FAKE HISTORY, ACADEMIC FRAUD
PERSONAL ABUSE in a PhD THESIS
Julia Clark posing at the school for Riding for the Disabled Association of Tasmania, 500 Kalang Ave, Glenorchy, with her stalking horse which she used to ingratiate herself into the confidence of the unsuspecting young Nevin family member who was a volunteer at the RDA Kalang. Source of image; RDA Kalang.
In 2015 this individual Julia Clark (b. 1949) submitted a thesis to the University of Tasmania in the hope of being awarded a PhD degree. The award, in our opinion, should be revoked. The many instances prior to this thesis where she has claimed - by means fraudulent, predatory, deceitful and abusive - that A. H. Boyd photographed prisoners in Tasmania in 1874 when no evidence has ever existed, nor ever will - is examined in great deal across these weblogs about the life and work of professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin. Without these Nevin weblogs, Julia Clark would have no thesis.
The first third of Clark's thesis was copied from the hundreds of books and articles on the subject of 19th century photography of prisoners; the middle third was an excuse to plagiarise the original research on these weblogs about Thomas J. Nevin's photographs of Tasmanian prisoners taken in the 1870s while abusing his descendants by name; and the last third of the thesis was copied from publications by Susan Hood at the Port Arthur Historic Site and her collaborator Hamish Maxwell Stewart at the University of Tasmania, the latter most obligingly supervising Clark's "thesis" with all its fantasies, sledging and fabrications. Her other supervisor, Stefan Petrow, whom she so warmly acknowledges as co-editor, was born in Hobart, according to the Tasmanian Historical Research Association's website, viz.
Stefan Petrow was born in Hobart. Stefan is an Associate Professor in the School of History and Classics at the University of Tasmania and has been a member of THRA since 1990. He has served two three-year terms as President.Why the THRA should see the need to announce Petrow's birthplace when those of other committee members are not announced is a sign among so many of casual racism/xenophobia in Tasmanian culture, but thank you THRA, it is so re-assuring to learn that Stefan Petrow was not born in some Nazi-infested Eastern European hell-hole, and that he must have learnt English from a very early age. So how come this sentence in Julia Clark's thesis passed his approval (p. 151)?
A descendant of Nevin’s, Dr Kerry Williams, has assiduously promoted the claims of Thomas Nevin, whom she believes to be her ancestor ...This sentence is an example of Clark's poor control of the English language. Can a descendant of an ancestor not be their ancestor's descendant, is that semantically possible? No, it is not. It is a semantic contradiction, approved by her proof reader Stefan Petrow. Belief doesn't come into it. It's Clark with her toxic emotions way out of control, so desperate is she to disparage and derogate the life and work of photographer Thomas J. Nevin. Kerry, for anyone who wants to know, is genetically blessed with the good looks, good fortune and intelligence of all her ancestors, and especially her maternal great grandparents, great grandfather Thomas J. Nevin, great grandmother Elizabeth Rachel Nevin nee Day and their respective ancestors, including Thomas' father, poet John Nevin snr, and Elizabeth's uncle, master mariner Captain Edward Goldsmith. Julia Clark is an idiot to imagine such a statement has any validity in any context, yet she appears so fond of it - the word "assiduously" especially - that she has repeated it time and again in print. She is an idiot, period (see Addenda below). Socially and intellectually pretentious Julia Clark, with her arrogant disregard for her own accountability, her narcissistic opinions, and her phony loyalty to her cohort - who has never produced anything beyond the mediocre -is threatened by researchers, especially descendants who respect protocols and generously provide primary documents, all at their own expense. No primary documents appear in Julia Clark's blather across her whole A. H. Boyd scam. Stefan Petrow's "eagle-eyed" editing, to quote Clark (page 4), might have missed this nasty little sentence in Clark's thesis (p.151), or indeed he may well have condoned it, given the malice and hostility Clark has mustered towards Nevin in the pursuit of this worthless PhD degree. Since the THRA committee is most keen to inform us that Petrow was born in Tasmania, he would be acutely aware of how distressing misinformation about one’s ancestry can be, yet apparently not when it comes to the one historical figure who is central to his own and his History Department's research on 19th police in Tasmania, viz. commercial and police photographer Thomas J. Nevin (1842-1923).
THE THESIS as retrieved in February 2017 from the University of Tasmania:
'Through a Glass, Darkly’: the Camera, the Convict Life and the Criminal'Our Comments and Annotations
by Julia Christabel Clark B.A. (Hons.)
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)
University of Tasmania
November 2015
How to access the text to which these comments refer: just open this document here which is the thesis (or from the embedded document below) as it was retrieved from the University of Tasmania in February 2017 and annotated at that time with the comments below. Each yellow bubble and highlight inserted on the page listed below by number contains at least one of these comments as an annotation to the text. The comments therefore need to be read concurrently with the thesis.
Please note: our comments here are brief. We have no intention of providing a free editorial service with lengthy responses to each silly claim which Clark makes, and we do not dignify Clark's thesis within our definition of reasonable debate. For extended discussion on this web site on any comment we have tagged ">>", use our search engine accessed here.
TITLE PAGE:
When Julia Clark attended the PhD ceremony in August 2016 to accept the award, she was introduced with this statement, which she had crafted herself:
"Deputy Chancellor, I present to you Julia Clark. Dr. Clark identified the probable photographer of Port Arthur's last convicts as camp commandant A. H. Boyd..."Here is reason enough why graduands should not be encouraged to craft their own synopses. The sheer idiocy of the premise - that Clark has "identified" the camp commandant at Port Arthur A. H. Boyd as the probable photographer of ... convicts" - is not born out by this wretched little thesis. A. H. Boyd is the theme, the core, as Clark blindly sees it, despite 200 pages of extraneous padding. The word "probable" is as laughably inaccurate regarding the bully A. H. Boyd as the thesis is disturbingly vituperative and malicious towards the living descendants of the only REAL photographer of Tasmanian prisoners in the 1870s, T. J. Nevin. The award should have been withheld, and this thesis should not be available online via the University of Tasmania library. Clark has extended her resentment of Nevin to harassing his living descendants and encouraging others to post online abusive misinformation of Nevin ancestry. This and the thesis constitute misconduct of the first order.
Image caption, title page:
>> Why is the QVMAG catalogue number missing from here and on the other four images in this thesis? "PROBABLY" is neither a curatorial term nor a publisher's - "attributed to .." is the usual wording. The few photo reproductions in this thesis are of exceptionally poor quality, and the choice of this image in no way proves the Boyd attribution.
>> Footnote, title page:
Irrelevant and unexplained religious reference, supposedly signifying Clark as a believing Christian, a good person who would never lie or cheat or abuse or defraud.....
PAGE 2 COPYRIGHT OATH:
>> Clark's infringement of copyright in this thesis is extensive: the first third of the thesis dealing with theory has been copied and regurgitated from Jager, Tagg et al; the body of the thesis, the second third, is derived from the weblogs online since 2005 created by descendants of the photographer Thomas J. Nevin, but with distortions, lies, fabrications of sources, suppression of facts, personal abuse, and fraudulent claims; the last third of the thesis is a jolly japes account of naughty convicts' offences copied from Sue Hood et al publications issued at Port Arthur. Clark openly thanks Susan Hood for writing the thesis for her when Clark was employed at the Port Arthur heritage site as an "Interpretations" manager (see "Acknowledgments".) This thesis is a highly idiosyncratic fantasy which bears little relation to historic reality.
>> Clark's signature and date: The PhD rules specifically state that the limitation on time taken to submit the thesis is 5 years: Clark was enrolled in the PhD program already by 2007, according to what she told Margy Burn at the NLA, and which I repeated in a complaint about both Clark and Burn to the Commonwealth Ombusdman and Australian Copyright Council, so her term exceeded 5 years when she submitted this thesis in November 2015, and it was not accepted until March 2016. That's 8 years. The award is therefore highly irregular, illegal even.
PAGE 3 ABSTRACT:
>> The 350 "convict portraits" - ie the police mugshots of prisoners taken by T. J. Nevin at the Hobart Gaol, were not created at Port Arthur in 1873-1874. The extant bundle of cdvs which are inscribed on the versos "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" were inscribed in 1915 by J W Beattie as tourism propaganda for the Tasmanian Gov't. Clark's thesis is also at base nothing more than tourism propaganda for the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, her former employer. She "wrote" most of the thesis in her employer's time to impress Board members and other staff.
>>A convenient pretence by Clark to ignore the facts about Thomas J, Nevin online since 2005 at thomasnevin.com
tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com
prisonerpics.blogspot.com
>> These are NOT EPHEMERAL sites. Each post and its revisions was and can still be retrieved as hard copy paper print.
>> There is no PROBABILITY whatsoever, no proof, no evidence, no reason or justification to believe such a proposition. Clark needs to define in percentage terms her use of this concept "probable", because she gives NO PLAUSIBLE EVIDENCE that A. H. Boyd ever took a photograph of anyone amongst all the padding she puts around her argument in his name. What IS evident here is the pitfall that heritage site workers fall into: they have an old cottage, and so stuff it to the rafters with every old object at hand to create atmosphere, calling the mishmash an "interpretation". The Port Arthur site is a prime example; Runnymede is another, and so is Mawson's Hut in Hobart, all full of stuff that never belonged to the house, and its owners. Clark's thesis is stuffed to the rafters with material derived from everywhere. There is nothing ORIGINAL, nothing AUTHENTIC about the so-called research. It is simply an excuse to vent maliciousness around the names of Thomas Nevin, and Dr (Kerry) Williams for no discernible reason other than wanting to punish T. J. Nevin for not being a transported convict, and his great granddaughter Kerry Williams for not being black (Aboriginal, mullato, colored), both identities being so dear to Clark as a source of exploitation.
>> Nonsense. The photographs were taken at the Hobart Gaol by Nevin for the police, and copies were circulated to regional gaols, including Port Arthur,
>> Again, rubbish.
PAGE 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
>> Hamish Maxwell Stewart's use of statistics would have been useful in helping Clark define the concept "probable". Stefan Petrow must be petty-minded to have approved the vituperations directed at Kerry Williams and Nevin expressed in Clark's various ungrammatical sentences.
>> Clark thanks Stefan Petrow's "eagle-eyed editing" - does that include her ungrammatical sentences, her personal sledging of Dr Kerry Williams, her fabrications of primary sources ?
>> Clark's communications with these people - eg. Carr, Davies, Farmery, Long, and Rieusset - centred on garrnering negative comments about Kerry Williams. None of these library and museum workers gave her information that was not already
published.
>> ... "so long" - yes, without the Nevin weblogs which appeared online in 2005, Clark would not have a thesis.
PAGE 6 CONTENTS:
>> The bulk of this thesis, pages 29-173, has been derived from ideas, images, texts etc in the weblogs online about Thomas J. Nevin. Clark has not personally contributed a single idea, image or text to the Nevin weblogs authors, nor have the weblog authors voluntarily contributed to her publications and thesis, SO SHE CANNOT CLAIM COLLUSION IN ANY FORM or DIRECTION with us. Her theft of our intellectual property is an emboldened and brazen pretension at setting herself up with academic credentials at our expense.
PAGE 7 PREAMBLE:
>> Inappropriate and irrelevant, suited to a fictional work, not a thesis. Clark had no interest in the "convict photographs" prior to contact with Kerry Williams in 2005.
PAGE 8 INTRODUCTION :
>> Here we are again at a heritage site with a heritage site worker: without a mystery there can be no ghost tour; without a mystery photographer Clark has no argument: it's a fallacious set-up from the start.
>> Boyd is given his full name, but not Nevin. Clark shows NO RESPECT ANYWHERE IN THIS THESIS TO NEVIN, to his work, to his family, to his descendants, nor to those experts, curators etc, who have provided research on Nevin and his accreditation to the mugshots since the 1970s.
>> Quite of a few of the extant photographs of prisoners show men who were "native" - locally born - and not pre-1853 transportees - who were sent to Port Arthur after being photographed at the Hobart Gaol from 1871, and returned again to the Hobart Gaol in 1873. And quite a few men in the photographs never went to Port Arthur.
PAGE 9:
>> There are no mysteries about mugshots taken in 1874 or 1974 or 2014. They all served the same purpose.
PAGE 13:
>> Clark co-opts the reader with this assumption from the outset, so why waste 300 pages of a PhD thesis pretending there's a "mystery"?
>> Many hundreds (400) more photographs and prints of Tasmanian prisoners are extant in public collections, dated from Nevin's first commission in 1872 to his last in the late 1880s.
>> This is NOT a "fact": Beattie and Searle wrote "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" on the cdv versos in 1915 as tourism propaganda for the international and interstate market when copies were displayed on the fake hulk Success in Hobart, Sydney etc.
PAGE 28:
>> The copyright owners of all this material which Clark has "summarised" should take a close look for her numerous infringements.
PAGE 29 Chapter 2:
>> Image caption: Why is the catalogue and call number at the NLA not noted here? The captions used by Clark underneath the four images are amateurish. For a thesis ABOUT photographs, photographs are noticeably absent, and the four which have been included are all erroneously labelled. Here again is the ridiculous premise "Photographer: probably Commandant A. H. Boyd" More about the NLA further on.
>> The foregone assumption again that the prisoners were photographed at Port Arthur, leaving no room for a fair consideration of the alternative.
PAGE 30:
>> Photographer T. J. Nevin was at Port Arthur in February 1872; in August 1873; in May 1874; in December 1875; etc
>> Which photographs? They all have catalogue numbers, so why are they not listed by collection, institution, numbers etc?
PAGE 48:
>> This description of deviancy perfectly applies to Clark's own behaviour since 2005; Her hostility directed at Nevin and his descendants she has sought to share with librarians, museum and heritage site workers, and now uses this thesis as a further conduit.
PAGE 58 Chapter3:
>> Image caption: This cartoon appeared in specific contexts in several publications from the 1870s (Sydney Morning Herald etc), to web sites, so where are references?
PAGE 66:
>> Footnote: Jager appeared on the Nevin weblogs in 2007; Clark misuses the reference without checking the original text.
PAGE 75:
>> Clark has sourced this from the Nevin weblogs without checking the source.
PAGE 80:
>> This extended discussion of the governor Gardner taking photographs himself at Bristol prison forms the basis of the assumption that A H. Boyd at Port Arthur did the same. It is a forced comparison, without proof of any kind in Boyd's favour.
PAGE 98:
>> They are not "Port Arthur photographs". They are Hobart Gaol photographs.
PAGE 101:
>> The post in 2008 on the Nevin weblogs which included this Act was so aggressively hacked by Clark et al that we had to repost it and block her ISP.
PAGE 139 Chapter 5:
>> From this page on - until Clark moves into detailing the jolly escapades in the last chapters of these naughty convicts of whom she is so fond - from here on page 139 to page 250, Clark has availed herself of every detail she could squeeze dry from our Thomas Nevin web sites. Theft of our intellectual property is just the half of it - a dozen lies appear on every page where Nevin's name is mentioned.
>> Thomas J. Nevin ran two studios and collaborated with five professional and amateur photographers from 1864 through to the late 1880s. He worked closely with police and the HCC administration from 1872 until 1888, commissioned by the Surveyor-General James CALDER and the Attorney-General W.R. GIBLIN.
>> Footnote: Clark got lucky at the NLA. The NLA valuer of 19th century photographs, Warwick Reeder, had made the error of copying Chris Long's published error about Boyd (1995), for his thesis. When Reeder met Kerry Williams at the NLA in 2001, he became most anxious to cover up the error. He used Clark at Port Arthur to write this pathetic article so that he could have the NLA apply it to every online catalogue entry of their collection of 83 "Port Arthur convicts" photographs. It was a serendipitous opportunity that could validate Reeder's MA thesis to make his Boyd attribution to appear to be correct after all.
PAGE 140:
>> Clark the gambler, the gossip, the gleaner - she has proved nothing about these Tasmanian prisoner photographs that would merit the rhetoric about Boyd.
>> Alfred? surely not.
PAGE 142;
>> If Clark can't find it, it never existed, that's her modus operandi.
PAGE 143:
>> There's no case for a hypothesis. These accounts originate in ignorance, poor research, lazy self-referential citations within the photohistory culture, underscored by their social pretension as art historians.
PAGE 144:
>> I reviewed all these late 20th century publications in 2007 on the Nevin weblogs; each had repeated the rumour spread in the 1980s about Boyd photographing prisoners, published first by Chris Long, repeated by Reeder, Ennis, Crombie, etc, none of whom bothered to check the validity of the rumour, which was just hearsay in any case, and which is all that it remains.
>> Clark has fabricated this business about the photographic house and the dates 1872, 1874, hoping that her BA credentials in Archaeology give the lie some validity. She needs to supply the authentic documents.
PAGE 146:
>> There was no planned ad hoc personalised amateur PROJECT by Boyd. The COMMISSION to use the commercial photographer T. J. NEVIN on government contract was settled in February 1872 by W. R. Giblin Tas A-G at the visit by the former Premier of Victoria and the Victorian Solicitor-General.
PAGE 147:
>> Not Boyd's OWN equipment. These documents in no way prove that Boyd ever took a single photograph, whether of a person, a prisoner, or a landscape. Where is Woolley's 1866 cdv of Boyd? Is Clark so MEAN-FISTED that she hasn't bought a copy for her thesis? The baby Boyd she talks about in a run down of his biography is spoken of in tones second only to adorers of the baby Jesus. Of course, she doesn't mention that he was sacked from the Orphan School New Town for MISOGYNY - in 1864 - to warrant dismissal because of misogyny in those Victorian times would indicate he must have been a real bastard.
>> The inscription with Boyd's name on this photograph is fraudulent, written in 1984 by Susan Hood and/or Chris Long.
PAGE 148:
>> Clark just hasn't looked for the right documents and dates, so of course she hasn't found anything, She is just repeating idle chat by Chris Long who dreamed up this prerequisite of a tender.
PAGE 149:
>> There is no record in the Tasmanian Police Gazettes of this John Smith - Clark has fabricated this little tidbit to further weigh her argument towards Boyd. Boyd DID NOT photograph prisoners - end of story so any of these little speculative tidbits are fragments of hope from Clark's desperate imagination.
PAGE 150:
>> Try harder.
>> Poor Nevin, on trial for being a real photographer, whereas A. H. Boyd, a tyrant and bully who never photographed a living person or indeed anything at all, is the GOLDEN BOY for Clark and her cronies at the Port Arthur Heritage site.
>> Nevin had three master mariner in-laws in his wife's family, with whom he voyaged from ports as far south as the Tasman peninsula to intercolonial ports.
PAGE 151:
>> This is the famous RUMOUR from Boyd descendants.
>> This sentence is an example of Clark's poor control of the English language. It is a semantic contradiction, approved by her proof reader Stefan Petrow. It's Clark with her toxic emotions way out of control, so desperate is she to trivialise Nevin. Kerry, for anyone who wants to know, is a direct genetic descendant of Thomas J. Nevin and Elizabeth Rachel Day, a great granddaughter and one of hundreds of their descendants.
>> All of our "evidence" on the Nevin websites is meticulously supported with original primary historical documents and original historical photographs sourced from public and private collections. This is the multimodal future of "evidence" - NOT the format of the traditional thesis with footnotes which the reader has to chase from one page to the next, or worse, to the appendices. Worse still, the reader is coerced into believing the footnote references are real because the originals of the primary documents are never visible; the assertion by the thesis writer that the reference is valid and the document referenced actually exists should never be accepted at face value, especially in this thesis by this writer Julia Clark. Her thesis is devoid of any supporting authentic historical document. The four images of convicts are so poorly reproduced, they are barely recognizable. It is a bizarre document, written with much hostility towards the subject, and shows no evidence that Clark actually conducted any original research of her own.
>> Footnote: this URL which Clark cites - "Tasmanianphotographers.com" was never owned by Dr Kerry Williams. Nor has it ever existed. The correct url is https://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com/
>> Clark is delusional if she thinks her off-hand remarks and casual lies denying her extensive use of our Thomas J. Nevin web sites are to be believed. We have not deleted any post or its revision since transferring from NY based Blogharbor in 2003 to our two current hosts in April 2007. We have recorded more than 5000 clicks every few months, year in, year out, since 2005, by Clark from her ISP and from the ISP at Port Arthur on the hundreds of our lengthy posts detailing Nevin's work on the mugshots at these URLS -
https://thomasnevin.com
https://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com
https://prisonerpics.blogspot.com
PAGE 152:
>> Really? Who is Clark trying to blame for "tricking" the world into believing Nevin took the 1870s Tasmanian mugshots?
>> This claim is fabricated by Clark to pretend a lie was afoot. No one claimed these prison mugshots printed in cdv mounts were all stamped verso with a studio stamp, Nevin's or any one else's, though Nevin stamped one per bundle of a 100 for copyright and govt contract commission.
>> Footnote: Sylvia Carr was not especially conversant with the history of the NLA's acquisition of the "Port Arthur convicts" photographs, as they call them - in fact, no one on the NLA staff had ever bothered to consult the original accessioned files and curatorial documents of the subsequent exhibition located in Manuscripts which have all been posted on these Nevin weblogs to establish once and for all that the NLA DOES hold the documents pertaining to Nevin's attribution as the photographer of the NLA's collection of prisoner mugshots.
PAGE 153:
>> Alan Davies said no such thing to Dr Kerry Williams when she visited the SLNSW in 2009 to photograph the eleven (11) prisoner photos catalogued in Nevin's name held there. Clark has NOT provided the SLNSW's Mitchell Collection catalogue or call number for those eleven mugshots, neither here in the text of the thesis nor in the bibliography, but she described our photos online of those prisoner cdvs taken in 2009 to talk down Nevin in her article published in 2010. No thanks was extended, no courtesy, no permission requested to us by Clark - just the usual psychotic vituperations we have come to expect from her.
PAGE 154:
>> Clark says the file is lost. She PROBABLY (her favourite modality) removed it permanently from the Tasmanian Archives Office to make it "lost". She has readily falsified references in this thesis and in the 2010 JACHS article.
>> The onus is on Clark to produce the exact historical document from TAHO for this reference. Otherwise she has fabricated it to cover her prevarications, or her "bet each way" as she so crudely phrases it.
>> Footnote: The Town Hall keeper, Mr Lonergan gave Kerry Williams a guided tour in April 2012 of the Mayor's Court and the police cells which were located in the Town Hall basement. Nevin was both Office and Hall Keeper for the HCC, and photographer for the central Hobart Municipal Police Office located on the other side of the entry hall of the Town Hall where he photographed prisoners on arrest and discharge. This footnote 673 demonstrates Clark's ignorance of the courts system, the function of the Municipal Police Office, and an ugly willingness to badmouth "Dr Williams" while attempting to discredit any aspect of Nevin's working life.
>> All of the prisoners were photographed at Hobart, in the Supreme Court at the Hobart Gaol and at the Mayor's Court, Town Hall. The inscription "Taken at Port Arthur 1874" on the versos of about 300 in the bundle originating from the QVMAG were inscribed in 1915 by Beattie and Searle, displayed on the (fake) hulk Success in Hobart, Sydney etc to promote local and interstate tourism to the Port Arthur ruins. Clark is in the same business - tourism spin, most important to the World Heritage application that PAHSMA was hoping to gain when Clark began her Boyd or anti-Nevin project. Claiming that a record does not exist simply because she says she hasn't found it is childish. Lies, deception, fake claims, fraud - there's not much Clark will not lie about.
PAGE 155:
>> Clark needs to submit the original documents from TAHO to support these claims.
>> The Town Hall porter was promoted into the Hall keeper position in 1881. Nevin was Hall and Office Keeper for the HCC from 1876 to 1880, police photographer from 1872 to 1888. Here again is Clark's pathetic attempt to denigrate Nevin. Whose serious drinking problem is at issue here? Sad Julia Clark's, it seems, looking at this thesis which appears to have been written by a sanctimonious drunk. Attempting to write a PhD thesis is in her declining years when her mental faculties were never good from the beginning, is sad. What happened way back when she was sacked from the National Portrait Gallery for lies and deception?
>> One wonders about sanctimonious Julia Clark who sees the world through alcohol. Through A Glass Darkly, as the thesis title she has chosen in fact tells us she does indeed drink to excess.
PAGE 156:
>> Clark is deliberately confusing the several different people called Thomas Nevin in Hobart in these years, including his son, Thomas James Nevin jnr, born 1874 while Nevin was at Port Arthur photographing convicts.
>> Thomas Nevin died in his 81st year in 1923. He was remembered fondly as healthy and active by his grandchildren who were still living at the time of our Nevin web sites appearing online. Boyd by contrast was a belligerent drunk who died when he fell of his horse before his 65th birthday.
>> Here we go on the ghost tour again - "shrouded" and "mystery: - where would Clark be without these words and the word "probable".
>> Ahh, so touching, second only to the baby Jesus.
PAGE 157:
>> No, he was sacked for MISOGYNY, quite a feat.
>> So true, no mention or association of Boyd with photography because HE WASN'T A PHOTOGRAPHER
PAGE 158:
>> Prolific? Rubbish. No photographs have ever been attributed to A. H. Boyd before this nonsense appeared in the 1980s from amateurs such as Chris Long and Warwick Reeder and Elspeth Wishart, each demonstrably resentful enough of published professionals such as Prof. Joan Kerr et al to actually fabricate photohistory based on nothing more than personal whimsy.
PAGE 159:
>> He did not have a studio - this is a fabrication by Clark after Long.
PAGE 160:
>> What? He was sacked for misogyny in 1865, and corruption in 1873.
PAGE 161:
>> Contradictory statements proliferate in this thesis, this example is typical.
PAGE 162:
>> So where are the photographs by A. H. Boyd supposedly taken by him of his family etc? Not one single portrait of a Boyd family member supposedly taken by him has ever been included in any publication on this topic of Boyd's supposed talent for the medium. The reason? Simple. He wasn't a photographer.
>> No man in prison uniform has ever been photographed by A. H. Boyd. No such photograph exists which can be attributed to A. H. Boyd.
PAGE 163:
>> Only if you want to believe in this furphy. Boyd did NOT photograph any single person, male, female, prisoner, visitor - not one photograph supposedly by him has ever been validated.
PAGE 165:
>> Clark needs to produce the original document from TAHO for this statement.
PAGE 166:
>> Our Nevin web sites have documented dozens of prisoners' criminal careers in and out of the Hobart Gaol. Only Clark wants to force the cliche by association "Tasmania + convicts= Port Arthur" because it's good for PAHSMA's business of tourism. Facts only get in the way of a good story, or in this case, a phony thesis.
PAGE 169:
>> Try harder, try the Hobart Gaol records.
PAGE 170:
>> Nevin photographed these prisoners on contract from Feb 1872 at Port Arthur and the Hobart Gaol. Their photographs were filed in the Hobart Gaol Photo Books. Copies were sent to Port Arthur and other regional police stations, accompanying the prisoner's movements. There is no evidence that Boyd took prisoners' photographs, nor even that there were facilities for the purpose at Port Arthur. In any event, Boyd was gone from Port Arthur by December 1873, so Travers Solly's request for photographs of the Gregsons, Kilpatrick and Harrington in a letter that might appear to be addressed to Boyd in January 1874 was probably ignored. Solly was only assuming their photographs existed before that date. The Gregson brothers were definitely photographed at the Hobart Police Office on transfer from Launceston after capture in February 1874 by T. J. Nevin, and not before that date. Photographs of Kilpatrick and Harrington, if they ever existed, are missing, unidentified, or were never held in public collections.
PAGE 171 Conclusion
>> It is not remotely likely and certainly not possible let alone "probable" that A. H. Boyd photographed prisoners at Port Arthur in 1873-4. The proposition is a fantasy spin for tourists, nothing more. Clark should be warned that if she keeps telling this story, she risks making a terrible fool of herself and those she corrals as supports (her cohort of deviants), and that if she keeps up the personal abuse directed at Dr. Kerry Williams, she is liable to process in civil action.
PAGE 173 Chapter 6:
>> Image caption: Again, no NLA catalogue number. The reproduction is terrible. Fancy, a thesis about photos and the reproductions are rubbish, all four of them in a document of more than 300 pages.
>> There is NO MYSTERY.
PAGE 175:
>> They were photographed at the Hobart Gaol by T. J. Nevin, govt contractor.
PAGE 201:
>> Three times this date regarding Alfred Malden/Maldon's crime is incorrect - the correct date for the Mercury reference is 28 April 1871. Clark has just copied the error from some earlier writer, as she has done for most of this section on the jolly japes of the "Port Arthur convicts" .
PAGE 246 Chapter 8:
>> Image caption: Another poorly captioned image intended to deceive. No NLA call no, no catalogue no., no information about the prisoner etc.
PAGE 294:
>> Three times the citation of this date regarding Alfred Malden/Maldon's crime is incorrect - the correct date for the Mercury reference is 28 April 1871. Clark has just copied the error from some earlier writer, as she has done for most of this section on the jolly japes of the "Port Arthur convicts" .
PAGE 320 CONCLUSION:
>> The whole opening paragraph is a travesty of the facts about these photographs. A. H. Boyd DID NOT sit these men down to photograph them - this is fake history. It is an outrageous example of politically driven corporate psychopathy devised and promulgated by the PAHSMA board to consolidate their academic credibility. Poor Julia Clark really believes she has done them a favour. Her cosy fantasy is an attempt to endear herself with flattery to the Port Arthur Historic Site board members who have colluded in this travesty, eg. Michael Field, who is both a PAHSMA board member and the University of Tasmania Chancellor.
PAGE 322:
>> First, Maldon's full name was Alfred Malden, not John Maldon; second, none of these prisoners " sat before the Commandant to have their photographs taken" - they sat for photographer Thomas J. Nevin. Typical of the whole thesis, this statement by Clark contains mistakes copied from earlier writers, references which do not exist, fudging with facts, fantasy and laissez-faire..
PAGE 329:
>> There are two more cdv mugshots held at the National Library of Australia of Maldon by Nevin, in addition to the copy at the TMAG, all duplicates from Thomas Nevin's single sitting with prisoner Alfred Maldon/Malden taken at the Hobart Gaol Feb 1874. The fact that another copy is held at the Port Arthur heritage site is proof that Clark has copied the earlier writings of staff there, including their mistakes (see comments on Maldon above), a clear indication that very little if anything in this thesis is originally Clark's work.
PAGE 341: Bibliography
>> This photograph and its various copies and duplicates housed in Anson albums all appear on the Nevin web sites, photographed by Kerry Williams at the SLNSW Mitchell Library in 2009. Clark has used our photograph without our attribution or permission in the thesis [see photo below].
PAGE 370:
>> This article is a travesty of academic research. Clark's research MO is gossip, gambling and gleaning, a pathetically pretentious attempt at spinning propaganda for the Port Arthur heritage site using the Nevin web sites which, for reasons known only to ignorant herself, she assumed entitlement.
PAGE 378:
>> Guess what's missing!!!
Nevin, Thomas J. (1842-1923) at -
thomasnevin..com
tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com
prisonerpics.blogspot.com
>> Since Clark sourced so much information, inspiration and motivation to attempt a thesis from gouging out the eyes of the extensive web sites about the REAL photographer of the so-called "Port Arthur convicts", at -
thomasnevin..com
tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com
prisonerpics.blogspot.com
- it is a thing of wonder that she deliberately suppresses the bibliographic references.
It is what it is - fraud.
PAGE 380:
>> What is significant by absence here is the name of Dr Kerry Williams and the rude emails Clark sent her back in 2005, or the website she created in 2013 with a proxy to bully Kerry Williams, or the pdfs she concocted containing a fake family history and caricatured images of Kerry Williams, not to mention the stalking of Nevin family members, and the dozens of emails sent to libraries, museums and heritage sites, all deriding Kerry Williams over more than a decade. Julia Clark, in short, is a major troll and bully. Her parasitic thesis would not exist without our research, our Nevin web sites and Nevin descendants such as Dr Kerry Williams. That brief contact back in 2005 seemed to incite such a singular deep resentment in Clark that she chose the totally inappropriate vehicle of a PhD degree to vent it.
Ref: Mitchell Library, SLNSW
Views in Tasmania, Vol. II, ca. 1885-1894 / Anson Brothers.
PXD 511/no. 10 ‘Port Arthur during convict occupation’
Taken at the SLNSW
Photo copyright © KLW NFC 2009 ARR
This is the fake attribution, the one and only photograph in existence which bears A. H. Boyd's name pencilled on the bottom right hand corner (beneath the magnifying lens). This photograph of buildings at the Port Arthur prison which was published by the Anson brothers in 1894 was annotated with A. H. Boyd's name in pencil in 1984, probably by Port Arthur employee Susan Hood et al to massage the rumour created about A. H. Boyd during an exhibition at Port Arthur in 1983 of a selection of 50 mugshots taken by T. J. Nevin which were sourced from the Beattie collection at the QVMAG but not returned there, deposited instead at the TMAG. From fake attribution to fraudulent thesis: congratulations, PAHSMA and Julia Clark.
ADDENDA: the idiocies of Julia Clark
A toxic habit: this Abstract (webshot below) written in 2002 by Julia Clark shows just how oblivious she is to her own "toxic mythmaking". Her particular brand of nonsensical hero discourse is expressed here too in a series of strangely ungrammatical sentences - "That .... That .... That .... and spelling errors, all contributing to what she must suppose to be "stylish". It comes as no surprise that she talks to rooms, especially those that never existed, such as the dark room she created for her hero, prison commandant A. H. Boyd at Port Arthur, to justify her fantasy that he miraculously became a photographer of "convicts" there (2010). In her article published by the Journal of Australian Colonial History in 2010, which was her gamble at escalating abuse and plagiarism of our research with impunity, she credited her hero A. H. Boyd with photographing Tasmanian prisoner George Ormiston in 1800, (JACHS, 2010, p. 88, Fig. 3)! Now that is 40 years before the invention of photography, so clever was her Mr. Boyd!! In her own words (and very few in this article ARE her own words apart from the archaeological fictions), Clark stated clearly that NO official record of A.H. Boyd taking prisoners' photographs exist, yet she has persisted in arguing his case ever since (JACHS, 2010:90). For those who disagree with Julia Clark she prescribes herself as an "emetic"(Anderson 2011) to purge them of their "toxic-mythmaking" views. Clearly, Julia Clark is an obsessive whose scatological imagery of vomit, bodily evacuations, poisons etc underscores in every instance a total lack of self-control, a hatred of her work and of her cohort. What she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, is a professional. Her articles and thesis are best consigned to the rubbish bin of Tasmanian history.
All are "toxic myth-making" except Julia Clark herself (2002).
Review our comments on her thesis (2015) here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Rfp9h454ChZ70kMJxRICjPpVTR-0qNf/view?usp=sharing
RELATED POSTS main weblog
- Improprieties: A.H. Boyd & the Parasitic Attribution
- The fruitless search of wadsley-1
- Julia Clark must face up to academic fraud
- Julia Clark: A Question of Stupidity and the NLA
