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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.


Monday, May 4, 2009

Lee, William



National Library of Australia Catalogue
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.
Subject Lee, William.

The NLA has attributed this image to the copyists Searle and Beattie, ca. 1915. William Lee was photographed by Thomas Nevin on discharge , 12th September 1874. Lee was admitted to various pauper institutions and released on several occasions over a period of ten years.




POLICE RECORDS for William Lee



William Lee per Neptune, aged 78 years, last tried August 1872 for being idle and disorderly, discharged on 1st October 1873 from the Brickfields Depot, Hobart.



William Lee, pauper, discharged from Brickfields Depot, Hobart 12 September 1874



William Lee, pauper, discharged 29 January 1875

Source: Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1875. James Barnard Government Printer.


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First published on Monday, May 04, 2009
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