Habitual offender Edward Wallace at Hobart Gaol

This gallery contains 10 photos.

Edward Wallace aka Timothy Donovan was a transported felon, arriving in Hobart from Dublin on board the Blenheim (2), on February 2nd, 1849. He became an habitual offender. His photograph is held at the Mitchell Library Sydney, SLNSW, in a box of nine cartes-de-visite of prisoners taken by Thomas J. Nevin at the Hobart Gaol. The collection was bequeathed by David Scott Mitchell to the State Library of NSW ca 1907 (PXB 274). The Mitchell Library has catalogued all these nine photographs with the date “1878″; however, two of the photographs were taken by Nevin in 1875 (those of Mullins and Smith), and this one, of Edward Wallace was more likely to have been taken by Nevin in 1872 or early 1873, when Wallace was re-arrested for absconding from the Hobart Gaol. Continue reading →

From Thomas Bock to Thomas Nevin: Supreme Court prisoner portraits

This gallery contains 5 photos.

“… portraits of prisoners taken in the dock …” THOMAS BOCK Police artists worked in the Supreme Court of Tasmania from as early as 1824. An album of portraits of “prisoners taken in the dock” (Dunbar, QVMAG catalogue 1991:25) by … Continue reading →

Aliases, Copies, and Misattribution

This gallery contains 14 photos.

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. Continue reading →

A first-class faithful Likeness February 1873

This gallery contains 7 photos.

Personal friendships, mutual business support and Lodge affiliations ensured priority and preference, and in Nevin’s case, his family solicitor, Attorney-General W.R. Giblin, and his Loyal United Brothers membership played a key role in the offer to provide the Municipal and Territorial Police, and the Prisons Department with identification photographs of convicted criminals. “A first-class faithful likeness” is exactly what the police wanted of the prisoner and ex-convict population. Continue reading →

Improprieties: A. H. Boyd and the Parasitic Attribution

This gallery contains 14 photos.

The root of the notion that A.H. Boyd had any relationship with photography arose from this children’s story forwarded to the Crowther Collection at the State Library of Tasmania in 1942 by its author, Edith Hall. It was NEVER published, and exists only as a typed story, called “The Young Explorer.” Edith Hall claimed in an accompanying letter, dated 1942 and addressed to Dr Crowther that a man she calls the “Chief” in the story was her uncle A.H. Boyd, and that he was “always on the lookout for sitters”. Hopeful Chief! The imaginative Edith and her description of a room where the child protagonist was photographed (and rewarded for it) hardly accords with a set-up for police photography. The photographing of prisoners IS NOT mentioned in either the story or the letter by Edith Hall. In the context of the whole story, only three pages in length, the reference to photography is just another in a long list of imaginative fictions (many about clothes and servants) intended to give the child reader a “taste” of old Port Arthur, when both the author and her readers by 1942 were at a considerable remove in time. Boyd is not mentioned by name in the story, yet Reeder 1995 (after Long, 1995) and Clark (2010) actually cite this piece of fiction as if it contains statements of factual information. A.H. Boyd has never been documented in newspapers or validated in any government record of the day as either an amateur or official photographer. Continue reading →

Poster boys 1870s

This gallery contains 25 photos.

Who were they? They were T.J. Nevin’s sitters for police records, mostly “Supreme Court men” photographed on committal for trial at the Supreme Court adjoining the Hobart Gaol when they were isolated in silence for a month after sentencing. If sentenced for a long term at the Supreme Court Launceston, they were photographed, bathed, shaved and dressed on being received in Hobart. These procedures, past and present, were reported at length by a visitor to the Hobart Gaol and Supreme Court in The Mercury, 8th July 1882: Continue reading →

Fraudulent pretensions

This gallery contains 29 photos.

This image of a building is not a vignetted carte-de-visite photograph of a man in prison clothing, yet the curator of photographs at the State Library of NSW, Alan Davies, is proposing it is sufficient evidence to warrant a claim that A.H. Boyd was a photographer, and to extend that claim to a proposition that Boyd was also the photographer of the “bulk” of the 300 extant prisoner cartes, despite all the available evidence of attribution to Thomas J. Nevin. As recently as August 2009, Alan Davies maintained that proposition, which is founded in the cliched equation “Tasmania + convicts=Port Arthur” … Continue reading →

T.J. Nevin’s prisoner mugshots, Mitchell Library NSW

This gallery contains 17 photos.

THOMAS NEVIN’S ELEVEN The Mitchell Library at the State Library of NSW has catalogued eleven prisoner photographs so far which were taken by Thomas Nevin and his younger brother Jack Nevin at the Hobart Gaol between 1875 and 1884. All … Continue reading →

Nevin’s mugshots: the transitional pose and frame

This gallery contains 16 photos.

Between 1876 and 1884, transitional years in the history of 19th century prison photography, changes took place in the way Jack and Thomas Nevin posed the prisoner and and printed the final carte-de-visite. The technology changed too. Lenses after 1875 enabled a closer or larger image of the face. The prisoner was also posed closer to the camera in a full frontal position facing the photographer, and although the oval vignette was still the preferred format for printing, square frames were also used. The formalised front and profile pair of portraits using the methods of Bertillonage did not appear in Tasmanian prison photography until the late 1890s, by which time both Nevin brothers had ceased professional photography. Continue reading →

Nevin’s photos of prisoners Sutherland and Stock with death warrant

This gallery contains 9 photos.

From the David Scott Mitchell Collection, 1907 … Photography © KLW NFC 2009 ARR. Above: Detail of Nevin’s carte of condemned prisoner James Sutherland with the blue hand-tinted scarf intended to reflect reality, one of several extant hand-tinted prisoner mugshots … Continue reading →

The QVMAG convict photos exhibition 1977

This gallery contains 7 photos.

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 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. Continue reading →

Three significant prisoner cartes by T.J. Nevin

This gallery contains 14 photos.

More than 3000 Tasmanian prisoner identification photographs (mugshots) were taken by the brothers Thomas and (Constable) John (Jack) Nevin between 1872 and 1884. T. J. Nevin, 9 convicts photographs Mitchell Library NSW (PXB 274) Photo KLW NFC 2009 Arr Most … Continue reading →

About those photographic glasses 1873 …

This gallery contains 76 photos.

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 May1871 until his forced resignation in December 1873 under allegations of … Continue reading →

Trademarks copyrighted for 14 years

This gallery contains 5 photos.

Prisons photographer T.J. Nevin’s official government stamp and trademark … Above: The Hobart Supreme Court seal (stamped here on a death warrant 1883), with lion and unicorn rampant, the same insignia used by Thomas Nevin on the versos of prisoner … Continue reading →

Poster of Thomas Nevin’s convict portraits 1870s

This gallery contains 17 photos.

Who were they? They were T.J. Nevin’s sitters for police records, mostly “Supreme Court men” photographed on committal for trial at the Supreme Court adjoining the Hobart Gaol when they were isolated in silence for a month after sentencing. If sentenced for a long term at the Supreme Court Launceston, they were photographed, bathed, shaved and dressed on being received in Hobart. These procedures, past and present, were reported at length by a visitor to the Hobart Gaol and Supreme Court in The Mercury, 8th July 1882: Continue reading →