GENESIS of the BOYD MISATTRIBUTION
A.H. Boyd (1827-1891) was a Hobart-born accountant appointed to government service in 1848. He served at the Port Arthur prison as Civil Commandant from 1871 until his forced resignation in December 1873 under allegations of corruption and nepotism directed at his brother-in-law Attorney-General W.R. Giblin in Parliament (Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac 1873; Australian Dictionary of Biography online; The Mercury, July 1873 ). He married Giblin’s sister Henrietta in 1871. His subsequent appointments were in the administration of welfare depots. He was acting as coroner at Franklin, 28 miles south of Hobart shortly before his death (Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac 1889, p.319).
A.H. Boyd and Henrietta Giblin marriage, 1871 (AOT)
The Giblin family (AOT)
A.H. Boyd’s brother-in-law, W.R. Giblin had a child called Edith Mary Giblin, born in 1868, who mentioned in a children’s story delivered as a talk in 1930 that she had seen cameras at the Port Arthur prison during her uncle’s service there. She was less than five years old when A.H. Boyd left his position at Port Arthur in December 1873.
n 1979, Margaret Glover produced a report about Port Arthur titled Some Port Arthur Experiments (In: T.H.R.A. Papers and Proceedings, vol. 26 no. 2, Dec. 1979, pp. 132-143). She had read the reminiscence in story script form (dated 1930), written by Edith Mary Hall nee Giblin, daughter of Attorney-General W.R. Giblin and niece of A.H. Boyd, about Edith Mary’s childhood visits to Port Arthur. In her reminiscence of Port Arthur, according to Margaret Glover (recounted by Warwick Reeder 1995), Edith Mary Hall recalls seeing a room fitted out with cameras at the Commandant’s House. This single memory, of a child aged less than five years old, delivered as a talk in 193o, and reprised by Margaret Glover in 1979, is the kernel and genesis of the myth of A.H. Boyd as an amateur photographer of convicts.
For reasons best known to photohistorian Chris Long and his editor Gillian Winter in the publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), their supposed perusal of a document (Tasmanian Papers 320, SLNSW ) – or was it second-hand information from Alan Davies et al? – showing that a cargo of 288 photographic plates was intended for delivery to government stores at Port Arthur in July 1873, suggested to them that this same Commandant at Port Arthur, A. H. Boyd, had personally taken photographs of the prisoners there, the same photographs now extant in public collections at the NLA, the TMAG, and the QVMAG etc, which have a published and curatorial attribution to Thomas J. Nevin (1977, 1978, 1984, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2009). Nevin’s stamp bearing the government insignia on several cartes in public collections was sighted and validated by Long, despite his idle suggestions about Boyd.
Illogical as it now seems, this implausible idea and impossible scenario about Boyd, or” belief” as Long phrases it (p. 36, TMAG 1995), had a certain appeal for photohistorians in the late 20th century who wished to mobilise the Foucauldian tropes of surveillance by the powerful of the powerless within postmodernist discourse (Reeder 1995, Ennis 2000, Crombie 2004).
There was one problem for Chris Long et al, namely the discrepancy between 1873 when the plates supposedly arrived at Port Arthur and the date of “1874″ which appears in the handwritten transcription “Taken at Port Arthur, 1874” across the verso of several of these prisoners’ images. No discussion ensued that countenanced an error concerning the date 1874, made perhaps much later by commercial photographers Beattie or Searle reprinting these mugshots in the 1900s for tourists, or by the archivist Ms Wayn at the AOT in the 1920s, or even later museum and library workers.
Cargo of 288 photographic glasses listed for Port Arthur
Tasmanian Papers Ref: 320, SLNSW
To account for the discrepancy between July 1873, the date of the schooner Harriet’s way bill listing of 288 photographic glasses, and 1874, Chris Long et al decided that the plates were used by Boyd personally, and that they were printed in 1874 by Nevin, at least six months later. An unscientific supposition about wet and dry collodion processes was used as collateral. No cross-referencing was made to the police records of individual convicts, no research was conducted on Nevin’s professional contracts apart from a few details derived from Kerr (ed, 1992), no commercial photographer other than Nevin was considered, and no evidence given that could validate the proposition of Boyd ever having held a camera, let alone the skills and equipment required to use the plates. The insistence that the prisoners were photographed at Port Arthur by Boyd was grounded in a belief that the wet plates needed to be processed in situ; yet Nevin’s partner Samuel Clifford was well-known for his dry-plate expertise and so was Nevin. In any event, any photograph taken at Port Arthur by these two photographers, whether of landscapes, buildings, prisoners and prison officials, was developed and printed within their own Hobart-based commercial studios. The impracticality of lugging cameras and equipment to Port Arthur and setting up a studio would seem obvious to anyone with a knowledge of the requisite technical processes, manpower and skills.
A. H. Boyd had no reputation in his own lifetime as a photographer, none subsequently, and no works by him are extant, yet he suddenly entered photohistory as an “artist” in 1995 due largely to Margaret Glover’s reprisal of a Boyd family memoire, and a cargo list. Thomas Nevin, well-known within his lifetime as a contractual commercial photographer, civil servant, and special constable with the Municipal and Territorial Police, and with a sizeable legacy dating from the 1860s -1870s held in State, National and private collections, was effectively dismissed as a “copyist” by Chris Long. Authoritative commentators who were aware of the problem ensured Chris Long was named as someone in error on this matter when Nevin’s biographical details were published in 1992 ( Willis, Kerr, Stilwell, Neville, etc).
Chris Long’s “belief” in Boyd was a very curious manipulation of facts, a vague and sudden attribution to a person by the name of Boyd, a name belonging to one of Australia’s great “artistic” dynasties. Were Chris Long et al so blind-sided by their art history training that anyone by the name of Boyd just had to be an artist? Even more strange is the fact that the State Library of Tasmania’s considerable holdings of photographs dated between 1871 and 1873 were taken by Samuel Clifford around Port Arthur: the buildings, the visitors, the officials etc etc, yet Clifford’s name never entered the mix. Even these photographs of Port Arthur mounted with Clifford’s stamp cannot be accurately dated, since Clifford advertised in The Mercury, January 17th, 1876, that he had acquired the interest in Nevin’s commercial negatives and would reprint them for Nevin’s patrons on request.
If a cargo of glass plates arrived at Port Arthur in July 1873, they may have been used by Clifford, Nevin’s mentor and senior partner during his stereograph phase from the late 1860s, to mid 1870s, yet this easily accessible information and obvious use was not cited by Chris Long et al. The information made available by Tasmania’s specialist in photohistory at the State Library of Tasmania, G.T. Stilwell, was also ignored. Less than a year after the first exhibition of Nevin’s convicts photos at the QVMAG in 1977, Stilwell had located government tenders for Nevin’s prison commission, among others from the Hobart Municipal Council for Alfred Winter’s commission to photograph the city’s buildings, and Henry Hall’s Baily commission to photograph notable citizens.
THE LONDON INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION
Tasmanian photographers exhibited at the London International Exhibition 1873. The only records pertaining to the Tasmanian government’s expenses of photographic materials in the years 1873-1874 are those which paid the Secretary of State’s custom tariff on behalf of the London Ethnological Society ’s interest in acquiring photographs for the 1873 exhibition:
The Journals of the House of Assembly for June 1873 documented the Colonial Treasury’s expenditure on photographs:
On June 23rd, 1873 the Colonial Treasurer paid 14/8 shillings for “Expenses in London clearing, &c. Case of Photographs for Secretary of State …“. This was the additional expense for sending the “Photographs of Aborigines for Ethnological Society … 5.0.0 ” i.e. five pounds to London.
The photographs of Aborigines were reproductions for the Ethnological Society (Londo) of those taken by (Bishop) Francis Russell Nixon in the 1850s and Charles A. Woolley ca. 1866. Bishop Nixon was a permanent resident in London by 1865, never to return to Tasmania. The case of photographs cleared in London for the British Secretary of State were not photographs of Tasmanian prisoners; in addition to the photographs of Aborigines there were photographs – reprinted – taken at the request of Queen Victoria of Tasmanian children, of local architecture, and of landscapes following the visit of her son the Duke of Edinburgh in 1868. These too were intended for the London International Exhibition, 1873.
If a cargo of 288 photographic glasses actually arrived in government stores at Port Arthur in July 1873 and were used to photograph the prisoners there for official prison records, as Chris Long et al wanted to believe, and had therefore been bought by the government, who supplied and paid for them? Not the Colonial Treasury. The case of photographs (used plates or prints) for the British Secretary of State were cleared in June 1873. They were arriving in London, not departing. The date of 288 plates listed as cargo for Port Arthur was on 30th July 1873, less than a month after the Colonial Treasury’s tabling of the government’s photographic expenses. Those glass plates could not have been the same case of photographs cleared in London for exhibition in London.
If Boyd had requested (from which supplier?) 288 plates destined to government stores at Port Arthur, the Colonial Treasury report (above) would show such detail, but it shows no items of expenditure for photographs sent to Port Arthur 1873, although the general expenditure on Boyd and the Port Arthur site was considerable. By June and July 1873 the Parliament was questioning W. R. Giblin the Attorney-General about the corrupt practices of Boyd, Giblin’s brother-in-law (Mercury, July 1873), and the vast amounts being spent on the penal settlement, including Boyd’s huge salary, all reasons among others raised about inhumane practices by Drs Crowther and Coverdale to close down the prison there as soon as the inmates could be relocated to Hobart (the “Mainland”). On July 19th, 1873, The Mercury reported these men’s concerns:
… one great reason why Port Arthur should be broken up was the cruel wrong done by sending men young in crime to herd with habitual criminals … The point he wished to direct the attention of the House to was … that a great wrong and injustice had been done by the late Government in order to perpetuate an establishment of that kind that short-sentenced men had been sent there … July 19, Mercury 1873
A year and a half later, in 1876, the Colonial Secretary ordered all documents pertaining to the Commissariat’s stores be destroyed (AOT), a measure to cover up corruption which underscored the waste of goverment funds.
SAMUEL CLIFFORD, H.H. BAILY & THOMAS NEVIN
Samuel Clifford’s photographs of the Port Arthur site, its officials and surrounds between 1871 and 1873 were commercially produced cartes and stereographs bearing his impress on the mount (SLTas), including the series depicting Governor Du Cane and his vice-regal guests. However, no association with the extant prisoner ID photographs and Clifford’s name can be made, apart from Clifford’s partnership with Thomas Nevin in the late 1860s to the late 1870s of stereographs and studio portraits of private patrons (The Mercury 1876; QVMAG; TMAG; Private Collections).
Attributed to Samuel Clifford
The Government Cottage, Port Arthur,
Photo dated 1873
State Library of Tasmania
Another close associate of Nevin’s was commercial photographer Henry Hall Baily (their companionship was mentioned in The Mercury, December 4, 1880). In January 1875, Baily retrieved a case of photographic glass sent from London which had been seized at the Customs House in Hobart, on payment of a fine:
Archives Office of Tasmania Treasury papers
Click on for readable version
Why had Customs in Hobart seized this particular cargo of photographic glass from London? The Mercury’s account of the trial and conviction of Baily’s apprentice, Joshua Anson, in June and July 1877 for theft and serious fraud, provides the account. Joshua Anson, still in his teens in 1872-74, ordered expensive cameras, lenses, glass plates, albums, mounts from Melbourne and Paris, and sundries from London through the firms of Websters, Weavers the chemists, and Walch’s Stationers, Hobart on Baily’s account and without Baily’s knowledge. He kept the loot at his mother’s home where it was discovered by Detective Connor. Aged 22 in 1877, Joshua Anson was finally arrested after years of suspicions held by Baily, and imprisoned for two years. Chief Justice Francis Smith stated in his summary that the seriousness and scale of the theft warranted a sentence of 14 years, and leniency was granted only on account of Anson’s youth. Anson’s plea was to be kept apart from the prisoners on incarceration, because he felt he was above them, though the jury did not agree.
The goods stolen were valued at 180 pounds, though their real value was much greater, and included large quantities of glass, negatives, boxes, lenses, mounts, chemicals, and albums by Baily called “Souvenirs of Tasmania.” Samuel Clifford who was called as a witness identified several of his stereographs and albums among those which he said he had sold to Anson, and which Anson had reprinted as his own, an offense which the court noted as fraudulent pretensions.
The Joshua Anson trial, reported in The Mercury, July 11th 1877.
FRAUDULENT PRETENSIONS and the SLNSW CLAIM
There is ONE print, an enlargement of a (supposed) stereograph held at the Mitchell Library, SLNSW, which the curator of photographs maintains is evidence of Boyd’s photographic talent, but which is not even noted as an image by Boyd in the SLNSW’s catalogue entry for the album in which it appears, evidenced by this webshot.
Anson Bros Views in Tasmania Vol II.(PXD511)
The album itself was bound in red leather by the Royal Museum Scotland, donated by Capt W.J.F. Fuller in 1946, and accessioned by the State Library of NSW in 1964.
Vol. 2, Album bound in Scotland, inside cover with dates
Photos copyright KLW NFC 2009 Arr
Below is the famous image claiming to be by A.H. Boyd. It is No. 10 in this album, (PXD511/ f10) and has a pencilled note underneath, ” Enlargement from a stereoscopic view by A H Boyd Esq.“
None of the other prints in this album, Vol. 2, has a similar note or inscription. The note about Boyd is so indistinct, not even a magnifying glass renders it visible, e.g.
According to Alan Davies, curator of photographs at the SLNSW, co-author of the 1985 publication The Mechanical Eye in Australia, and one of several people who received a letter from Chris Long ca 1984 suggesting Boyd was a photographer (despite no evidence), this ONE enlargement from an original stereograph which is likely to be an original by Clifford ca. 1871-3 is THE ONLY image underpinning the vapid claim that Boyd photographed prisoners. The stereograph is not even a photograph of a prisoner. It is a reprint by the Anson Bros of an image of empty streets and the Port Arthur penitentiary which is held at the Archives Office of Tasmania, dated 1880 and unattributed. The same image appears in an Anson album held at the State Library of Tasmania, dated ca. 1875:
URL: http://portal.archives.tas.gov.au/menu.aspx?detail=1&type=i&id=6425
The image was reprinted in another album by the Ansons, held at the State Library of Tasmania, and dated ca. 1875, per this catalogue entry:
The aggressive promotion of this notion – that Civil Commandant A. H. Boyd was not only a photographer, but THE photographer of the extant 300 Tasmanian prisoners’ carte-de-visite photographs – is one of the fictions created for the commercial promotion of the Port Arthur Historic Site as Tasmania’s premier tourist destination. The notion, as demonstrated, has no basis in fact. If the pencilled note under the image attributed to Boyd in the Anson Album at the SLNSW (PXD 511/f10) existed prior to 1982, why had Chris Long NOT known about it when researching the prisoner cartes in Tasmania and duly referenced it in notes left there, and which were forwarded to the NLA? It would seem that this pencilled noted underneath the image at the SLNSW was written sometime after 1992, when Joan Kerr et al publicly refuted Chris Long’s hypothesis about Boyd. Someone then pencilled the note -
” Enlargement from a stereoscopic view by A H Boyd Esq.“
- underneath the reprint to support Chris Long and his “belief” in Boyd based on
(a) Glover’s story of a Boyd memoire, and
(b) glass plates listed as cargo for Port Arthur in 1873.
Fraudulent pretensions beget fraudulent pretensions, it seems. Or the case may be that the Boyd apologists have mistaken his ownership of a print for his authorship. The SLNSW holds another document with Boyd’s name scribbled on the cover, a legal document by Rocher on prison discipline which Boyd kept in his office.
A further shipment in 1873 DID arrive. In August 1873 a small case of photographs arrived at Port Arthur which were duplicates from Nevin’s negatives of prisoners at the Hobart Gaol, together with details of the prisoners’ records held in the central registry of the Police Office at the Hobart Town Hall. The purpose was to check convicts’ shipping records with current records held in Hobart for aliases. Many of the men photographed by Nevin gave him an alias. One notable example of at least 40 aliases among those pictured in extant cartes was William Campbell. Nevin accompanied Campbell back to Port Arthur on 8th May 1874 to correlate the police data with the convict transportation records. Campbell was hanged a year later as Job Smith. His other alias was Brodie (see Way Bill below).
Henry Hall Baily eventually used the plates retrieved from Customs to photograph his series of notable administrators, including Governor Weld, and prominent businessmen in Tasmania. He submitted more than 100 photographs to exhibitions in Melbourne and Philadelphia.
Ref: AUTAS001125883652
This image is unattributed at the State Library of Tasmania. It was the photograph taken by Henry Hall Baily of Governor Weld for exhibition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, according to the report in The Mercury, December 1st, 1875:
PHILADELPHIA EXHIBITION. – There are now ready for shipment some further exhibits of our most valuable wools, which have come in since the 23 boxes and two bales were despatched per last Southern Cross. These consist of six fleeces of pure merino wool, hot water washed, from Mr Page, of Ellenthorpe Hall, and three fleeces of pure stud merino rams from the Hon. Donald Cameron, of Forde, which are valued by the owner at £150,and £80 respectively. These, with eight fleeces from Mr. George Taylor, of Milford, have all been presented by the exhibitors to the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, to which also has been presented, by the Municipal Council of Hobart Town, the large frame of photographs of the public buildings of the city, the large map of Tasmania, and also the bismuth iron and tin ores which received prizes in Melbourne at the recent successful exhibition there. Mr. H. H. Baily’s books of Tasmanian views and portraits which received a prize, have been returned to the secretary in this colony, with a request that some of the plates which have been damaged by the inspection of the 240,000 visitors to the exhibition might he replaced by clean plates–a request which Mr. Baily has at once expressed his plesaure to accede to. The first photographic picture in the book is that of His Excellency Mr. Weld, C.M.G., in his gubernatorial uniform; and amongst the hundred other portraits are those of many of our best respected citizens and their beautiful children ‘of all ages, the last few pages being occupied with portraits of the American officers who were on ’scientific duty in the Swatara, and who had made themselves so very popular in this colony.
Photographs of the Exhibition Halls and exhibits were commissioned.
See this excerpt from the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition homepage for an overview.
Expenses incurred by the case of photographic glass arriving from London under false orders by Anson which Baily retrieved from Customs in January 1875 were eventually underwritten by both the Municipal Council of Hobart and the Colonial Secretary, but the case sent to Port Arthur does not appear to be associated with any official document apart from a simple ship’s cargo list.
Just as Baily’s public work received official support and funding, Nevin’s early police photography from his first contract in 1873 was funded on commission to the Municipal Police. His appointment in 1876 as Keeper at the Hobart Town Hall, which housed the Police Office, consolidated the confidence of Attorney-General Giblin and Inspector of Police John Swan. In almost every instance, the prisoners whose photographs survive today were photographed at the Hobart Gaol and at the Police Office on their discharge, whether as “FS” – free on servitude or “Free” – between 1874-1884. A few were photographed at Port Arthur ca. 1870. Nevin’s visits to the site on police business became more frequent from May 1874 when Dr Coverdale accelerated the transfer of the criminal class of inmate to Hobart prisons and for reassignment. Many of these transferees, 109 in all, re-offended on a regular basis, and were photographed again by Nevin on arrest (the booking photograph), arraignment (the classic mug shot) and release (those men who smiled for the shot!) A few of his cartes survive of men who were hanged: Job Smith, James Sutherland and Henry Stock (NLA, TMAG; SLNSW C203, Death Warrants VDL).
Mr Nevin arrives at Port Arthur aboard the Harriet, May 8th, 1874
accompanying the prisoner whom he had photographed as William Campbell
but who was hanged as Job Smith at the Hobart Gaol, May 1875.
Source: Mitchell Library SLNSW, Tasmanian Papers Ref: 320.
Thomas Nevin’s busiest years working with the Municipal and Territorial Police in Hobart prisons and at the Town Hall Police Office were 1873-1884. A.H. Boyd’s name, by contrast, disappears abruptly from the police gazettes after February 1873, and up to that date only in relation to his signature undersigning the transfer of paupers from the Port Arthur site to invalids depots and asylums in Hobart (Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1875. J. Barnard Gov’t Printer).
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