Please note: Below each image held at the National Library of Australia is their catalogue batch edit which gives the false impression that all these "convict portraits" were taken because these men were transported convicts per se (i.e before cessation in 1853), and that they might have been photographed as a one-off amateur portfolio by a prison official at the Port Arthur prison in 1874, which they were not. Any reference to the Port Arthur prison official A. H. Boyd on the NLA catalogue records is an error, a PARASITIC ATTRIBUTION with no basis in fact. The men in these images were photographed in the 1870s-1880s because they were repeatedly sentenced as habitual offenders whose mugshots were taken on arrest, trial, arraignment, incarceration and/or discharge by police and prisons photographer T. J. Nevin at the Supreme Court and adjoining Hobart Gaol with his brother Constable John Nevin, and at the Municipal Police Office, Hobart Town Hall. The Nevin brothers photographed more than 3000 prisoners, the bulk now lost or destroyed. These extant mugshots are random estrays salvaged or selected on the basis of notoreity in the early 1900s from the Supreme Court trial registers, the Habitual Criminals Registers, warrant forms, and police gazettes records of the 1870s-80s. The earliest date from 1871. The police records are sourced from the weekly police gazettes which were called (until 1884) Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1885. J. Barnard, Gov't Printer.


Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Jeffries, Henry (aka Thomas)


NLA Catalogue
Part of collection: Convict portraits, Port Arthur, 1874.; Gunson Collection file 203/7/54.; Title from inscription on verso.; Inscription: "299 ; Henry Jeffries, native, taken at Port Arthur, 1874"--In ink on verso.; Condition: Some foxing.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4594564.

POLICE RECORDS



Henry Jeffries aka Thomas Jeffries, was tried in the Supreme Court Launceston on 1st September 1873, sentenced to 8 yrs, transferred to the Hobart Gaol when he was photographed by T.J. Nevin on being received, and discharged 25 September 1878. He may have been photographed again by T.J. Nevin at the Hobart Municipal Police Office on release.