There are several reprints of a particular photograph of empty streets and the penitentiary at the Port Arthur prison site which was taken in the 19th century by an unknown photographer. It was enlarged as a single frame reprint by the Anson Bros ca. 1888. As a viewer, you can see that there are no people in the photograph.

Anson Bros., Settlement of Port Arthur (Penal Settlement ) Past and Present.
The SLNSW has two copies (PXD512/f4 and PXD513/f6), cross referenced to the image with the Boyd inscription at PXD 511/f10.

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 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” in an email to this weblog, extracts of which are quoted here:

… the attribution of the several hundred portraits known as the convict photographs is unresolved … please see Anson Bros Views in Tasmania Vol II. (PXD511/ f10) The view looking south from the slope opposite the Penitentiary is inscribed on the mount in a contemporary hand “Enlargement from a stereoscopic view by A H Boyd Esq.” This view also appears in Anson Bros., Settlement of Port Arthur (Penal Settlement ) Past and Present. We have two copies (PXD512 and PXD513) and the references to the Boyd image in both are PXD 512/f4 and PXD 513/f6. Comparison of this photograph with the images in the Anson/Beattie collection titled Port Arthur during occupation , leads to the conclusion that they may also be by Boyd. It would seem that like many Tasmanian photographers, Boyd s work was subsumed by the Anson/Beattie archive, leading to later problems of attribution.

FRAUDULENT PRETENSIONS and the SLNSW CLAIM
This 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, 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.

The album itself was bound in red leather by the Royal Museum Scotland, owned by Capt A.W.F. Fuller in 1946, donated by his wife and accessioned by the State Library of NSW in 1964.

Click on images for large view
Vol. 2, Album bound in Scotland, inside cover with dates
Photos copyright KLW NFC 2009 Arr

Below is the image used as the basis of the claim 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 additional inscription, and this single fact raises questions and suspicions as to why it was added. In addition, 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 Nevin or 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 an enlarged 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, and may have been taken by H.H. Baily (see PHILADELPHIA Exhibition notice below):

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 then forwarded to the NLA in 1982 when their prisoner cartes were being accessioned? It would seem that this pencilled note underneath the image at the SLNSW was written sometime after 1992, when Joan Kerr et al publicly refuted Chris Long’s hypothesis about Boyd in their entry on Nevin (page 568, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press). 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) Margaret Glover’s story of a 1930s story from a Boyd memoire, and
(b) glass plates listed as cargo for Port Arthur in July 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.

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).

In 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.

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 government 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 glass negatives from London retrieved by Baily in January 1875 were the same photographic glass plates which were listed as cargo destined for government stores at Port Arthur in July 1873, but they were never shipped because they were not government property. They were seized by Customs until Baily paid the tariff in January 1875. The prisoners at Port Arthur were not photographed by someone using this cargo of plates, and they were never photographed by Boyd for official purposes and for any other purpose because (a) he was not a photographer, and (b) because the plates never arrived at Port Arthur in July 1873.

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.

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).

The true origins of the photographic misattribution to non-photographer and Port Arthur official A.H. Boyd of Thomas J. Nevin’s police mugshots of Tasmanian prisoners 1870s-1880s lies with the art historian Margaret Glover. The origin is hearsay based on a five year old child’s impressions.

Margaret Glover’s interest in these mugshots – usually designated as “convict portraits” in public holdings – was spurred by Jack Cato’s suggestion in The Story of the Camera in Australia,(1955:164) that convict artist and photographer W.P. Dowling (who died in 1877) might have photographed prisoners in Launceston,Tasmania. Nothing came of the suggestion, evidenced by Margaret Glover’s recent publication on W.P. Dowling (2005). In any event, prisoners arrested in Launceston whose sentences were longer than three months were transferred to the Hobart Gaol where they were photographed on being received, and not prior to transfer (Cyclopedia of Tasmania 1898).

Nevin’s attribution as the commercial photographer and civil servant who worked with police in Hobart prisons and produced prisoner identification photographs for the Colonial Government was firmly established for the modern era in 1977, and thereafter in 1982, 1992, 1995, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009. Current estimates of extant examples of his mugshots number over 300 in public and private collections.

In 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 a reminiscence in story script form (dated 1930), written by Edith Mary Hall nee Giblin, a daughter of Attorney-General W.R. Giblin and niece of A.H. Boyd, about Edith Mary’s childhood visits to Port Arthur. Born in 1868, Edith Mary Hall nee Giblin, would have been no more than five years old when her uncle A.H. Boyd vacated the position of Commandant at Port Arthur in December 1873 (Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac 1873).

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. In the light of police history in Tasmania, and the activities of both Thomas Nevin and his brother Jack Nevin at the Hobart Gaol, such childish nonsense has to be put to rest.

The only two extant photographs of Edith Mary Hall nee Giblin’s father W.R. Giblin and her uncle A.H. Boyd dated to 1873-4 were both taken by T.J. Nevin (Archives Office of Tasmania; Harrisson Collection). If indeed this tiny child saw cameras at Port Arthur in 1873, they were Nevin’s, and his purpose in being there was to photograph prisoners who were newly sentenced or who were being released with a ticket-of-leave. Nevin had visited the prison at Port Arthur on several occasions, and in the company of other photographers from the mid-1860s to its closure in 1877.

Margaret Glover began this “industry” of the A.H. Boyd misattribution, despite the fact that Boyd had no reputation as a photographer in his lifetime, no photographic works by him are extant, and no document exists that testifies to his skill in using a camera. If his name exists in handwritten form on the verso of the ONE photograph often cited as the singular evidence of his talents (by whom? it’s a postcard view of Port Arthur, uncatalogued at the SLNSW, and printed or reprinted by the Anson brothers) , it was to signify ownership of his property, just as he scribbled his name on prison reports in his library (there is one document by Rocher, held at the SLNSW). Boyd entered the 20th century as a photographer thanks to (legally inadmissable) hearsay about a child cited by Margaret Glover. She circulated E.M. Hall’s children’s story at the Port Arthur Historic Site in the 1980s, and suggested Boyd had taken “convict portraits” as a plausible event to researchers such as Chris Long ca. 1984 whose knowledge of Nevin as the photographer became subsumed by what he termed his “belief” in Boyd (1984; 1995), under Margaret Glover’s persuasive promotion of Boyd.

The A.H. Boyd misattribution has taken hold in the imagination of art historians who have failed to see that these extant “convict portraits” were not a fanciful one-off ethnographic portfolio (Crombie, 2004) taken by some dabbling Sunday amateur such as Boyd is portrayed (Long, 1995; Reeder 1995; Ennis 2000), but were police mugshots, taken over several years in the usual circumstances and for the same reasons that all mugshots are taken today, and by professional photographers contracted or employed for the purpose, as were the brothers Thomas and Jack Nevin between 1873 and 1884.

Warwick Reeder entered the scene with an MA thesis (ANU) in 1995, the same date which saw the publication of Chris Long’s promotion of Boyd and trivialisation of Nevin (TMAG 1995). Reeder clearly stated that Chris Long was the first to suggest a photographer attribution of convicts to Boyd, based on Margaret Glover’s promotion of Edith Hall’s memories as a five year old at Port Arthur. Reeder’s research on Nevin adopted Chris Long’s tenor and text, and his few details were extremely inaccurate and deliberately misleading. His thesis promulgated the Boyd shibboleth, displaying a breathtaking ignorance of police history in the process. Reeder’s recent outrage at being proven wrong about both Boyd and Nevin has created hysteria among his “friends” who have leapt to his defence (a dreary line-up of lower middle management individuals including totally indifferent cataloguists at the NLA, SLNSW, TMAG and QVMAG); thus the Boyd misattribution persists because a few egos in the late 20th century have been bruised. Litigation might be necessary to set them straight.

Below: page 69 of Warwick Reeder’s MA thesis (The Democratic Image, ANU 1995) which contains just three pages of relevant discussion:

Reeder assumes that (a) Boyd ordered photographic equipment himself, although no government document shows payment of the order; (b) the equipment, specifically glass plates, actually arrived at Port Arthur, when there is evidence they did not leave Customs in Hobart; (c) these specific photographic plates were used to photograph prisoners in situ at Port Arthur, despite the impracticality of setting up a fully-equipped studio for such a large assignment; (d) and that Boyd took the photographs himself, again despite a complete lack of evidence that he ever held a camera, let alone used one for official records.

Reeder’s account of his efforts to fully research the involvement of Boyd contains the often repeated phrase that by 1995, there was just ONE prisoner photograph held at the QVMAG Launceston (among 112) which bears Nevin’s (government) stamp on verso. But previous researchers at the QVMAG maintained there were quite a few, in addition to photographs by Nevin of commercial products, trader’s advertisements, and private clientele (John McPhee, curator of Nevin’s CONVICTS exhibition at the QVMAG 1977; Chris Long, letter to Nevin descendants 1984). Many more convict cartes have surfaced with Nevin’s stamp, and some of these stamped items were “removed” from the public collection between 1977 and 1995 by ….??? One album had found its way to the National Gallery of Victoria (McPhee, verbal communication 1986), and acessioned at the National Library of Australia in Nevin’s name by 1987 (see the NLA’s accession records), and misattributed to Boyd under Long and Reeder’s influence in two instances (In a New Light online exhibition 2003; Clark “essay” 2007).

There is of course the assumption, ingrained in the art historian’s psyche, that a photographer’s stamp proves authorship. Yet the Mitchell Library SLNSW which also holds a collection of Nevin’s prisoner photographs, has been influenced enough by Reeder’s determination not to let it go that they have placed a catalogue note next to the two prisoner photographs which are stamped by Nevin, suggesting Boyd took the originals (SLNSW, PXB 274). Corruption, it seems, is still dogging the hapless Boyd. The majority of Nevin’s prisoner mugshots were not intended for sale, but some were, reprinted in duplicate and even hand-tinted for heightened realism, and for reasons to do with informing the public at large of criminals wanted on warrant. Nevin was the only photographer in Hobart over the decade from 1873 to use a stamp which incorporated the Hobart Supreme Court’s insignia of lion and unicorn rampant, signifying copyright under tender to the government. None of his later prisoner mugshots, which were taken exclusively within and for the prison administration once he became a full-time civil servant, were stamped.

Below: Warwick Reeder’s highly inaccurate information (1995) about Thomas J. Nevin: by 1888 Nevin was the father of seven children (six survived), not two. He did not cease photography in 1876, he ceased commercial photography temporarily to work full time photographing prisoners with the Municipal Police at the Town Hall and the Hobart Gaol with his brother Jack Nevin. At the Town Hall he was also the keeper (a position title denoting manager of an archive still in use at the Archives Office of Victoria). Reeder not once countenanced the existence of a police photographer in Hobart producing these mugshots, nor did he reference the work of earlier prison photographers Frazer Crawford (1867, SA) and Charles Nettleton (1874 onwards in Vic). Reeder fusses about the museological history of the photographs in this short thesis. Sadly, it is this solipsistic and self-referential preoccupation that prevents Reeder (and others in his profession) from adding real value to the history of the national heritage because they have pursued a parasitic attribution which leads to a dead-end. Establishing the plain facts about the jobbing photographer Nevin going about his work and supporting his large family should have been his starting point, joining the photographer on the ground, at ground zero, carrying out the daily routine with the police.

Below: The Young Explorer (1931), by Boyd’s niece Edith Mary Hall, the script for children about her uncle and Port Arthur which gave birth to the A.H. Boyd photographic misattribution.

Below: Edith Mary Hall, born 1868 (Archives Office of Tasmania), daughter of Nevin’s referee, Attorney-General William Robert Giblin:

Below: Margaret Glover (1979), Some Port Arthur Experiments, the publication which created the A.H. Boyd “attribution” as a photographer who took photographs of convicts as an “experiment”.

Margaret Glover would do well to publicly acknowledge her role in this fantasy about Boyd. She could start with letters to the National Library of Australia, the State Library of NSW, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, public institutions where Boyd’s name has infected the convict photographic records like a virus, needlessly confusing the public. She could countenance those who seek personal advantage from it (eg. the University of Tasmania, History Dept), and she could acknowledge how speculative and implausible was her association of Boyd with Nevin’s prisoner photographs. She could request that the public institutions now under sway of the Boyd misattribution (thanks to a few sycophantic “believers”) all retract A.H. Boyd’s name from the public records associated with Thomas J. Nevin’s. Far from damaging her credibility as a writer and art historian, this sort of retraction can only enhance it. Humility, after all, is a term of endearment.

RELATED POSTS at main weblog

• Convict cartes by Thomas Nevin at the new National Portrait Gallery
• “In a New Light”: NLA exhibition with Boyd misattribution
• Professor Joan Kerr (DAA ed. 1992)
• Prison photographers Nevin, Nettleton & Crawford
• ‘Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory’ (TMAG 1995)
• Two histories, two inscriptions (TMAG 1995)
• Anne-Marie Willis & Richard Neville on the A.H. Boyd misattribution
• The QVMAG, Chris Long and the A.H. Boyd misattribution
• Helen Ennis’ NLA publication ‘Intersections’ 2004
• Isobel Crombie and Helen Ennis: how misattribution can persist
• The A.H. Boyd misattribution at DAAO

It is likely that the man photographed here standing on Thomas Nevin’s carpet was William Graves, and that Nevin photographed him in May 1875. This may not be the only photograph of William Graves taken by Nevin. There may have been a standard half-body vignette printed as well to attach to Grave’s crime sheet. But such a standard carte is not extant, and there may be a reason why none ever existed.

ARCHIVES OFFICE of TASMANIA
Reference: PH30/1/221
Title: Brother Payne [sic]
Subject: people, portraits
Locality: not identified
Date: 1880

PAUPERS
Although the AOT calls this man Payne, he is not the same man identified as “Brother Payne” in the images below. He is likely to be a pauper, arrested as William Graves.

Nevin may have photographed this man who was his probable captive William Graves using this full-length shot because Graves was not going to be imprisoned at the Hobart Gaol; he was going to another receiving depot, one for paupers such as the Brickfields Depot in Hobart or even the Lunatic Asylum. And because Graves was “well-known in the Glenorchy district” possibly due to his mental and physical state, and because Nevin took an active role in the detective work, the occasion warranted a studio portrait.Who would have paid for such a studio photo? Not the poor man himself. It is likely to be a Nevin souvenir of the event.

Very few prisoner ID photographs currently in existence by Nevin are of paupers; none exist at all of all those who had been transferred by late1873 from Port Arthur to Hobart, because the police did not think a photograph of a pauper per se was necessary without a further conviction (see William Lee’s record below). Thomas Nevin’s police photographs in standard vignette carte-de-visite format, printed from his glass negative, ALL depict criminals who re-offended, were arrested on warrant, and/or discharged: they were recidivists and habitual offenders, for the most part. Their mugshots were taken because of these reasons, per police regulations of the day, and for the same reasons that mugshots are taken today of those when “booked” and released. William Graves may have been too decrepit, too ill or too non compis mentis to be incarcerated in a gaol.

The police gazette described Graves in these terms:

About 60 years of age, about 5 feet 5 inches high, lame of right leg, walks with a crutch. Well known in Glenorchy district.

POLICE RECORDS for William Graves

Warrant for William Graves’ arrest, published 19th March 1875

William Graves was arrested by the New Town Territorial Police with assistance from Thomas Nevin on 21st May 1875.

Graves was in fact tried and detained at New Norfolk because the Lunatic Asylum was located there.

William Graves, aged 65, tried at New Norfolk, sentenced to one month for being found in a dwelling house, left leg crippled, discharged 23 June, 1875. BDM records show that he was born in 1810 and died in 1893, aged 83, at the New Town Charitable Institution. He was buried at Cornelian Bay cemetery (records courtesy of Graves of Tasmania website).

Another pauper photographed by Nevin was William Lee, transported per Neptune, 78 years old in 1872 when he was convicted for being idle and disorderly in August, then discharged as a prisoner from the Brickfields Depot in Hobart on 1st October, 1873, and therafter discharged as a pauper in 1874 and 1875. The paper reprint here is from a lantern slide reproduction by John Watt Beattie ca 1900 of Nevin’s original glass negative, cunningly labelled with “Port Arthur” to attract the tourist.

National Library of Australia Catalogue
Part of the collection of photographs compiled by Australian photographer E. W. Searle while working for J. W. Beattie in Hobart during 1911-1915.
On the photograph held, the image including the name of the subject appears in reverse.”Official Prison Photographs from Port Arthur” and “Types of Convicts”–Inscription on page of album, below photograph.
Subject Lee, William

POLICE RECORDS for William Lee

William Lee per Neptune, aged 78 years, last tried August 1872 for being idle and disorderly, discharged on 1st October 1873 from the Brickfields Depot, Hobart.

William Lee, pauper, discharged from Brickfields Depot, Hobart 12 September 1874

William Lee, pauper, discharged 29 January 1875

Source: Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1875. James Barnard Government Printer.

With the intense promotion of Tasmania’s penal heritage in the early 1900s, due largely to the release of the film based on Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel, For The Term of His Natural Life (1908, 22 minutes), many Tasmanian prisoner ID photographs taken by Thomas Nevin on government contract to police and prison authorities in the 1870s were removed from the police registers and reprinted by John Watt Beattie and Edward Searle for sale as tourist tokens in Beattie’s convictaria museum in the 1900s which he called The Port Arthur Museum, although it was located in Hobart and not at Port Arthur. Some of Beattie and Searle’s reprints were sold in albums as “Types of Convicts – Official Prison Photographs from Port Arthur“, such as this one of convict William Lee, held at the National Library of Australia. Presumably Searle or Beattie wrrote the caption on the album leaf – ” Official Prison photographs from Port Arthur” – to hype the transportation and penal heritage of both his museum objects, which were for sale, and of the State’s history. Just as he hyped his “Port Arthur” Museum with the “Port Arthur” label, despite its location in Hobart because the label guarranteed sales, he has hyped this photo of William Lee with the label “Port Arthur”. The very ordinary facts of Lee’s life as a prisoner and pauper in a city depot would not have played on the tourist’s simultaneous feelings of fascination and repulsion of the State’s history.

BROTHER PAYNE

ARCHIVES OFFICE of TASMANIA
Reference: PH30/1/221
Title: Brother Payne
Subject: people, portraits
Locality: not identified
Date: 1880

This is not Brother Payne, this man was too old in 1875 ca to be the same man in the photographs below. The Archive Office of Tasmania has catalogued the photograph with the assumption that the man photographed here on Thomas Nevin’s carpet was Brother Payne, a sawyer by trade and character in the Hobart streets who sharpened knives from a trolley cart. The term “Brother” may be a courtesy title of Methodist origin.

Since the man photographed here is standing on the very same carpet that appears in Thomas and Elizabeth Nevin’s wedding photograph, dated to 12th July 1871, he cannot be the same man identified as Brother Payne in other photographs held at AOT which are unattributed and are dated 1880-1900. For example:

Click on images for large view

Reference: NS1013/1/1279
Title: Payne, Knife Grinder
Subject: grinding wheels, men, men’s clothing
Locality: not identified

This same image was catalogued again at the AOT with the date “1900″:

Reference: PH30/1/744
Title: Knife grinder
Subject: people
Locality: Tasmania
Date: 1900

Reference: NS1013/1/1278
Title: Payne, Knife Grinder
Subject: machinery, men, men’s clothing
Locality: not identified

Reference: PH30/1/220
Title: ‘Brother Payne’
Subject: people, portraits
Locality: not identified
Date: 1880

NEVIN’s CARPET
Although Nevin used several types of carpet in different studio locales, the carpet on which the pauper stands appears again in all of these cartes, and the address of the studio stamps on verso is his principal business address, “140 Elizabeth St, Hobart Town“. The pattern on the carpet is lozenge or diamond squares alternating with chain links, the oblong ends providing depth and perspective.

From A selection from the weblogs for Thomas J. Nevin

Thomas and Elizabeth Nevin’s wedding photo, July 1871

From A selection from the weblogs for Thomas J. Nevin

Thomas Nevin’s father, John Nevin, ca. 1874

From A selection from the weblogs for Thomas J. Nevin

Tinted flowers on table, hatless seated woman, ca. 1872 from the Harrisson Collection.

From A selection from the weblogs for Thomas J. Nevin

This carte of a seated woman, unidentified, with handbag, umbrella and hat ca 1871 is from The Marcel Safier Collection.

From A selection from the weblogs for Thomas J. Nevin

The same carpet also appears in the Nevin photograph of a young man standing next to a stereoscope which bears on the verso his “T.J. Nevin” studio stamp with the government insignia, dated ca. 1874, from The McCullagh Collection.

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.

Caption: “Unknown photographer”

nla.pic-an24612762 PIC P1029/36 LOC Album 935 John F. Morris, per P. [i.e. Pestonjee] Bomanjee 2, 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]

This is how the NLA is still cataloguing the cartes: the current catalogue entry at the NLA still wants the public to believe these photographs were taken at Port Arthur in 1874. The police records tell a different story.

POLICE RECORDS

John F. Morris was photographed by Nevin on discharge from the Hobart Gaol, 28th April, 1875.

RELATED POSTS

Well-groomed Prisoners Morris and Evans

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:

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Convict portraits by Thomas J. Nevin at the NLA

Emanuel Blore and Job Smith aka William Campbell

From the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection
Reproduced from page 36 of

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

Job Smith Alias Campbell Alias Boodle

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

Samuel Blore per Ld Petre Taken at Port Arthur 1874

Blore’s carte bears the number “134″ on recto. Job’s carte has no numbering recto or verso. Clearly, these convicts were photographed at a different time and place, and the history of each carte is very different. Their criminal history can give some indication of the likely time, place and circumstance of capture. Both convicts’ transportation details are listed in the Archives Office of Tasmania Convicts Records data base, but the Police Gazettes tell of very different fates.

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

William CAMPBELL alias BOODLE alias Job SMITH

The National Library of Australia holds a copy of the same photograph of Job Smith, catalogued with the alias William Campbell. It is one of two convict cartes by Nevin which had been hand-tinted, probably at the time of the original capture by Nevin (or indeed Nevin’s wife Elizabeth Rachel). The other carte is of Johnstone aka Bramall aka Taylor. The NLA holds two identical cartes of Bramall: the sepia or untinted carte, and the coloured one.

nla.pic-vn4270353

William Campbell, per S. [Sir] R. [Robert] Peel, taken at Port Arthur, 1874 [picture] 1874.

1 photograph on carte-de-visite mount : albumen, hand col. ; 9.4 x 5.6 cm., on mount 10.4 x 6.4 cm.

The NLA catalogue entry would seem to indicate that there is the inscription on verso, “Taken at Port Arthur, 1874” and this is partly correct. But Nevin took this photograph of Job Smith aka Campbell in 1874 before accompanying Job Smith as William Campbell on May 8th 1874 back to Port Arthur. Nevin hand-coloured several convict photographs to aid public recognition of wanted criminals. One copy of the several duplicates he made was pasted to the criminal’s record sheet; another was held at the central registry at the Police Offfice located at the Hobart Town Hall; others were circulated to regional police; and another was displayed in Nevin’s shop window at 140 Elizabeth St Hobart Town. The same image held at the TMAG needs to be examined to ascertain if it is also hand-coloured.

In either event, it is the same single image of this convict with several aliases, taken by Nevin once and once only; one or both items in these collections may be copies, and there were probably many more in existence at the time of Job Smith’s – aka William Campbell’s – hanging, given the notoreity of the case. Nevin’s reputation for hand-tinted photography was reported in The Mercury, December 4th, 1880. See this entry for more information on Nevin’s coloured convict portraits at the NLA.

POLICE RECORDS for Campbell, hanged as Job Smith

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

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

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

William Campbell alias Robert Boodle (or Boodie) alias Job Smith was convicted 19th March 1872 for uttering a forged cheque and sentenced to 8 years, free in servitude. In the weeks or months preceeding May 8th, 1874, Thomas Nevin took a photograph of William Campbell at the Hobart Gaol where Campbell had been relocated from Port Arthur before June 1873, and accompanied him back to Port Arthur on board the government schooner Harriet. One year later William Campbell was executed at the Hobart Gaol.

William Campbell arraigned for rape 11th May 1875, hanged as Job Smith 31st May 1875

Source: Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1875 Gov’t Printer

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

JOB SMITH – 31st May 1875
Job Smith was a prisoner at Port Arthur, who had served most of his sentence by 1875 and had conducted himself well while there.

Margaret Ayres was a housemaid and in the service of Rev. Mr. Hayward the Church of England clergyman there. Shortly before 5 p.m. on 27th February, 1875, she went into the bush to search for Hayward’s cow.

On the way she met Smith and asked him if he had seen the cow and he pointed out the direction in which it had gone. She noticed that Smith was following her so she began to go back telling him she was afraid of snakes. She then claimed Smith made improper advances to her and when she fell trying to get away, he raped her.

Smith was charged with rape in the Supreme Court on 12th May, 1875.

The defence claimed there was no evidence of rape, that any of six prisoners were free to commit the offence and that Ayres had not noticed her assailant had lost the use of one arm as Smith had.

The jury rejected these claims and found Smith guilty and he was sentenced to death.

Smith went to the gallows on 31st May, 1875 declaring his innocence, but this contradicted a written statement he left with Father Beechinor.

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

Job Smith was one of the sixty prisoners relocated to the Hobart Gaol and re-assigned before July 1873 (see W.R. Giblin’s and the Inspector of Police report of convicts tabled in the Parliament on July 17th, 1873). Thomas Nevin may have photographed him in that batch of sixty, and certainly before William Campbell was returned to Port Arthur on May 8th, 1874 to complete his 8 year sentence when he was accompanied by Thomas Nevin in his role as police agent and photographer. Both were listed as passengers on the schooner Harriet’s way bill:

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

Nevin would have carried at least two copies on his person of the prisoner’s photograph, one loose and one pasted to the prisoner’s parchment record, in the event of attempted escape in transit. Other copies would have remained at the Office of Inspector of Police, Town Hall, Hobart. Dr Coverdale, the Surgeon-Commandant at Port Arthur who had replaced A.H. Boyd by January 1874 would have deemed this procedure sufficient for security. Clearly, Boyd had nothing to do with this photograph of Job Smith. And because just one image of Campbell aka Job Smith is extant, it would appear that Nevin photographed him once and once only, although two copies are currently extant in State and National collections.

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

The last hours of Job Smith were reported in The Mercury on June 1st, 1875, and not without a note of pathos (some words from the NLA original on microfilm are illegible):

EXECUTION AT THE HOBART TOWN GAOL

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

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

From the cell to the gallows, Smith betrayed no physical emotion, his step being steady, and his demeanour apparently composed. On arriving at the drop ,the Under-Sheriff asked the unfortunate man if he had anything to say. Smith replied, ” I am not guilty ; I am an innocent man.”The Under-Sheriff then read the following written statement : -” I was born at Bristol on the 23rd of November, 1819, and was a Protestant all my life. Became a Roman Catholic upon receiving sentence of death. I have left with my [spiritual] director a statement, which, in his discretion, I request him to publish wholly or in part.”

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

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

[end of transcipt from The Mercury June 1st, 1875]

Nevin’s original capture would have been reprinted and offered on sale as an image of infamy to remind the population of the swift course of justice. Given that photographs were not printed in newspapers in 1875, the Press in attendance may have used this carte of Job Smith as an adjunct to sales. Nevin also displayed his photographs of wanted criminals in his shop window, hand-coloured in key details of eye and hair colour, to encourage the public in assisting the police.

The handwriting on the verso of Smith’s carte is similar to the handwriting on another of Nevin’s photographs held at the TMAG – the landscape of Melville Street under snow, inscribed “W. Hobart, July 1868” .

EMANUEL BLORE

TMAG Catalogue:
Ref: Q15596
ITEM NAME: Photographic print:
MEDIUM: carte de visite,
MAKER: A H Boyd [Artist];
TITLE: ‘[Convict]: “134″ “119 / Samuel Blore / per Ld Petre / Taken at Port Arthur 1874.’
DATE: 1874

The carte here bears the number “134″ on the mount below the image. Like so many of these cartes which bear numbers from one to more than 300 either on verso or mount, some with the inscription “Taken at Port Arthur 1874” on verso, its provenance is from the QVMAG exhibition held in 1977 of Thomas Nevin’s convict portraits.

Despite the attribution to T. J. Nevin in 1977, by the time it was acquired and catalogued by the TMAG in 1987, it was wrongly attributed to A.H. Boyd. It is one of several cartes of Tasmanian convicts displayed online at the TMAG until November 2006 (now viewable on preserved pages, Museums, at the State Library of Tasmania). The TMAG uniformly applied this Boyd misattribution to all of their holdings of Tasmanian convict cartes which they derived from the writer of their publication, Chris Long, in Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (Gillian Winter, ed: TMAG 1995).

Emanuel (or Samuel) Blore’s police record:

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