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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.


Friday, April 8, 2011

Edwin Barnard:it takes one to know one

Excerpt from:
ABC TV (Aust) news report by Siobhan Heanue, 2 April 2011.
NB: this report contains unfactual and erroneous statements by both the journalist and interviewee.



For AUTHENTIC and ACCURATE research see this article which reviews the NLA publication Exiled (2010) with specific examples of Barnard's suppositions, prevarications and omissions, titled Thomas Francis was Photographed by T.J. Nevin on 6th February 1874 at:

http://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com/2010/10/thomas-francis-was-photographed-by-tj.html

See also:
http://prisonerpics.blogspot.com
http://prisonerpics.blogspot.com/2009/01/langley-george.html
http://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com/2007/04/anthony-trollopes-port-arthur.html
http://prisonerpics.blogspot.com/2009/01/dogherty-denis.html

And search convicts' names and Nevin's photographs at:
http://thomasnevin.wordpress.com
http://tasmanianphotographer.blogspot.com
http://prisonerpics.blogspot.com

The interviewee Edwin Barnard in this ABC news report poses here as an expert on the Tasmanian convicts photographs taken and produced by commercial and police photographer Thomas J. NEVIN in the 1870s. Original duplicates of these same mugshots held at the NLA which were made by Thomas Nevin and his brother Constable John Nevin for the police are held in other public institutions (TMAG, QVMAG, AOT, State Library of Tas) and private collections.

Langley and Dogherty are two prisoners mentioned in this excerpt from an ABC TV (Aust) news report delivered by Siobhan Heanue, 2 April 2011. Langley's and Dogherty's photos are just two of thousands of prisoner mugshots taken by the Nevin brothers at the Hobart Gaol and survive along with the hundreds of Tasmanian prisoner photographs in public collections. How Barnard can assert that Denis Dogherty never saw his own mugshot is just another example of his shallow modus operandi in presenting himself as an expert. Dogherty would have seen his own mugshot on prison and police records called up at every arraignment. Barnard is simply repeating the simplistic nuances of a faded postmodern discourse on power marshalled in the 1990s by photohistorians such as Helen Ennis and Isobel Crombie.

HIDDEN in FULL VIEW
Barnard claims to be the "author" of the recent publication featuring Nevin's prisoner mugshots titled Exiled: The Port Arthur Convict Photographs (2010) sponsored by the National Library of Australia, but the facts remain and are widely known that Barnard liberally appropriated materials three years ago from our weblogs and albums about Thomas J. NEVIN. The weblogs have presented accurate research about Nevin's police commission online since 2005 by Nevin descendants - yet Barnard used the research without due contact or courtesy in any form, not even an email. Earlier in the interview Barnard claims he "discovered" and "unearthed" these mugshots despite and in the face of their public visibility since 1977 when they were exhibited at the QVMAG, researched and curated by experts, and constant online visibility at the Archives Office Tasmania and the NLA since the early 1990s with full and unequivocal attribution to T.J. Nevin.

On April 8th, 2011, Edwin Barnard made an appearance at the National Library of Australia during a weekend conference called True Stories: Writing History. In his talk, Barnard conceded that the so-called "Port Arthur convict photographs" which feature in the NLA publication Exiled (2010) were taken at the Hobart Gaol and not at Port Arthur, though he did not explicitly name Nevin as the photographer despite the facts available (who is still arguing?), which would have redeemed him in our eyes. But then, when requested by an audience member to recite what he had written about the convict Denis Dogherty, he quoted verbatim the material we published on these weblogs way back in 2006 and duly basked in the audience's warm response. It's a sad comment, but there are people such as Barnard (and others like Julia Clark) who crave love and validation through coveting the legacy of others.



T.J. Nevin’s mugshot of prisoner Denis Dogherty (spelled Dougherty by Edwin Barnard in Exiled (2010), page 64.
Photo © KLW NFC 2011 ARR.

See the full interview from Siobhan Heanue at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQF2xFIomQ0

First published on Friday, April 08, 2011
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