orphan School, New Town, for bullying and misogyny, and forced again to resign from the position of Commandant at Port Arthur for corruption in December 1873. As an accountant, Boyd merely signed documents to pay for the site's operation. His signature can also be found on documents pertaining to the exhibition of cabinetry and shoes made by convicts at the Port Arthur prison: does that make him a carpenter and shoemaker too?

A close examination of the original way bills cited by Long and held at the Mitchell Library (SLNSW) gives no indication in any sense that Boyd was the photographer. The photographic equipment on two way bills went into government stores. The third and last way bill cited by Long (dated 2nd April 1874) purportedly shows that a photographer's tent was shipped back to Boyd as personal property in Hobart after his term of service at Port Arthur expired (Long, 1995: 36), which is a curious state of affairs for government stores property. The document actually shows only a few feminine items belonging to a Mrs Boyd that were amongst the cargo that day. The tent was simply listed amongst other cargo. It probably belonged to Samuel Clifford who photographed the site's buildings and landscapes in 1873 or to Thomas Nevin who visited the site regularly with both Alfred Bock and Samuel Clifford. His visit on May 8th, 1874 was significant because he accompanied William Campbell, whose photograph in the NLA Collection is one of the more remarkable for being hand-tinted. Campbell was hanged a year later at the Hobart Gaol under the name "Job Smith".

To enhance the totally improbable story that A. H. Boyd was the photographer of "convict" portraits taken in the 1870s which bear the inscription "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" verso, which was probably written by Beattie who touted them to tourists in the 1900s, Chris Long cites two circumstantial pieces of "evidence":

1. There is ONE photograph supposedly taken by A.H. Boyd held at the Mitchell Library, SLNSW, according to Chris Long. However, in every instance when writers about this so-called "mystery" of authorship engage in the discussion, no one has actually obtained and cited a catologue number for that particular photograph, and no one has given a description of the subject of that one photograph. It is in fact a reprint by the Anson Bros. of a building at Port Arthur, not of a man in prison clothing, and it is dated 1894: someone has pencilled Boyd's name on the mount. It looks most suspiciously like a fake inscription written in a modern hand, to mislead researchers idto believing Boyd actually photographed something or someone when nothing at all exists that can be proven to be his photographic work. The only document listed with A.H. Boyd's name in the SLNSW catalogue of MS and pictures is his pencilled name on his copy of Rocher's rules of convict discipline dated 1839.

Furthermore, the Mitchell Library SLNSW holds a vast collection of original documents from the Tasmanian colonial period - 368 volumes - bequeathed by D. S. Mitchell in 1907, including a later acquisition from photographer John Watt Beattie (1919) from whose bequest in the QVMAG the Nevin portraits of convicts were drawn for exhibition (1977) and distributed piecemeal to other State and National institutions (e.g. AOT, NLA and TMAG 1987).

MITCHELL LIBRARY SLNSW
Title : Tasmanian Papers, 1803-1890, re the administration of the Tasmanian convict system
Creator : Tasmania. Government
Date of Work : 1803-1890
Contents : Official records relating to the government and administration of Tasmania. The records relate to both free citizens and convicts and include material as diverse as jury lists, correspondence, supreme court records, police records, convict indents, convict returns and convict assignment lists, musters, land grants, financial records, Commisariat records, executive council minutes, stock and produce returns, magisterial records, marriage records, plans etc.
Title : Tasmanian Papers, 1821-1877, bequeathed by D.S. Mitchell, 1907 [87 vols. from a series of 368 vols.]
Date of Work : 1821 - 1877
Type of Material: Manuscripts
Bequeathed by D. S. Mitchell, 1907 (Tas. Papers Nos 16, 21-30, 129-141, 161-174, 198, 209-211, 221, 229, 233, 247-251, 294-302, 305-308, 310-314, 316, 318-321, 332, D 2-D 13, D 23).
Other volumes were acquired from Angus & Robertson, 1911,1913, Mr Beattie, 1919, Mr. Eldershaw, 1939, C.R. Fisher, 1946, C.L. Wilkes, 1949 and C.H. Lucas, 1954.



Mitchell Collection State Library of NSW
Photo copyright © KLW NFC 2009 ARR

Any researcher on this question of "authorship" - which is a debate amongst art historians founded on essentialist notions of the "artist" - needs to examine the Mitchell holdings: to imagine that the only extant records relevant to the period are held by Tasmanian institutions and Tasmanian historic sites, is indeed naive. There are eleven photographs of Tasmanian prisoners taken in the 1870s by Thomas J. Nevin held at the Mitchell Library NSW, two of which bear his Royal Arms colonial warrant studio stamp. These Tasmanian prisoners were not photographed because they were transported convicts per se as some sort of ethnographic portfolio, a notion often applied by social anthropologists to photographs of Aborigines of the period. They were photographed because they were repeat offenders, recidivists and habitual criminals who earned a further sentence in the Supreme Court and a mugshot.

2. There is ONE photograph supposedly by A.H. Boyd held at the TMAG. Again, no catalogue number is cited. No subject of the supposed photograph is described when cited by the Boyd apologists. There is one photograph taken by Charles A. Woolley of a man whom Chris Long claims to be A. H. Boyd (published in the TMAG Directory 1995:129). It looks like an early photograph of a young man, too young to be A.H. Boyd in 1874, and as Woolley had wound down his photographic operations by about 1870, the photograph must have been taken elsewhere and in the 1860s. There is another photograph of a man who looks very similar but ten years older which was taken by Thomas J. Nevin ca. 1876, and which bears Nevin's studio stamp with the government Royal Arms insignia on verso (Personal Collection of G. T. Harrisson).

Why foist this nonsense onto Boyd, then, who has no extant work and had no reputation as a photographer in his lifetime, when government contracts issued to professional photographers for prison photography was already common practice in South Australia, NSW, and Victoria?

FICTION CANNOT be USED as PROOF of HISTORICAL FACT
A story circulated at the Port Arthur Historic site in the 1980s that a descendant of A. H. Boyd recalled seeing a camera at the Commandant's House. This is the source of the Boyd misattribution manufactured by Chris Long which referenced statements that historian Margaret Glover did NOT make in her article on Port Arthur experiments (1979). Chris Long's research strategy was to approach descendants for information about the family collections (Nevin family included -1984) regardless of their wishes.

The Boyd descendant was a niece, E.M. Hall, whose so-called "remininences" about her uncle at Port Arthur was in reality a children's fictional tale about a holiday which was submitted in typescript to the State Library in 1942. The story mentions neither Boyd by name nor the photographing of prisoners. The construction of A. H. Boyd as the photographer of prisoners, which was repeated by Warwick Reeder again in 1995 (MA thesis ANU, page 69) was - and still is - founded on hearsay about the presence of a camera on the site - nothing more substantial than that. Hearsay, of course, is a legally discredited term. By the 1880s, when the Commandant's House had become the Carnarvon Hotel, there were several photographers and cameras on site to supply the tourists with a memento of their visit. This is one example by A. Sargeant ca. 1885, also from the TMAG, and it correlates with the imagery in E.M. Hall's story, a place which by 1880 was a deserted ruin:

Port Arthur photographer 1885

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Q1998.25.5
ITEM NAME: Photographic print in album:
MEDIUM: gelatin silver print toned,
MAKER: A Sargeant [Artist];
TITLE: 'Citadel Port Arthur. A Sargeant Photo 89'
DATE: 1885 c

The inscription "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" appears on the verso of several of the convict cdv's held in public collections. The handwriting is consistent and similar across all these prisoner photographs from the 1870s, and is consistent with handwriting styles of the 1920s.

A remarkable oversight by Chris Long - if he saw the original way bills at the Mitchell - is the presence of a Mr Clifford on the passenger list for the government schooner Harriet's way bill dated July 30th 1873. He was indeed the photographer Samuel Clifford on his way to photograph the general degradation of the site, the buildings in disrepair and the underdeveloped surrounding landscape, at the behest of the parliament questioning the outrageous cost of maintaining the site, and the misappropriation of government resources by its Commandant A. H. Boyd in collusion with public works administrator Mr. Cheverton.

On board the schooner Harriet on its way to Port Arthur that day in July 1873 was a listed cargo of 288 photographic glasses, which may have been intended for any or several purposes. Many of Clifford's photographs of Port Arthur taken in 1873 are held at the State Library of Tasmania. The cargo of 288 glass plates supposedly shipped there in July 1873 reflects the photographic difficulties of the era - accidents, mistakes, breakage, clouding and dirt. The number of plates in no way bears any correlation to the number of inmates at Port Arthur in July 1873; by 1871 there were fewer than 109, and by 1873 even fewer. Having started the transfer back to the Hobart Gaol and other municipal asylums in Hobart by 1871, the colonial government was intent on closing Port Arthur because of the corrupt practices of its administrators - A.H. Boyd in particular - who bolstered the numbers of inmates by whatever artificial means to arrest the site's closure and thereby protect his well-heeled existence as the brother-in-law of the Attorney-General W.R. Giblin.

Professional photographers Samuel Clifford and Thomas J. Nevin used a joint signature - "Clifford & Nevin, Hobart Town" - on several photographs they produced while in partnership. They toured the island of Tasmania in 1874, Clifford producing commercial views for sale while Nevin visited regional police offices on government business. Clifford also copied and printed Nevin's stereographs in the late 1870s. Thomas Nevin, with his younger brother Constable John Nevin (1851-1891) who was salaried with H.M. Gaol, worked principally as a team under contract as prison photographers between 1873-1884, and there is also evidence of Thomas Nevin's earlier presence there in the late 1860s, just as there is evidence of his presence at the Port Arthur prison in May 1874 when Dr Coverdale had become Commandant Surgeon of the site, and when the transfer of prisoners to Hobart was almost complete.

Thomas J. Nevin's commercial cohort and close associates were Morton Allport, Alfred Bock, George Cherry, Samuel Clifford, Charles A. Woolley, Alfred Winter, and particularly Henry Hall Baily whose studio was opposite Nevin's in Elizabeth St. and who was out with him that fateful night in December 1880 when Nevin was detained on suspicion of pretending to be a ghost. The ghost was not caught, but propinquity would suggest that it was Mr Edwin Midwood, the Information Officer at the Town Hall Police Office, or his famous cartoonist son Thomas Midwood, who would publish that same year a caricature of Police Superintendent Propsting.



Henry Hall Baily's stamp Elizabeth St. 1860s

Henry Hall Baily did not receive official government endorsement until the 1880s, and no association has been established between Samuel Clifford and the photographing of convicts. Misattributions still persist with these 1870s photographs of Tasmanian prisoners. The National Library of Australia calls them "portraits" as though they were aesthetic objects, and has been misled into adding A.H. Boyd's name to each photographic record under pressure from the commercially driven interests of the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. However, it is not good enough that Ennis and Crombie failed to check the history of the seminal exhibition in 1977 of Port Arthur convict photographs by Thomas J. Nevin at the QVMAG. No acknowledgement was extended to work of the original curator John McPhee, nor to the publications by researchers Geoff Stilwell and Joan Kerr in 1992 when Helen Ennis and Isobel Crombie used these prisoner cdv's to inflect a postmodernist discursive turn of power differentials as their preferred interpretation.



Above: QVMAG press release 9th March 1977. John McPhee curator.

RELATED POSTS main weblog

Convict Carte No. 1: George WHITE aka NUTT

ALIASES, COPIES & MISATTRIBUTION

George White as Nutt, George Nutt alias White ...





Above: The database image with verso at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery: note that the verso is inscribed with the conventional date of Nevin's photographic registration (1874), the alias, and the ship on which Nutt was originally transported before 1853, but the transcription which appears on many other versos of convicts' cartes - "Taken at Port Arthur" - is absent. Nevin may have photographed Nutt at Port Arthur between 23rd February and 8th May 1874; the former date being another sentence for Nutt for breaking the cell while trying to escape, the latter being one of the dates on which Nevin attended Port Arthur on police business. He was absent from Hobart when his father-in-law Captain James Day registered the birth of Thomas James Nevin jnr in May 1874.

The transcriber of the notes on the verso of the carte - probably at Beattie's Museum in Hobart in the early 1910s - has collated the prisoner's record with the photograph, and assumed the date "1874" was the date of Nevin's photographic capture. As prison official A. H. Boyd was gone from Port Arthur by December 1873, his attribution is doubly impossible, being neither there nor being a photographer, amateur, official or otherwise. There was NO photographer in Tasmania by that name, nor are there any extant photographs bearing that name.

Thomas Nevin would have taken another photograph of Nutt in any event as a re-offender in 1875 when Nutt was arrested for absconding, and this is the image.



Webshot AOT of Thomas Nevin's carte of George Nutt alias White 1875

POLICE RECORDS
The carte-de-visite of convict George Nutt alias White, which is also online at the Archives Office of Tasmania (the AOT has reversed the alias per original Separate Model Prison records of 1870-1), was taken by Thomas Nevin soon after Nutt was arrested on September 3rd, 1875. Nutt escaped while under sentence on 24th August, 1875 from the Port Arthur settlement, and was considered desperate enough that a reward was offered which was posted in the weekly police gazettes (Tasmania Reports on Crime for Police Information 1875) during the fortnight of the convict's freedom.



Above: The notice in the gazette on 27th August, 1875.

Some details about his height were amended in the following week's description for police information:



The notice appeared again on the eve of Nutt's capture:



And the notice of his arrest appeared in the same issue, September 3rd, 1875.

Nutt arrested 3 Sept 1875

Sources: Tasmania Reports on Crime for Police Information 1875.
James Barnard, Govt printer.

THE FAIRLIE 1852
Thomas Nevin would have been able to recognize and describe George Nutt from their common experience as passengers travelling to Australia on board the Fairlie, which arrived in Hobart on July 3rd, 1852. Thomas Nevin was still a child in 1852, the ten year old son of a guard, formerly of the Royals Scots, John Nevin, accompanying his mother Mary and three siblings, William John  (Jack) , Rebecca and Mary Ann. George Nutt was a Parkhurst boy, a transported exile from the prison of the Isle of Wight. He would have been about 18 years old in 1852, if he was 42 years old when he fled the Port Arthur prison in 1875.



Above: Nutt's convict record at AOT
Ref: CON33-1-107_00197_L

Unlike many of these transportation records, this one contains some information of Nutt's work record and serial criminal offenses upto his discharge in 1884.

COPIES and DUPLICATES and ALIASES
The Archives Office of Tasmania & the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery copies of this prisoner's vignette both bear the number "1" on the mount, recto. An ink stain of a square stamp partially covering the convict's face is evident on the AOT copy.



AOT: PH30/1/3222
Caption by AOT: Possibly George White alias Nutt convict transported per Fairlie 1852
Photo taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin 1874


Archives Office of Tasmania photographic database:
PH30/1/3222
Title: George White
Subject: convicts, people, portraits
Locality: not identified
Date: 1874

Archives Office of Tasmania Convicts' names database:
Database number:81329 Name: White, George
Arrived: 03 Jul 1852 Fairlie
Departed: 11 Mar 1852 Plymouth
Transported as George Nutt

The AOT has used Nutt's transportation record with details of his incarceration in 1870-71 at the Separate Model Prison Port Arthur where he was documented George White as Nutt -



White as Nutt in Separate Prison July 1870



White as Nutt Separate Prison April 1871

George White as Nutt,
Separate Model Prison 1870-1
Mitchell Library, SLNSW
Photos © KLW NFC 2009 ARR


The police, however,  documented his escape as Nutt alias White. According to information detailing the Parkhurst Boys at Convict Central, a 13 year old boy called George Nutt was convicted of larceny on 15th May 1848, sentenced for 7yrs and transported on the Fairlie departing Plymouth on March 2nd, 1852, arriving in Tasmania on July 3rd, 1852. The transportation record (above) confirms these details, although his age by 1852 was given as 19 yrs. He was listed as a tailor or shoemaker. George Nutt would have been born ca 1834 if aged 13 at the time of conviction in 1848, and would have been around 42 in late 1875. The photograph by Nevin shows a man of that age.

COPYING
Nevin took the one surviving image of Nutt as a police photograph at the Hobart Gaol where Nutt was incarcerated after arrest in 1875. The photograph was printed from the glass negative  as a standard police identification carte-de-visite in an oval mount, typical for police mugshots of the period, and pasted to Nutt's criminal record sheet. The number "1" on the mount may have been written by the same person in the 1980s at the QVMAG when so many of these prisoner cdvs were copied and dispersed to the TMAG and Archives Office in Hobart. It might be Nevin's numbering, on the other hand, or one used by the police, and there would have existed at least five more duplicates circulated to police, but more likely it has been numbered by museum archivists on accession or for copying. Another indication on this carte that it was the first photograph in an album copied as a series at the QVM in 1958 is the impress left by the square QVM stamp across George Nutt's left cheek and collar from the verso of the second carte in the series in 1958 which was placed on top of it, that of convict carte No.2, Nevin's vignette  of Wm Yeomans.

For this reason, the square stamp ink is visible in the AOT image, but not in the QVMAG image, although identical in all other respects, which points to multiple copies made by the QVMAG archivist (in Launceston) for circulation to the AOT office (in Hobart). The original from which 20th century copies were made may be the one held at the QVMAG but not necessarily the only duplicate which was first made by Nevin from his glass negative and used in criminal registers hedl at the Hobart Gaol and Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall.

For example, there are three extant copies of the photograph taken once and once only by Thomas Nevin of prisoner William Yeomans: one at the QVMAG, one at the AOT, both numbered "2" on the front, and a third which is held at the National Library of Australia with no numbering on the front, rather, it is numbered "57" on the verso, testifying to further copying from a single original glass negative either by Nevin for the prison authorities' immediate use, or by later archivists again. The NLA copy of the Yeomans carte is an archival estray donated there by Dr Neil Gunson in 1964 and accessioned in Nevin's name. But under the influence of Elspeth Wishart and her former colleague at the TMAG, Julia Clark, the NLA has recently been co-opted  to apply the misattribution to Boyd of their 84 "convict portraits", further effectively suppressing Nevin's former sole attribution, for no reason other than to attempt to mask their collective foolishness in believing Chris Long's idle speculations (1984,1995). Their doggedness is tantamount to professional fraud.



NLA Catalogue notes:
Part of collection: Convict portraits, Port Arthur, 1874.; Gunson Collection file 203/7/54.; Title from inscription on reverse.; Inscription: "No 57"--On reverse.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: https://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an24612826.



Photograph of convict William Yeomans by Nevin at the QVMAG and AOT.

The recto on Yeomans' carte is numbered "2' and was most likely placed on top of the front of Nutt's carte when the QVMAG archivist was in the process of copying them in 1958. The catalogue number for the job in 1958 was 1958:78:22, accompanied by the QVM stamp with more numbers.

The original transcription of the convict's name and ship and the date 1874 was added much earlier, probably ca. 1900-1927, given the calligraphic style. The most recent inscriptions by archivists date from 1985; e.g. QVM1985:P69, and are in a childish hand. Again, there is NO statement on this verso that the photograph was taken at Port Arthur, the probable explanation being that these first few cartes were transcribed verso and copied by one person, and the remainder at a later date by another.




MISATTRIBUTION: QVMAG, TMAG, DAAO
Cataloguists, librarians, archivists, students, photo historians and others in public service have made a real mess of storing and recording the accession history, numbering, and data collation on these Tasmanian prisoners' identification photos: obliteration, reinvention, fads, guesses, fashions, and personal agendas have managed to obliterate valuable data and thus the traces of facts from their past.

George Nutt's prisoner identification photograph is one example. It was one of more than 70 exhibited at the Queen Victoria and Museum Gallery in 1977, with correct attribution to Thomas Nevin from the Beattie collection. But by 1984 a researcher on a very tiny budget, Chris Long, who had the job of putting together an A-Z directory of Tasmanian photographers (published in 1995) for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, indulged a speculation that photographic supplies supposedly sent to Port Arthur in August 1873 were used personally by the Civil Commandant to photograph the prison's inmates (letter to Nevin descendants 1984, letter to the authors Davies and Stanbury, The Mechanical Eye 1985). The Civil Commandant from 1871 to December 1873 was A.H. Boyd, with no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, no history of training or skills, and no extant works. No police or official documentation associates his name with prisoner photographic records and there has never surfaced any evidence to support this "idea" or "belief", but because of the self-referential world of art history, photo historians such as Ennis, Crombie and Reeder have credited Chris Long and used his "idea" as a possible attribution, extending to the present as a "likely" attribution by the sycophantic Clark. This simple fallacy of judgment by Long and his unquestioning cohort has misled commentators, and more significantly, librarians and museum cataloguists into suppressing Nevin's attribution, foregrounding the name A.H. Boyd, ignoring the circumstances and contexts of police practices, and labelling the ID photos as "portraits" - aesthetic objects, in other words. Chris Long has since regretted the confusion he caused (acknowledged 2005, email to these weblogs), blaming difficulties with his editor Gillian Winter (1995) and unsubstantiated rumours spread by Boyd's descendants, but the misattribution in public institutions is still evident in their catalogues. George White aka Nutt's carte has gone from this record:

Archives Office of Tasmania (and current at June 2010)
Carte no. 1
PH30/1/3222
Title: George White
Subject: convicts, people, portraits Locality: not identified
Date: 1874 Possibly George White (alias Nutt) convict transported per Fairlie.
Photo taken at Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin

and this original record at the QVMAG (prior to 1985)
Nevin, Thomas J. 1874
QVMAG carte no. 1
George White, alias Nutt
Fairlie

to this now at the QVMAG from 1985 (until 2009) when Elspeth Wishart re-catalogued all these convict photographs for an Exhibition purely because of Long's idle speculation:

QVMAG from 1985-2009
Registration Number: QVM: 1985:P :0070
Type: carte de visite
Producer/Photographer: Boyd, Adolarious Humphrey
Content: Portrait of George White alias Nutt at Port Arthur, Tasmania, 1874.

Notice that the data about ship, date of transportation, and former catalogue numbers are all gone, and the aesthetic term "portrait" has subsumed the documentary facts. When asked why the QVMAG had obliterated Nevin's attribution, which was correctly assigned in 1977 by the same institution, the QVMAG, their reply was simply - "because of comments made by Chris Long, " without so much as a backwards glance at their own curatorial history (letter from Community History Technical Officer - see this article: The QVMAG, Chris Long and A. H. Boyd.)

AS AT JUNE 2010
The QVMAG has now brought online most (but not all) of their database holdings of these convict photographs, with a revised catalogue entry for Nutt (below). The first cataloguing of these photographs by the QVM was in 1958, evidenced by the stamp on versos, and the second database dates from 1985. A new database collation needs to be performed, going back to the original cartes and glass negatives to include the criminal records sheets with prisoners' cartes attached, mentioned by Nevin's curator for the 1977 QVMAG exhibition, John McPhee, in correspondence with the Specialist Librarian G.T. Stilwell.

Purely because of one idle comment by Chris Long that forced an association with the Commandant A.H. Boyd as the photographer of these "convict portraits" (i.e. police mugshots), the former employee at the QVMAG and now an historian at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Elspeth Wishart, has pushed onto the public the Boyd misattribution, both at the TMAG and per this entry online at the QVMAG website (webshot below). A.H. Boyd has no entry in the mammoth publication, Dictionary of Australian Artists to 1870 (ed. Joan Kerr 1992), while Nevin does, complete with attribution as the photographer of these convict images (p.568), yet Boyd has an entry as THE photographer of these prisoner cartes in the DAA online version, probably because Wishart and Clark were actively involved as contributors who authored the fatuously illogical comment -"not surprising given his job as penal officer".



The entire misattribution problem has its genesis in a belief that a single sentence in an unpublished children's fictional tale about a holiday at Port Arthur, written in 1930 by a niece of A.H. Boyd, E.M. Hall, called "The Young Explorer" (SLTAS) which does NOT mention Boyd by name NOR does it refer to the photographing of prisoners at the Port Arthur prison, can be taken as FACT. Elspeth Wishart and her former colleague at the TMAG, Julia Clark, are determined to promulgate the A.H. Boyd misattribution with appeals to impressionable staff at the National Library of Australia and other public institutions, not to mention the editors of academic journals (JACHS 2010) purely to mask their own gullibility in placing all their faith in Chris Long's assumption that a paragraph from children's fiction can function as historical fact.

AS AT JUNE 2012
No one knows anything!



For further discussion on this issue see these articles:



Separate Prison records, Mitchell Library, SLNSW
Photos © KLW NFC 2009 ARR

The QVMAG Exhibition 1977 of convict photographs

These are some of the original documents and press release prepared for the 1977 exhibition of commercial and police photographer T. J. Nevin's prisoner mugshots at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, catalogued as "Convict portraits, Port Arthur 1874" in public collections:



Above:Letter to Specialist Collections Geoff Stilwell at the State Library of Tasmania from the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery curator John McPhee, dated 24th February 1977.

TRANSCRIPT
Dear Geoffrey, Enclosed is a photostat of a convict history sheet, featuring a photograph. I think we have a couple of these.
Should you be interested in including them in your exhibition or any of our T.J. Nevin photographs, do let me know.
Best wishes, John
[24.ii.1977]

Geoffrey Stilwell in turn forwarded this letter with biographical information about Thomas J. Nevin to John McPhee, dated 4th April 1977:



Above: Letter from Geoff Stilwell to John McPhee, curator, QVMAG, dated 4 April, 1977.



Above: curator John McPhee
ABC TV snapshot 26 June 2009

TRANSCRIPT
Dear Mr McPhee,
At last I have some biographical details about Thomas Nevin though I am afraid these are somewhat late for your exhibition. These were mainly supplied by his granddaughter Mrs Shelverton.

Thomas Nevin was born on 28 August 1842 near Belfast, Northern Ireland (Mrs S[helverton]). He was the son of Private John Nevin and Mary his wife whom he accompanied on the convict ship Fairlie which arrived at Hobart Town in July 1852. John who was one of the guards of this vessel was also accompanied by his other children Mary A. and Rebecca both under fourteen and Will[iam] J under a year old (MB2/98).

The following marriage notice appeared in the Mercury of 14 July 1871.

NEVIN-DAY - On Wednesday, 12th July, at the Wesleyan Chapel, Kangaroo Valley, by the Rev. J. Hutchison [sic], Thomas, eldest son of Mr. J. Nevin, of Kangaroo Valley, to Elizabeth Rachael, eldest daughter of Captain Day, of Hobart Town.

Kangaroo Valley is now know as Lenah Valley. From about 1876 to 1880 he lived at the Town Hall, Hobart as caretaker. Two of his four sons were born at the Town Hall residence. He had in addition two daughters one of whom was Mrs Shelverton's mother.*

According to Mrs Shelverton he died about 1922, she is not sure of the date, and was buried at Cornelian Bay. The tombstone has now fallen over.

Yours sincerely, [signed] G.T. STILWELL Librarian, Special Collections

Both letters are from the files of G. T. Stilwell, courtesy of the State Library of Tasmania. Surprisingly, this information was not only forwarded to the QVMAG for their files, but addressed directly to John McPhee, yet his latest exhibition catalogue for the QVMAG exhibition, The Painted Portrait Photograph in Tasmania (November 2007-March 2008), which included a coloured carte with the Clifford and Nevin Hobart Town inscription on verso (p. 63), makes the erroneous statement that the arrival date of T. J. Nevin in Tasmania is not known (p.103)!.





Photos © KLW NFC 2009 ARR

Above: John McPhee's brief biography of Nevin, p. 103, published in the QVMAG exhibition catalogue, The Painted Portrait Photograph in Tasmania (November 2007-March 2008) with several incorrect statements which McPhee (and his editor) should have checked before publication. The following are established facts:

1. Nevin arrived with his parents and three siblings in Tasmania free to the colony on board the Fairlie in July 1852;

2. Nevin leased Bock's studio from fellow Wesleyan Abraham Biggs (Victoria). He sublet the former studio of Bock's in 1876 but maintained his studio at New Town, first established in 1864, where he resumed professional photography between 1881-1888.

3. Nevin worked as a commercial and government photographer until the late 1880s;

4. Three of Nevin's seven studio stamps make no mention of A. Bock;

5. Nevin produced an equally large number of stereographs, held at the TMAG. Many more were reprinted by Samuel Clifford from Nevin's commercial negatives from 1876, and thereafter by the Anson Bros and J.W. Beattie;

6. and 7. The photographs of convicts or "prisoner portraits" were legal instruments taken for the police to be used daily; they were not produced as ethnographic doco-artefacts of criminality for the middle-class gaze;

8. Nevin's position of keeper at the Town Hall included photographic services rendered to the Police Office on the premises, specifically the production of mugshots;

9. Nevin was not arrested the night he was detained by Detective Connor on suspicion of practicing spirit photography.

10. Nevin was not the person dressed as a ghost in a phosphorescent-coated white sheet. The name "George" was uttered when constables set off on the chase after the "ghost"; Edwin Midwood, Nevin's colleague at the Town Hall police office was the likely "ghost" though never apprehended or charged.

Thomas J. Nevin was also a special constable, a commercial designer for press advertisements with H.H. Baily, a Wesleyan and a Loyal United Brothers Lodge member.

The notice (below) appeared in the Hobart Mercury on March 10th, 1977, announcing the opening at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery of the first major exhibition of "convict photos" taken by Thomas J. Nevin, with the date "1874" written on the versos in the 1900s.



Convict photos at Launceston
Hobart Mercury March 10th, 1977

Most of these prisoner ID photographs were acquired by the QVMAG in 1927, as part of photographer John Watt Beattie's (1859-1930) collection from his estate and convictaria museum in Hobart. Beattie's sources in turn were the police gazettes, photo books and prisoner registers held at the Town Hall Municipal Police Office, where Nevin worked full-time 1876-1880, and from the Sheriff's Office and Supreme Court at the Hobart Gaol where his brother Constable John Nevin was his assistant. Beattie had ready access as official government photographer ca. 1900s to these documents.

Beattie also had access to Nevin's commercial negatives when he joined the Anson brothers studios in 1892. The Ansons had acquired Nevin's negatives from their purchase of Samuel Clifford's photographic stock which was advertised at auction in the Mercury, 16th March, 1878. Two years before that date, on 17th January, 1876, Samuel Clifford placed a notice in the Mercury, stating that he had acquired the interest in T.J. Nevin's negatives, and would reprint them for Nevin's friends and patrons on request. Nevin's civil service as bailiff, keeper and police photographer at the Hobart Town Hall from that date precluded income derived from active, independent commercial practice.

The collection of convict photographs featured in this exhibition remained intact at the QVMAG (witnessed*) until ca. 1984. A large old leather-bound photo album of 70 or so prisoner photographs was sent first to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (before 1985 - communication per the curator), and then to the National Library of Australia in Canberra where the album was intact in 1996 (witnessed*), rectos and versos photocopied) and was still intact in 2000 (witnessed*).

The QVMAG prisoner photographs are largely Thomas Nevin's originals and duplicates which were taken of men sentenced at the Supreme Court adjoining the Hobart Gaol (Campbell Street Hobart) and then circulated to police and regional prisons including Port Arthur. They were duplicated for the central criminal registry at the Town Hall Municipal Police Office on the prisoner's discharge. But many have been copied and circulated and accessioned in the last thirty years: the Archives Office of Tasmania has both originals and copies (92 online as at April 2009); the National Library of Australia has both originals and copies, including an early donation of twelve (12) or so similar photographs, estrays from a government archive and part of the Gunson Collection (80 were listed online in April 2009); the Mitchell Library NSW holds thirteen, some stamped verso with Nevin's government contract studio stamp (with Royal Arms insiginia); the Penitentiary Chapel Historic Site in Hobart next to the old Gaol has a few, including one pasted to a criminal record written on parchment; and a few are held in private collections. The numbers which appear on the loose mounted cartes-de-visite mugshots range from 1 to 322, and are clear evidence of extensive copying by archivists from Beattie's time onwards. The two major cataloguing events at the QVMAG which affected the versos of their collection were in 1958 and 1985, visible as stamps and inscriptions on the versos, eg:



Prisoner Thomas Fleming
Print from Nevin's negative, taken at the Hobart Gaol on the prisoner's discharge, 7 January 1874.
QVMAG Collection Ref: 1985:P:0169



Source: Police gazette, Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police J. Barnard Govt Printer

Fleming was tried at the Supreme Court Hobart of 9 September 1867, sentenced to 7 years, and photographed by Nevin prior release from the Hobart Goal, in the first week of January 1874. He was NOT photographed at Port Arthur.



Prisoner Thomas Fleming
Mounted carte-de-visite by Thomas Nevin from his negative



Above: recto and verso of T. J. Nevin's mugshot of Thomas Fleming, QVMAG Collection with three archival inscriptions from different periods:

1."Taken at Port Arthur 1874" dates from Beattie's time, ca. 1916. These prisoners were photographed in Hobart and not at Port Arthur. Beattie hyped these cartes as convictaria of notoreity for sale to tourists at his convictaria museum in Murray St. Hobart.
2.The square stamp dates from 1958 catalogued at the QVMAG as 1958:78:22
3. QVM 1985:P:67 is the third catalogue date - 1985 at the QVMAG

This prisoner photograph of William Smith with T. J. Nevin's government contract studio stamp with the Royal Arms insignia is held at the QVMAG.





Above: Another photograph of the same prisoner William Smith, wearing the prison black leathern cap and grey jacket issued at the Hobart Gaol. This photograph with Nevin's Royal Arms stamp is held at the Mitchell Library NSW. The official stamp of T. J. Nevin, Photographic Artist, 140 Elizabeth St. Hobart Town, was used to register his government commission to provide identification photographs of prisoners, most with Supreme Court records who were incarcerated and released from Tasmanian prisons, January 1871-3; the copyright endured 14 years from the second year of registration (1874). Nevin's earliest prisoner identification photographs were taken in 1871, as soon as the prison system was transferred from Imperial to Colonial government control.

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, acquired over fifty (50) of Nevin's convict photographs (apart from his commercial cartes and stereographs) from several sources. Some were estrays from the Town Hall Police Office (next door), some were lantern slides reproduced from the original glass negatives by Beattie for his lecture tours on Tasmanian history, and some were duplicates donated by Beattie from his convictaria museum ca. 1916 (noted by a South Australian visitor in The Mercury February 3rd, 1916). Some were copies by the Ansons Bros dating to ca. 1878. And some were copies acquired and accessioned from the QVMAG collection ca. 1985-87, deposited at the TMAG instead of being returned to the QVMAG.

The TMAG erroneously attributed their convict photographs to the Civil Commandant at Port Arthur A.H. Boyd (May 1871-December 1873, ADB). Boyd's function as the former accountant at the prison was to sign for the purchase and delivery of goods into and from government stores. Boyd had no reputation in his life-time as a photographer, and there are no extant photographic works by A.H. Boyd. The "Port Arthur convicts" as the men whose images survive in this collection are called at the National Library of Australia, were not photographed by Boyd, nor were they photographed at Port Arthur. The majority were habitual criminals, repeat offenders and recidivists whose criminal careers at large in the open prison of the island of Tasmania earned then a further sentence and a mugshot, taken by Thomas Nevin at the Hobart Municipal P.O. (Police Office) and Mayor's Court at the Hobart Town Hall, and at the Supreme Court and adjoining Hobart Gaol. The Boyd misattribution was published in the TMAG publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995:36) and was thereafter mistakenly assumed to have some credence by later authors on this subject of "Port Arthur". The Boyd shibboleth was based on nothing more than a sentence in a short story about a children's holiday at Port Arthur, written by a niece of Boyd, unpublished and submitted by her in typescript to the State Library in 1942: the story mentions neither Boyd by name nor the photographing of prisoners. It is generically FICTION, yet has been used as if it is a document of historical fact. There are no official documents which associate Boyd as a photographer of prisoners.

QVMAG convicts cartes list by Nevin 1977

Photo © KLW NFC 2009 ARR

Above: The QVMAG lists of 72 convict cartes from the 1977 exhibition,worksheets acquired here in 2005, courtesy of the QVMAG. The physical number at the QVMAG now totals 112. The list here might give the impression that there were 199 items, listed by the number written on the carte itself, eg. George Nutt or White, no. 1, but in fact the person at the QVMAG who prepared this list ran a sheet with numbers from 1 to 199, and inserted the prisoner's name by the number on the carte, totalling 72. What is missing therefore, are cartes with numbers on recto or verso which were circulated to the NLA, AOT and TMAG, and those that bear numbers greater than 199, and there are quite a few; for example, the NLA carte of convict Henry Cavanagh is numbered "306" on verso. He was photographed by Nevin on admission to the Hobart Gaol on 17th September, 1873.

At present (April 2009), the QVMAG states they hold 112 physical copies of the original cartes: 72 were exhibited at the QVMAG exhibition with Nevin's attribution in 1977. Another 40 were included in the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, Heads of The People, Canberra, 2000 with Beattie's attribution, despite the fact that Beattie had arrived in Tasmania in 1878, and did not join the Ansons as a photographer until the early 1890s. Beattie was never involved in the actual photographing of prisoners for the police; he merely exhibited or copied those mugshots he found in the police, courts and prison registers, divorcing them in the process from their contemporaneous written references, and reprinted several for sale as tourist tokens.



Above: Press release for the QVMAG Exhibition 1977

John McPhee, curator of the QVMAG exhibition of Thomas J. Nevin's Port Arthur convict portraits in 1977, announced in his press release (above) that these photos have "a quality far beyond that of records" - i.e. police records - and that these photographs -

"... are among the most moving and powerful images of the human condition." They also "represent the 19th century's great interest in phrenology and the belief in various other quasi-scientific methods of identifying the criminal 'type'".

This statement was certainly true by 1882 when a reporter for the HobartMercury (8th July 1882) wrote a lengthy account of his visit to the Hobart Gaol, detailing the layout and the procedures, past and present, fr om the prisoner's reception, bath and issue of clothing, the areas isolated specifically for men awaiting Supreme Court trials, and the general physicality of the prisoners' features:

In their dark-grey uniform and black leathern caps, with their criminal visages, shaven of the covering Nature had given to aid them in the concealment of their vicious propensities and villainous characters, they were, in truth, a forbidding, repulsive lot. Yet very far from unintelligent, at least, in some marked instances. A villainous shrewdness and a perverse cleverness writ in many a cunning, gleamy eye and heavy brow ; and a dogged determination to be read in the set of the jaw, and the style of the gait, were as the translated speech of artfully calculated, daring crime.

The Mercury, 8th July 1882

Old police identification photographs taken on arrest, arraignment and discharge, commonly called mugshots now, are enjoying a renaissance of interest in this decade of the 21st century. Even though they were legal instruments taken for the police to be used daily, they became doco-artefacts of criminality for the middle-class gaze in the age of Bertillonage and the portrait parlé in the 1900s. They can be seen on the walls of art galleries, and in coffee table glossy volumes such as Pellicer's Mugshots (2009). But what of the photographer? Anonymity was de rigeurin the job, although Nevin's work with police was common knowledge in the 19th century. It is only in the late 20th century and continuing today that acknowledgement of his work has been compromised by the error made by Chris Long and those who have "believed" in his belief about Boyd based purely on a piece of fiction. Because of this dead-end misattribution, the Nevin brothers' total involvement in police photographic work in Tasmania from ca. 1865 to the mid 1880s has yet to be fully appreciated.

Bertillon mugshots 1888

Photo © KLW NFC 2009 ARR

Above: from Mugshots 2009 by Raynal Pellicer: on the left, Bertillon's own front and profile mugshots used to demonstrate the non-commercial photographic pose for criminals he advocated to the Paris police, 1888, and on the right the Commissioner of Police, 1903, trying out the system of Bertillonage for himself.

*Witnessed in the course of research 1977-2007
First published 27th April 2007. Updated May 2009. Last update August 2010

Australia's FIRST MUGSHOTS

PLEASE NOTE: Below each image held at the National Library of Australia is their catalogue batch edit which gives the false impression that all these "convict portraits" were taken solely because these men were transported convicts per se (i.e before cessation in 1853), and that they might have been photographed as a one-off amateur portfolio by a prison official at the Port Arthur prison in 1874, which they were not. Any reference to the Port Arthur prison official A. H. Boyd on the NLA catalogue records is an error, a PARASITIC ATTRIBUTION with no basis in fact. The men in these images were photographed in the 1870s-1880s because they were repeatedly sentenced as habitual offenders whose mugshots were taken on arrest, trial, arraignment, incarceration and/or discharge by government contractor, police and prisons photographer T. J. Nevin at the Supreme Court and adjoining Hobart Gaol with his brother Constable John Nevin, and at the Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall when appearing at The Mayor's Court. The Nevin brothers produced over a thousand originals and duplicates of Tasmanian prisoners, the bulk now lost or destroyed. The three hundred extant mugshots were the random estrays salvaged - and reproduced in many instances- for sale at Beattie's local convictaria museum in Hobart and at interstate exhibitions associated with the fake convict ship Success in the early 1900s. The mugshots were selected on the basis of the prisoner's notoriety from the Supreme Court trial registers (Rough Calendar), the Habitual Criminals Registers (Gaol Photo Books), warrant forms, and police gazettes records of the 1870s-1880s. The earliest taken on government contract by T. J. Nevin date from 1872. The police records sourced here are from the weekly police gazettes which were called (until 1884) Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1885. J. Barnard, Gov't Printer.