8. MODELAMIENTO HIDRÁULICO
8.3.3 Calibración del modelo
The use of photographs in other colonies to identify absconding miscreants was known in Tasmania as early as 1863. An embezzler from Melbourne had fled, and a photograph had been lodged in the Commissioner’s office in Hobart in case he turned up there.611 Over the next decades, wrongdoers and ‘missing friends’ from as far away as California and London who sought anonymity in Tasmania took the risk that a photograph of themselves might be lodged in the Hobart Commissioner’s Office.
610 E. M. Hall, ‘The Young Explorer’, typed script of a story read at a literary society meeting
c1930, unpaginated, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office (TAHO).
611Tasmanian Police Gazette, 26 June 1863, 99.
‘Port Arthur during occupation’, c1875
Inscribed lower left, ‘Enlarged from a stereoscopic negative by AH Boyd Esq.’
As it had in New South Wales, the local newspaper seems to have played a role in
disseminating to Tasmanians a knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the use of photography in criminal management. In October 1872 the Mercury reprinted an article from the Law Magazine in London under the heading ‘General Extracts’, a grab bag of widely disparate topics that the Editor presumably thought would be of interest to his readers. After the results of the Cambridge University Entrance exams for women and a report on working men’s strikes in New York came ‘Crime in the Metropolis’. This dealt with
improvements in policing, and particularly the beneficial impact of police supervision of prisoners and habitual offenders through the use of photography. It enthused: ‘The system of supervision by the police, the accurate registration and photographing of prisoners, although still in its infancy and requiring further development, has given the police a greater knowledge of the previous life of criminals and a considerable control over their actions … ’612 A mere ten months later, someone began to photograph the prisoners under sentence who remained at Port Arthur.
A question of attribution: the maker of Port Arthur’s convict portraits
Founded in 1830 as a timber getting camp for a small team of convict axe-men, sawyers and their guards, by the middle of the nineteenth century the Port Arthur Penal
Establishment was an industrial settlement of almost two thousand people, including almost 1100 convicts. These men had reoffended since arriving in the colony and
received long sentences. They produced huge quantities of goods for the government and the private market, ranging from nails to ships. But by the 1870s, while most of the
inmates were men still under sentence, there was also an increasing population of paupers, lunatics and invalids, many the product of the convict system. By the time the settlement began to wind down, it was a shadow of its former self. It could not muster enough able- bodied men to pull the fire wagon when one of the buildings caught fire in 1877.613 It closed in that year.
612Mercury, 24 October 1872, 3.
Commandant Adolarious Humphrey Boyd, the penultimate commandant, arrived in June 1871 and was given the unenviable task of beginning to wind up the settlement. The men still able to work were to be shipped off to serve the rest of their sentences at Hobart Gaol, while the paupers, lunatics and invalids were destined for various grim welfare
establishments. This was the setting for Tasmania’s first forensic photographic project, although its genesis and purpose remain shrouded in mystery.
The photographer who made the portraits of Port Arthur’s convicts did not sign his work (see Appendix 1 for a complete list of images). His (and I think that given the exclusively male nature of the convict system’s administration it is safe to say ‘his’) identity is not conclusively known. In this chapter, however, I will argue for one of the two men who have been proposed as the originators of this work. But first the question must be asked - does it matter who took these images? Are they not in themselves sufficient as
documents? I do not believe that this is the case. As I have argued in Chapter 1, the photographer’s experiences, opinions, obsessions and prejudices shape his work just as surely as they do the work of a documentary historian. As E.H. Carr reminds us, the making of history ‘is a selective process, in which some facts are thought worthy of accumulating and preserving and others are not’.614 A photographer, in the case of a portrait, dresses and poses the subject to express his understanding of what is necessary and meaningful to include. So, as Carr puts it, ‘It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts that it contains but with the
historian who wrote it’.’615 And further, ‘We must not only study the historian but his
social and historical environment, because he is a product of both’.616 As a result, in order to understand why the men in the photographs appear as they do, we must understand what the photographer thought about both his subject matter and the process in which he was engaged. Since we do not know for certain who the photographer was, this may seem like a daunting, indeed an impossible, task.
614 E.H. Carr, What Is History?, (London : Macmillan, 1972), 10. 615 Carr, What Is History?,10.
The first component of that task, therefore, is to attempt to identify the photographer. Two men have been credited with the job – Adolarius Humphrey (A.H.) Boyd and T.J. or Thomas Nevin. Boyd was Commandant from June 1871 to 1 April 1874. Nevin was a Hobart photographer, who ran a studio in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The
documentation surrounding, or rather not surrounding, these images in public collections cannot arbitrate in this contest. There is a considerable range of attributions on the databases of the holding institutions, none with a firm foundation in nineteenth century records. This is all the more surprising when many of these images are held in some collections only as photocopies obtained from a single common source, the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery (QVMAG). When I began this research in 2006, QVMAG attributed the work as follows: ‘Photographer unknown but possibly taken by A.H. Boyd or T.J. Nevin’. This had not always been the case however. In the past, they attributed them only to Nevin.617 The Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office (TAHO) obtained their images from QVMAG, but followed only the Thomas Nevin attribution. The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) attributes their images to A.H. Boyd. The Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority (PAHSMA) makes no attribution on its own holdings, but the copies obtained from QVMAG are attributed to A.H. Boyd. The National Library of Australia (NLA) initially also followed the Thomas Nevin
attribution, but have now changed their database to read ‘Formerly attributed to Thomas J. Nevin, the portraits are now considered more likely to have been taken by A.H. Boyd’.618
QVMAG also now attributes the work as follows: ‘Formerly attributed to Thomas J. Nevin, the portraits are now considered more likely to have been taken by A.H. Boyd’. Unfortunately, none of the institutions involved have any documentation that can shed light on this confusion. This material entered their collections during the first half of the twentieth century with no documentation other than, occasionally, the name of the collector who donated it.
617 A.M. Willis, Picturing Australia: A History Of Photography, (Sydney: Angus &
Robertson,1988), 98 note 49.
618 My paper on this topic apparentlyconvinced library staff that Boyd was more likely than
Nevin. J. Clark, ‘A Question of Attribution: Port Arthur’s Convict Portraits’, Journal Of Australian Colonial History, Vol. 12, (2010), 77-97.
A number of scholars have expressed an opinion about the identity of the photographer and what follows is a survey of those attempts. In the exhibition at QVMAG in 1977, curated by John McPhee, the images were attributed to Nevin. McPhee corresponded with the librarian of the then Tasmaniana Library (now the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office), the late Geoffrey Stilwell, to obtain biographical information about Thomas Nevin, but in the absence of any documentation related to the exhibition it is not possible to tell whether McPhee carried out further research or simply accepted
QVMAG’s attribution. At that time, he had no reason not to do so. Like McPhee, Stilwell accepted this attribution; he also would have had no reason to question it, unless he had any information that pointed elsewhere. There is no evidence that he did.
Over the ensuing 35 years matters seem to have crawled towards some resolution. It is worth canvassing what little has been written about this intriguing body of material to see where researchers have tended, and on the basis of what evidence. Some have simply repeated the attribution supplied to them by the institution from which they sourced the image. As a result, some attribute the images to Boyd, some to Nevin, and some have a bet each way. One or two others have attempted a comprehensive appraisal of the available evidence to try to clarify matters.
Ann Marie Willis discussed two convict cartes de visite (cdvs) in her exhibition catalogue, those of John Nestor and Emmanuel Blore, and attributed them to ‘A.H. Boyd/T.J.
Nevin’.619 She also noted that ‘Examples held by the Queen Victoria Museum and Art
Gallery, Launceston, had until recently been attributed to T.J. Nevin, a photographer who had worked with Alfred. Chris Long suggests that they were taken by the Commandant of Port Arthur, A.H. Boyd’.620 Willis did not scrutinise the evidence for either of these attributions but indicated that, in her view, the authorship remains unproven and unclear. Chris Long, one of Australia’s pre-eminent historians of photography, has published extensively on Tasmanian photographers. According to Long:
619 Willis, Picturing Australia, 98.
A.H. Boyd, Superintendent of Port Arthur from June 1871 to March 1874, was a very keen amateur photographer and is known to have had a room fitted up in his garden as a studio and darkroom … From the amateurish nature of the convicts’ poses in their official photographs, it is quite possible that Boyd may have been the photographer.621
To support this attribution, he presented the following evidence, based on the few facts that were known at that time.
1. Boyd brought photographic gear to Port Arthur at exactly the time of the earliest known convict photographs (1873-74).
2. The number of photographic glasses despatched to Port Arthur, in July [actually August] 1873 represents a scale of photographic activity rather greater than that which an amateur, taking photographs purely for pleasure, would require.
3. The wet-plate process then in vogue required that the plate should be developed immediately after exposure. For convict photography on the scale indicated by the number that survive, a
permanent darkroom must have been available on site. It is highly likely that the photographs were taken at Port Arthur, and highly unlikely that there would have been a darkroom there apart from the Commandant’s own.622
While Long acknowledged thatNevin may have taken some of the convict photographs, he cautioned that ‘commercial photographers sometimes printed and mounted
photographs from amateurs’ negatives. So such examples may also be by Boyd’. His
621 C. Long, Tasmanian Photographers 1840-1940, A Directory, (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical
Research Association, 1995), 35.
conclusion was that ‘Boyd’s authorship remains the most likely interpretation of known fact, unless some hard evidence is found to support a contrary conclusion’.623
In The Dictionary of Australian Artists; painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870, the entry on Nevin by Joan Kerr and Geoffrey Stilwell was not definitive. The image used to illustrate their article was sourced from QVMAG but, despite the fact that the institution was not backing Nevin exclusively by the date that this book was
published, they tentatively attributed the images to him alone. Perhaps the entry was written some time before 1988. They said:
Some of the cartes-de-visite identification photographs of Port Arthur convicts taken in the 1870s … have been attributed to Nevin because they carry his studio stamp. He possibly held the government contract for this sort of criminal recording … 624
In fact, only three of the almost 200 cdvs bear Nevin’s stamp.625 I have searched the
Government Gazette for 1873 and 1874, where all government tenders were advertised, for any government tender to photograph convicts. I can find no evidence for the existence of such a tender.
In examining these images for his Master’s thesis, Warwick Reeder noted that the only clues to the photographer’s identity were one cdv at QVMAG bearing Nevin’s stamp, three held at TMAG bearing the stamp of the Anson studios, and one stamped J.R. Milner.626 While Nevin worked intermittently as a photographer in Hobart between 1867
623 Chris Long, pers. comm., 12 March 2006.
624 J. Kerr (ed.), The Dictionary Of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers And Engravers To 1870, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992), 568. Several technically accomplished photographs by Boyd have since been located.
625 The Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, holds two, James Mullins and
William Smith. QVMAG holds another copy of William Smith. Neither man was at Port Arthur in 1873-4.
626 W. Reeder, ‘The Democratic Image: the carte-de-visite photograph in Australia 1859-1874’,
M.A. thesis, (Australian National University, 1995). Two more have since been located at the Mitchell Library, but I shall argue in chapter six that none of these cdvs were taken at Port Arthur.
and 1875 and perhaps for a brief period again some time in the early 1880s, and the Anson Brothers were well known between 1878 and 1895, nothing is known about Milner. Based on his consideration of the available evidence, Reeder concluded that ‘the evidence strongly suggests that they were made by Boyd’.627 To account for the range of studio stamps, he postulated that the Port Arthur plates might have been acquired by commercial photographers, such as Nevin, the Anson Brothers or John Watt Beattie after Port Arthur closed in 1877.628 Anson Brothers worked in Hobart until 1895 and Beattie began business in his own name in 1891 (by taking over Anson Brothers). Beattie bought up many collections of glass plates over the years, printed them and sold them under his own name, thereby causing generations of confusion among photographic historians.629 Beattie’s postcards and framed images could not have been produced until the early 1890s at the earliest. This coincided with the burgeoning of the tourist trade at Port Arthur.630 The vast majority of the cdvs are not presented as postcards, however, and Reeder felt that ‘It seems more likely that the surviving copies may have come directly from Boyd’s tenure at Port Arthur, Boyd making copies to circulate to police authorities as directed by the Colonial Secretary in 1874’.631 This hypothesis will be discussed later in this thesis.
Helen Ennis accepted Long’s and Reeder’s attribution to Boyd. Isobel Crombie attributed a cdv of convict Henry Smith to A.H. Boyd, an attribution with which she was supplied by the holder of the image, TMAG. She also referenced Helen Ennis whosupported that
Also then unknown to Reeder were the collections at the Tasmania Archive and Heritage Office and the Port Arthur Historic Site, which also include Beattie postcards.
627 Reeder, ‘The Democratic Image’, 71-2. In fact Boyd quit his post on 25 April 1874, Mercury
25 February 1874, 3.
628 Reeder, ‘The Democratic Image’, 72.
629 Some of the photographs once attributed to Beattie include those taken of Aboriginal people at
Oyster Cove by Bishop Nixon in the 1850s, before Beattie arrived in Tasmania in 1878.
630 D. Young, Making Crime Pay: The Evolution Of Convict Tourism In Tasmania, (Hobart:
Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1996), 59-83.
attribution.632 She concluded: ‘A.H. Boyd … used the camera to take an inventory of the
men incarcerated in the penal system of Tasmania … ’633
In summary, while some consideration was given by scholars to Nevin’s claim to
authorship, no writer who had carried out any detailed research seemed inclined to award the palm to him. Eight scholars have expressed an opinion through their attribution of these images. Those who have undertaken some research – Long and Reeder – find pretty definitely for Boyd. Ennis followed Long and Reeder, and Crombie took her attribution to Boyd from the TMAG catalogue. Willis remained undecided and found neither case proven. McPhee, Stilwell and Kerr plumped for Nevin, but I can find no evidence of the presentation of supporting documentation or original research on their part. Since McPhee was working with the QVMAG collection, he may have taken that information from their catalogues. Stilwell may have had access to some persuasive documentation, but no one else has sighted it and so far it cannot be found. Support for Nevin seems to rest solely on acceptance of an attribution supplied by QVMAG, which may have rested on their holding of one cdv with Nevin’s studio stamp. On balance, scholarly opinion backed by an active enquiry into the evidence favoured Boyd.
Surviving archival documents seem to support Boyd’s claim and shed further doubt on Nevin’s. Boyd was at Port Arthur between 1871 and early 1874, finishing his almost three-year tour of duty on 31 March 1874.634 There is evidence that this photographic
project was in the planning, if not actually begun, well before the date of 1874 inscribed on the back of the cartes de visite. The necessary infrastructure was in place by late 1872. In a list of work and repairs to buildings at Port Arthur, dated 6 November 1872, is an entry ‘repaired lock, photographic house’.635 On 15 July 1874, work was ordered on ’fittings at Photograph House’. The earlier works were ordered by the Commandant, rather than as was usual by the Overseer of Works, indicating Boyd’s proprietorial
632 I. Crombie, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography And Australian Culture 1919-1939,
(Melbourne: Peleus Press, 2004), 16 fn.44, 39, 44.
633 Crombie, Body Culture, 46 fn.54.
634 Tasmanian Papers 320, Reel CY4529, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. 635 Tasmanian Papers Vol. 16, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
interest.636 The evidence strongly suggests that the studio was established at Port Arthur
before November 1872. Given the nature of early photography, which required the wet- plate to be developed immediately after exposure, it must have contained both a studio space where photographs could be taken and the requisite darkroom facilities.
Unfortunately, the request for works did not give a location for this building, but a