The Mercury 3rd February 1916, letter to the editor
from Edward Lucas, MLC, Legislative Council, Adelaide.
He wrote:
"There are three rooms literally crammed with exhibits ... The question which pressed itself on my mind time and again was, how comes it that these old-time relics which formerly were Government property, are now in private hands? Did the Government sell them or give them away? The same query applies to the small collection in a curiosity shop at Brown's River. Whatever the answer may be, I hold the opinion that the Government would be amply justified in taking prompt steps to repossess them, even though some duplicates may be in the State Museum. Today the collection is valuable and extremely interesting. A century hence it will be priceless. It would surely be unpardonable to allow it to pass into the hands of some wealthy globe-trotter which is the fate awaiting it, unless action be taken to secure it to the State.
This visitor on government business in Tasmania could hardly have envisioned that the State itself would never be able to do the collection justice, because Beattie had already violated the integrity of the originals, despite making "some duplicates" and lodging them in the "State Museum", by which he must have meant the institution now known as the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. This was one means whereby the TMAG acquired their 50 or so duplicates of Nevin's prisoner photographs. Two other sources are likely: estrays from the central police registry at the Hobart Town Hall (next door to the TMAG) where Nevin worked in the years 1876-1880 and which housed the Municipal Police Office and Office of the Inspector of Police, in addition to the Public Library. The TMAG acquired more than 50 stereographs and cartes by Nevin from this source. The other source is the "borrowing" of items by staff at the TMAG in Hobart from Beattie's donated collection in Launceston.
The rooms in Beattie's museum looked like this:
Room 1: the red arrow points to convict records with photos by Nevin
Two plate photographs of John Watt Beattie's
Port Arthur Museum, Hobart, Tasmania (TMAG Collection)
The 1916 Catalogue looked like this:
The Catalogue for Sale of items from
John Watt Beattie's Museum, ca. 1916
(photographed in-situ from the NLA Microfiche, September 2007)
John Watt Beattie located his museum in Hobart but called it the "Port Arthur Museum" where he sold any fragment of any item as historical artefact of Tasmania's convict and aboriginal past, including reproductions.
From the catalogue below in which this advertisement appeared, the tourist and collector could choose from a range of relics, curios, and photographs salvaged from across the State. The curiosity about Tasmania's convict past in these early years of the 2oth century ensured that Beattie's business flourished. His photographic reproduction of Nevin's prisoner ID photographs taken for the police and prison authorities in the 1870s-1880s was a lucrative niche market. Those extant cartes from his museum which are now in public collections may well be those which he did not manage to sell, or which he donated as duplicates to the TMAG. What needs to be underscored here is that John Watt Beattie was never the original photographer of Tasmanian prisoners at any time from his arrival in Tasmania in the 1880s to his death in 1930.
Port Arthur Museum (Beattie ca 1916) ,
Catalogue, Room 1.
John Watt Beattie's Port Arthur Museum, Hobart.
Catalogue dated ca. 1916
Author: Port Arthur Museum (Tas.)
Title: Catalogue of exhibits [microform]
Edition: [2nd ed.]
Publisher: [Hobart? : The Museum?, 1916?]
Printer: (Hobart : Critic Print)
Description: 15 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: Cover title.
Reproduction: Microfiche. Canberra : National Library of Australia, 2004.
Call Number: mc N 2225 JAFp HIST 3072
TRANSCRIPT: Catalogue of Exhibits
ROOM NO. 1
1. Frame Containing Relics of Rev. R. Knopwood (20 exhibits),
2. Harmonium, bought at Sir Wm. Denison's sale.
3. Oil Painting of Old St. David's Church, Hobart, 1825.
4. Oil Painting of Maquarie Street, Hobart, 1825.
5. Frame of Needlework Figure Picture, from Rev. R. Knopwood.
6. Water Colour Picture, "Hobart from River," 1828.
7. Water Colour Picture, "Sandy Bay, Hobart," 1849.
8. Music Stand made by Convict for Rev. R. Knopwood.
9. The Organ used at the Church, Port Arthur.
10. Chair from Capt. Jas. Kelly's Residence (bought at Governor Arthur's sale, 1836).
11. Coloured Picture, Hobart from Kangaroo Point, 1856.
12. Ship's Figure Head, from a China Trader, broken up at Hobart.
13. Crayon Portrait of J. E. Bicheno, Colonial Secretary, under Governor Franklin.
14. Engraving of Hobart in 1822.
15. Engraving of Road to Richmond, by French artist.
16. The Port Arthur Church from the Avenue.
17. The Ground Plan, Port Arthur Church, 1835.
18. Longitudinal Elevation, Port Arthur Church, 1835.
19. Portrait of Bishop Nixon, First Anglican Bishop of Tasmania
20. Portrait of Bishop Wilson, First R.C. Bishop of Tasmania.
21. Brass Ornament from Port Arthur Church.
22. Picture of The Pulpit, Port Arthur Church.
23. Picture of the Tasmanian Rural Police, 1870.
24. Pottery Made at Port Arthur (40 exhibits).
25. Musical Clock brought to Australia is the very early times.
26. Key Stone Head, carved by a Convict. 1830.
27. Picture Frames, made at Port Arthur (7 exhibits).
28. Wood Moulds for Picture Frames, carved by a Convict (7 exhibits).
29. Bedstead from Doctor's Quarters, Port Arthur
30. Desk Top from Charge Room, Old Gaol, Hobart.
31. Despatch Box from Colonial Office, carved by Convict in Tasmania
32. Box from Port Arthur, the property of Captain Booth, the Commandant.
33. Wooden Bowl from the Hospital, Port Arthur
34. Chair from "Exile Cottage" Port Arthur, used by Mr. Smith O'Brien while confined at Port Arthur (3 exhibits).
35. Carved Ebony Desk, the property of Comptroller-General
36. Writing Desk, made at Port Arthur.
37. Tea Caddy, bought at Sir Eardley Wilmot's Sale
etc etc etc
Port Arthur Museum Catalogue (Beattie, ca 1916)
68. Glass Case containing -
1. Skull of the Macquarie Harbour Cannibal, Alex Pearce (Marcus Clarke's "Gabbet.")
2. Two Sketches made of Pearce after ecexution.
3. The Axe Pearce Carried, and with which the murders were committed.
4. Bolts and Lock Taken from the Cell where Pearce was confined, Old Gaol, Murray street.
5. "Sling Shot" taken from Matthew Brady, the celebrated Tasmanian Bushranger, when captured by John Batman in 1820.
69. Three Frames containing 40 photographs taken at Port Arthur, showing types of Imperial Prisoners there.
etc etc etc
These three frames of 40 photographs in total were included in the exhibition Heads of the People, held at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, June to October, 2000, with a doubly erroneous attribution. Beattie's name appears as the source, giving the impression that these are indeed photographs, and that they were re-created by him "after" an earlier source, Adolarious Humphrey Boyd, the accountant and Commandant at the Port Arthur site from 1857-1873.
Although the contributor of these 40 images, Warwick Reeder, was fully aware that the Boyd attribution was merely idle speculation on the part of researcher Chris Long - without substance, and to this day without proof of any kind - his deference to Chris Long at that time (Reeder, MA thesis ANU 1995; Long, TMAG 1995) ensured that Boyd joined the ranks of photohistory, to be credited as the reputed photographer of convicts, and clearly that is not the case.
Neither Beattie, who was a photographer nor Boyd who was not, was the original photographer who stood there in front of these men who were all photographed in the 1870s. Their photographs came into existence at the behest of the Attorney-General, the Inspector of Police at the Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall, and at the Superintendent at the Hobart Gaol. They were photographed not because they had once been "Imperial Convicts" per se back before 1853, but because they were active criminals who had re-offended and were arrested on warrant and/or discharged. They had become the responsibility of the Colonial Government by 1871, not the Imperial Government.
Their photographs, one of which was pasted to their record, with copies circulated to police stations on their discharge, were kept in a supplement to the police gazettes, called Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police. It was Beattie who salvaged these records from the Sheriff's Office in the 1890s, saw their commercial potential and reprinted them. In doing so, he divorced the photographs from their contemporaneous references to the prisoner's criminal record in the police gazettes, and reprinted them, making sure the words "Taken at Port Arthur" appeared on the mount or verso, to enhance their historic appeal to tourists.
Some of his acquisitions remained intact as complete parchment records bearing the prisoner's carte, many were loose cartes or became loose once he had removed them from the parchment record, and some were Nevin's glass negatives which Beattie also reproduced as lantern slides for use in his lectures on Tasmanian history. A.H. Boyd had nothing to do with these photographs. He was not a photographer, he had no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, nor subsequently, and no works by A.H. Boyd are extant today.
HEADS of the PEOPLE
Heads of the People exhibition, National Portrait Gallery,
Canberra, June-September 2000. Titles and attributions by the NPG curators.
Only these 40 photographs which were listed in Beattie's 1916 catalogue of "Imperial convicts" appear in the catalogue for Beattie's Port Arthur museum for 1916, although many more can be seen in the top photograph lining the walls. Those on the walls are pasted to prisoner record sheets. Beattie deposited his collection at the QVMAG ca. 1927; this set of 40 resurfaced as a doco-artefact at the NPG in Canberra, 2000. They are the uncut copies reproduced by Beattie from the originals, whether from the loose vignetted carte or from the glass negative.
"Taken at Port Arthur" is Beattie's wording here in the 1916 catalogue, and it is also the wording of the inscription on the verso of dozens of surviving cartes of Tasmanian prisoners: the date "1874" which appears together with the wording on many of the extant cartes, is missing from the catalogue, which is unusual as other items are meticulously dated. This small detail of the date may prove to be significant: if not recorded by Beattie here for his display, when was it written on the verso of so many cartes? Possibly even later than 1916, and by other archivists whether at William Radcliffe's museum at Port Arthur which he called "The Old Curiosity Shop" during the 1930s, or at the QVMAG where Beattie's museum holdings were bequested in 1927-1930. In other words, the date "1874" is an opinion or guess made decades later about the actual date and place of capture of the Tasmanian prisoners' photographs known now as "Convict Portraits, Port Arthur, 1874".
Verso of a carte by Nevin at the NLA (carte inserted).
THE PORT ARTHUR LABEL
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 reprinted by John Watt Beattie and Edward Searle for sale as tourist tokens in Beattie's convictaria museum in the 1900s, called The Port Arthur Museum, although it was located in Hobart and not at Port Arthur.
The album leaf is cunningly labelled with “Port Arthur” to attract the tourist. Presumably Searle or Beattie wrote the caption - ” Official Prison photographs from Port Arthur” - to hype the commercial value they saw in promoting the transportation and penal heritage of both their museum objects and the State’s history. Just as they hyped the “Port Arthur” Museum with the “Port Arthur” label, despite its location in Hobart, they hyped this photo of William Lee with the label “Port Arthur”. It had become a brand name, much as it is in today's aggressive promotion of the Port Arthur Historic Site as Tasmania's premier tourist destination. The very ordinary facts of Lee’s life as a prisoner and pauper in a city depot would not have sold his photo without the caption, the brand name. The unspoken appeal to the tourist imagination, through their revulsion and fascination, was to suggest that despite such humble beginnings, a transported felon could do well in the colonies, but a pauper's end-of-life story, if revealed, offered nothing.
William Lee: Beattie Studio reproduction 1911-1915
National Library of Australia
Portrait of William Lee [picture].
Date1911-1915.
Extent 1 photograph : b&w, sepia toned ; 9.4 x 6.9 cm.
Context Part of Tasmanian views, Edward Searle's album of photographs of Australia, Antarctica and the Pacific, 1911-1915 [picture].
Photographer is uncertain. Possibly E.W. Searle.
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.
John Watt Beattie ca. 1920
Archives Office of Tasmania Ref:30-430c
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