Sometime ca. 2000-2003 the National Library of Australia reproduced 22 carte-de-visite vignettes from their holdings of 78 of Thomas Nevin’s Tasmanian prisoner ID photographs, for the purpose of mounting an exhibition called IN A NEW LIGHT: A Love of Order. The exhibition in summary form is still online.
This section online, called A Love of Order, which includes four Tasmanian prisoner images is fronted with the Boyd misattribution in this statement:-
In 1874, A. Boyd, the Superintendent at the Port Arthur penal settlement, embarked on a comprehensive documentary project—for official reasons presumably, he photographed all the inmates living at the settlement. Each man was photographed in exactly the same way, posed in front of a neutral backdrop and depicted from the same vantage point.
Boyd “embarked on a comprehensive documentary project—for official reasons presumably“? Boyd did no such thing. Behind this statement lies the often quoted story about the Governor of Tasmania and the Gregson brothers who were in Hobart, not at Port Arthur when they absconded on January 9th, 1874 and arrested one month later. Their photographs (also in this NLA collection) were taken by the police photographer Thomas Nevin at Hobart on the 27th January 1875, one year later, when the Gregsons were discharged.
The National Library of Australia had acquired 68 of these prisoner vignettes by 1982, some from Dr Neil Gunson as archival estrays deposited in the 1960s, many from the QVMAG with copies as well from the Archives Office of Tasmania, as the letters and other documents held at the NLA in Thomas Nevin’s Australian Photographers Ephemera File clearly indicate, yet the vignettes were not accessioned or catalogued until May 1995, and when they were catalogued, they were attributed correctly to Thomas Nevin as photographer. Boyd’s name was never mentioned in the letters sent to the NLA in 1982, which included a general statement about the prisoner cartes and a brief summary about Nevin’s work by the eventual perpetrator of the Boyd misattribution, Chris Long. See the NLA worksheets from Nevin’s ephemera file at the end of this article, and the weblog for these prisoner cartes at the NLA.
In 1977, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, exhibited a large collection of these prisoners’ ID photographs by Thomas Nevin. The curator’s press release stated that many of the men photographed in the 1870s had been transported as Parkhurst boys to Port Arthur. Few of these men had remained there. All but a few paupers and lunatics were still there in 1874 but because of someone’s transcription on the verso of many cartes, viz. “Taken at Port Arthur 1874“, the idea has become set in concrete. Of the 109 prisoners listed in the Nominal Return of prisoners sent to Port Arthur since the transfer to Colonial Government (i.e. since 1871), tabled in Parliament on June 11th, 1873, sixty(60) had already been received back in Hobart by that date; the remaining 49 were all relocated to Hobart by May 1874. Nowhere is there evidence that these men were photographed at Port Arthur. It is a late 20th century view of the place as an Arcadian boot camp where the good ole’ bad boys tinkered away at their trade, like Santa’s shoe-making elves. The reality is that the men whom Nevin photographed were repeat offenders, habitual criminals, and recidivists whose criminal careers at large earned them a further sentence and a mugshot.
The idea that Nevin (or anyone else) might have photographed more than 200 prisoners solely at Port Arthur is an erroneous one which originated during the QVMAG’s accession of the photographs, whether on acquisition of John Watt Beattie’s collections in 1930, or later, between 1982 and 1984 (Chris Long, Rhonda Hamilton et al) when some originals and copies were distributed to other state and national institutions. Many of the original photographs were salvaged by Beattie from the Sheriff’s Office in the 1890s and reproduced as commercial items. Had they remained intact and in situ, they would have been archived at the Archives Office of Tasmania as the supplement to the Tasmania Police Gazettes (known then as the Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police) which recorded on a weekly basis the subject of every photograph’s offence, sentence, and discharge. Fortunately, the later police gazettes dating from 1890 and their photographic supplement have survived intact at the AOT. But these ones didn’t: once divorced from the police gazettes, these earlier photographs from the 1870s lost their contemporaneous reference, and have been misattributed and misappraised as “portraits”, i.e. art objects by the public institutions which hold them. The terms and execution of Nevin’s prisoner commission were contractually and generically identical to those of other professional photographers working in prisons, Frazer Crawford (1867, South Australia) and Charles Nettleton (1873, Victoria).
The curator of the 1977 exhibition at the QVMAG sent an album of these photographs to the National Gallery of Victoria, which then found its way to the NLA. The record keeping at the NLA is such that no provenance is clearly stated on their accession sheet dated 1995. It would seem that if the event is not a personal memory of staff members, the event is either lost when the staff member leaves, and worse, the event then never occurred, and that sad state of affairs underscores the mess the NLA has made of this collection…
The appearance of A.H. Boyd’s name on NLA documents occurred in 2000, scribbled on the original cataloguist’s worksheet of 1995. It would seem that the staff members responsible (eg Ms Sylvia Carr) had heard about or read (only a part of) Chris Long’s idle hypothesis, published in 1995 (TMAG), that Boyd might have taken official photographs of prisoners at Port Arthur. Even though Nevin is still accredited by Long in that publication, he also seriously put forward the fantasy that Boyd, with no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, and without a single extant work to his name, was the sort of amateur gentleman photographer who would apparently have the skills and equipment to pose his prisoners for a Sunday session of photography. Long offered no evidence to support his idle imagining: he did no research on individual prisoners who were the subjects of the photos; he used nothing more than a second-hand report (ex- SLNSW) that a photographic tent was returned to Boyd personally in April 1874 (the original document does not bear this out); and for no other reason than hearsay of a story that a Boyd descendant had seen cameras at Port Arthur (when? probably the late 1880s), he maintained the fiction until Nevin’s attribution became severely compromised.
Extraordinary as this abrogation of professionalism now seems, the NLA librarians also had to contend with Long’s ‘belief” used by photohistorians who referenced his published statements in their own publications. Helen Ennis, for example, an academic at the ANU, wrote the paragraph cited for this online exhibiition, IN A NEW LIGHT, with the fuzzy nonsense about Boyd.
The questions have to be asked: why are these photohistorians so interdependent, why are they so self-seeking of personal attention and presumptive, and why are they so lazy? Why does such an illogical and groundless fantasy take hold when the attribution to Nevin in the 20th century was validated with authoritative, curatorial and published history?
Had the NLA appraised these Tasmanian prisoner vignettes for what they are – police “mugshots” taken by a police photographer for the same reasons that police photographers take “mugshots” today – they would not have been seduced into treating these photographs as “portraits” or art objects interpreted through the prism of an art historian’s aesthetic gaze. Nevin’s work was accredited and validated with rewards in the 19th century by those who employed him, whereas Boyd, an accountant promoted to Civil Commandant through nepotism, was accused of corruption in the parliament and the press, and disappeared from the police records soon after February 1873, where his name appeared only as a signature undersigning the transfer of paupers (not criminals) to Hobart, none of whom were ever photographed. Boyd was a non-photographer who has entered photohistory through the fictions of art, the subjective tastes of photohistorians, and the personality politics of librarians, but not through the facts of police history.
THE FOUR POLICE PHOTOS
Just to add to the confusion, the four individual images of Tasmanian prisoners placed online for the exhibition, IN A NEW LIGHT, all bear the caption “… photographer unknown.” This is yet another cover-up of incompetence on the part of the NLA, and Ennis et al.
Each photograph has its own page, per this example, with the caption beneath: “Photographer unknown”. So while the writer of the front page online for this section of the exhibition waffles on about A. Boyd as the photographer – “presumably” – the same writer has changed her mind, yet still abjects Nevin despite his established attribution at the NLA from 1995 onwards.
POLICE RECORDS
John F. Morris was photographed by Nevin on discharge from the Hobart Gaol, 28th April, 1875.
RELATED POSTS
nla.pic-an24612806 PIC P1029/10 LOC Album 935 George Fisher, per Streathaden [i.e. Stratheden], taken at Port Arthur, 1874 [picture] 1874. 1 photograph on carte-de-visite mount : albumen ; 9.3 x 5.6 cm. Part of Convict portraits, Port Arthur, 1874 [picture]
POLICE RECORDS
George Fisher was photographed by Nevin on discharge with ticket-of-leave 15th April 1874 at the Municipal Police, Hobart Town Hall, when Fisher was “enlarged” with a ticket-of-leave.
His photograph was used to arrest him a few months later, on 2nd December 1874, when he was arraigned and sentenced to 12 years for forgery and uttering:
George Fisher arraigned at the Supreme Court Hobart on 1st December 1874
These two (below) are the others featured in the online exhibition IN A NEW LIGHT. The quality of reproduction by the NLA for the purposes of the exhibition of these 22 cartes ca. 2000 is far superior to their more recent online digitisation of the remaining 54 in the collection in May 2007. Their reference in these photographs’ full records to an essay supporting the Boyd attribution dating from May 2007 is irrelevant; it is a worthless and intellectually deceitful attempt to promote the commercially driven interests at the Port Arthur Historic Site.
NLA’s WORKSHEETS:
from T.J. Nevin’s ephemera file, Photographers’ Files:
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: Letter from Archives Tasmania to NLA dated 3 December 1982. Nevin was not a convict. Chris Long’s visit to the AOT is dated here as October 1982. Chris Long is the source of the AH Boyd misattribution, but there is no mention of Boyd here.
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: included in letter from AOT to NLA dated 3 December 1982, Chris Long’s vague notes about Nevin despite a firm attribution by McPhee et al in 1977. There is no mention of Boyd here.
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: Included with letter from AOT to NLA dated 3 December 1982
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: included in letter to NLA from AOT dated 3 December 1982
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: NLA Accession sheet dated 10th May 1995 for Nevin’s convict photos
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: original catalogue of Nevin’s convict photos dated 12 May 1995, with note in Sylvia Carr’s handwriting inserting misattribution to A H Boyd dated 15th November 2000.
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| From Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
NLA Nevin ephemera file: catalogue revision of Nevin’s convict photos. Dated 15th November 2000 with misattribution to AH Boyd.
See the whole album at Picasa
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| Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA |
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