Above:
Letter to Specialist Collections Geoff Stilwell at the State Library of Tasmania from the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery curator John McPhee, dated 24th February 1977.
TRANSCRIPT
Dear Geoffrey,
Enclosed is a photostat of a convict history sheet, featuring a photograph. I think we have a couple of these.
Should you be interested in including them in your exhibition or any of our T.J. Nevin photographs, do let me know.
Best wishes,
John
[24.ii.1977]
Geoffrey Stilwell in turn forwarded this letter with biographical information about Thomas J. Nevin to John McPhee, dated 4th April 1977:
Letter to John McPhee, curator, QVMAG, dated 4 April, 1977.
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Click on image for large view
TRANSCRIPT
Dear Mr McPhee,
At last I have some biographical details about Thomas Nevin though I am afraid these are somewhat late for your exhibition. These were mainly supplied by his granddaughter Mrs Shelverton.
Thomas Nevin was born on 28 August 1842 near Belfast, Northern Ireland (Mrs S[helverton]). He was the son of Private John Nevin and Mary his wife whom he accompanied on the convict ship Fairlie which arrived at Hobart Town in July 1852. John who was one of the guards of this vessel was also accompanied by his other children Mary A. and Rebecca both under fourteen and Will[iam] J under a year old (MB2/98).
The following marriage notice appeared in the Mercury of 14 July 1871.
NEVIN-DAY - On Wednesday, 12th July, at the Wesleyan Chapel, Kangaroo Valley, by the Rev. J. Hutchison [sic], Thomas, eldest son of Mr. J. Nevin, of Kangaroo Valley, to Elizabeth Rachael, eldest daughter of Captain Day, of Hobart Town.
Kangaroo Valley is now know as Lenah Valley. From about 1876 to 1880 he lived at the Town Hall, Hobart as caretaker. Two of his four sons were born at the Town Hall residence. He had in addition two daughters one of whom was Mrs Shelverton's mother.*
According to Mrs Shelverton he died about 1922, she is not sure of the date, and was buried at Cornelian Bay. The tombstone has now fallen over.
Yours sincerely,
[signed] G.T. STILWELL
Librarian, Special Collections
Both letters are from the files of G. T. Stilwell, courtesy of the State Library of Tasmania.
Surprisingly, this information was not only forwarded to the QVMAG for their files, but addressed directly to John McPhee, yet his latest exhibition catalogue for the QVMAG exhibition, The Painted Portrait Photograph in Tasmania (November 2007-March 2008), which included a coloured carte with the Clifford & Nevin Hobart Town inscription on verso (p. 63), makes the erroneous statement that the arrival date of T.J. Nevin in Tasmania is not known (p.103)!.
Photo © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
Above: John McPhee's brief biography of Nevin, p. 103, QVMAG exhibition catalogue, The Painted Portrait Photograph in Tasmania (November 2007-March 2008) with several incorrect statements which McPhee should have checked before publication.
1. Nevin arrived with his parents in Tasmania on board the Fairlie in July 1852;
2. Nevin leased Bock's studio from fellow Wesleyan Abraham Biggs (Victoria). He sublet the former studio of Bock's in 1876 but maintained another studio in New Town and retained control of the dwelling next door to the "shop";
3. Nevin worked as a commercial and government photographer until the mid 1880s;
4. Three of Nevin's six studio stamps make no mention of A. Bock;
5. Nevin produced an equally large number of stereographs, held at the TMAG, and many more were reprinted by Samuel Clifford from Nevin's negatives from 1876, and thereafter by the Anson Bros and J.W. Beattie;
6. & 7. The convict or prisoner portraits were legal instruments taken for the police to be used daily, they were not produced as ethnographic doco-artefacts of criminality for the middle-class gaze;
8. Nevin's position of keeper at the Town Hall included photographic services rendered to the Police Office on the premises, specifically the production of mugshots;
9. Nevin was not arrested the night he was detained by Detective Connor on suspicion of practicing spirit photography.
10. Nevin was not the person dressed as a ghost in a phosphorescent-coated white sheet. It was someone called "George" who escaped the chase by constables.
Nevin was also a special constable, a commercial designer for press advertisements with H.H. Baily, and a Wesleyan.
The notice (below) appeared in the Tasmanian newspaper The Mercury on March 10th, 1977, announcing the opening at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery of the first major exhibition of the Port Arthur convict cartes, taken by Thomas J. Nevin in 1874.
The Mercury March 10th, 1977
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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 at the Hobart Gaol. Beattie had ready access as official government photographer ca. 1900s to these documents.
Beattie also had access to Nevin's commercial negatives when he joined the Anson brothers studios in 1892. The Ansons had acquired Nevin's negatives from their purchase of Samuel Clifford's photographic stock which was advertised at auction in The Mercury on the 16th March, 1878. Two years before that date, on 17th January, 1876, Samuel Clifford placed a notice in The Mercury, stating that he had acquired the interest in T.J. Nevin's negatives, and would reprint them for Nevin's friends and patrons on request.The collection of convict photographs featured in this exhibition remained intact (witnessed*) until ca. 1984: a large old leather-bound photo album of 70 or so photographs was sent first to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (before 1985 - communication per the curator), and then to the National Library of Australia in Canberra where the album was intact in 1996 (witnessed*, rectos & versos photocopied) and was still intact in 2001 (witnessed*).
The QVMAG prisoner photographs are largely Nevin's originals and duplicates which were circulated to police. But many have been copied and circulated and accessioned in the last thirty years: the Archives Office of Tasmania has both originals and copies (92 online as at April 2009); the National Library of Australia has both originals and copies, including an early donation of twelve (12) or so similar photographs, estrays from an archive and part of the Gunson Collection (80 were listed online in April 2009); the Penitentiary Chapel Historic Site in Hobart next to the old Gaol has a few, including one pasted to a criminal parchment record; and a few are held in private collections. The numbers which appear on the cartes range from 1 to 322, and are clear evidence of extensive copying by archivists from Beattie's time onwards.
The official stamp of T. J. Nevin, Photographic Artist, 140 Elizabeth St. Hobart Town, which was used to register his government commission to provide identification photographs of convicts incarcerated and released from Tasmanian prisons, 1873; the copyright endured 14 years from the second year of registration (1874).
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, acquired over fifty (50) of Nevin's convict photographs (apart from his commercial cartes and stereographs) from several sources. Some were estrays from the Town Hall Police Office (next door), some were lantern slides reproduced from the original glass negatives by Beattie for his lecture tours on Tasmanian history, and some were duplicates donated by Beattie from his convictaria museum ca. 1916 (noted by a South Australian visitor in The Mercury, February 3, 1916). Some were copies by the Ansons Bros dating to ca. 1878. And some were copies acquired and accessioned from the QVMAG collection ca. 1987.
The TMAG erroneously attributed their convict photographs to the Civil Commandant at Port Arthur A.H. Boyd (May 1871-December 1873, ADB). Boyd's function as the former accountant at the prison was to sign for the purchase and delivery of goods into and from government stores. Boyd had no reputation in his life-time as a photographer, and there are no extant photographic works by A.H. Boyd. The "Port Arthur convicts" as the men whose images survive in this collection are called, were not photographed by Boyd, nor were they photographed at Port Arthur. The majority were habitual criminals, repeat offenders and recidivists whose criminal careers at large in the open prison of the island of Tasmania earned then a further sentence and a mugshot, taken by Nevin at the P.O. (Police Office) , the Supreme Court and Hobart Gaol. The Boyd misattribution was reproduced in TMAG publication Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940: A Directory (1995:36) and was thereafter mistakenly assumed to have some credence by later authors on this subject of "Port Arthur".
Photo © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
Click on image for readable version
Above: The QVMAG lists of 72 convict cartes from the 1977 exhibition,worksheets acquired here in 2005, courtesy of the QVMAG. The physical number at the QVMAG now totals 112. The list here might give the impression that there were 199 items, listed by the number written on the carte itself, eg. George Nutt or White, no. 1, but in fact the person at the QVMAG who prepared this list ran a sheet with numbers from 1 to 199, and inserted the prisoner's name by the number on the carte, totalling 72. What is missing therefore, are cartes with numbers on recto or verso that are greater than 199, and there are quite a few; for example, the NLA carte of convict Henry Cavanagh is numbered "306" on verso. he was photographed by Nevin on admission to the Hobart Gaol on 17th September, 1873.
At present (April 2009), the QVMAG states they hold 112 physical copies of the original cartes: 72 were exhibited at the QVMAG exhibition with Nevin's attribution in 1977. Another 40 were included in the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, Heads of The People, Canberra, 2000 with Beattie's attribution, despite the fact that Beattie had arrived in Tasmania in 1878, and did not join the Ansons as a photographer until the early 1890s. Beattie was never involved in the actual photographing of prisoners for the police; he merely copied those mugshots he found in the police and prison registers, divorcing them in the process from their contemporaneous written references, and reprinted them for sale as tourist tokens.
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John McPhee, curator of the QVMAG exhibition of Thomas J. Nevin's Port Arthur convict portraits in 1977, announced in his press release (above) that these photos have "a quality far beyond that of records" - i.e. police records - and that these photographs "are among the most moving and powerful images of the human condition." They also "represent the 19th century's great interest in phrenology and the belief in various other quasi-scientific methods of identifying the criminal 'type'".Old police ID "booking photographs" such as Nevin's, commonly called mugshots now, are enjoying a renaissance of interest in this decade of the 21st century. Even though they were legal instruments taken for the police to be used daily, they became doco-artefacts of criminality for the middle-class gaze in the age of Bertillonage and the portrait parlé in the 1900s. They can be seen on the walls of art galleries, in coffee table glossy volumes such as Pellicer's Mugshots (2009), and merit appraisal in academic histories. But what of the photographer? Anonymity was de rigeur in the job, and Nevin's total involvement in police photographic work in Tasmania from ca. 1865 to the mid 1880s has yet to be fully appreciated.
Photo © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
Click on image for large version
Above: from Mugshots 2009 by Raynal Pellicer: on the left, Bertillon's own front and profile mugshots used to demonstrate the non-commercial photographic pose for criminals he advocated to the Paris police, 1888, and on the right the Commissioner of Police, 1903, trying out the system of bertillonage for himself.
*Witnessed by Nevin family descendants in the course of research 1977-2007
Updated May 2009
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