Prisoner James HARRISON

MULTIPLE COPIES and DUPLICATES
FALSIFICATION of PHOTOGRAPHER ATTRIBUTION

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery copy



TMAG Ref: Q15603
TITLE: '[Convict] "125" "99 / James Harrison per Rodney 1 / Taken at Port Arthur 1874".
DATE: 1874
PHOTOGRAPHER: Thomas J NEVIN

Exhibited in the 1970s at the AGNSW and QVMAG as the work of professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin, the TMAG deliberately falsified a photographer attribution of fifty or more of these 1870s mugshots to pander to descendants of the Port Arthur prison Commandant, non-photographer A. H. Boyd when Elspeth Wishart removed them from the QVMAG in 1983 to include them in an exhibition at the Port Arthur penal heritage site. At the close of the exhibition, they were deposited at the TMAG instead when they should have been returned to their original holdings in the QVMAG, thereby causing a lie to be perpetuated about A. H. Boyd as well as the loss of several of these rare photographs through dispersal to other state and national public institutions.

The National Library of Australia copy



The NLA catalogue caption was devised from the verso inscription:
"James Harrison, per Rodney, taken at Port Arthur, 1874."

The Archives Office Tasmania copy
A hard copy and a paper copy are held at the Archives Office of Tasmania:




Webshot: A soft paper copy of the QVMAG mugshot of James Harrison held at the Archives Office of Tasmania Ref: PH30/1/3261

 Caption: "James Harrison, convict transported per Rodney 1. Photograph taken a Port Arthur by Thomas Nevin"

The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery copy



Prisoner Harrison, James per Rodney
QVMAG Collection: Ref : 1983_p_0163-0176

This is a black and white reprint from Thomas Nevin's sepia print (1873) produced at the QVMAG in 1985 by Chris Long along with 39 others for reasons known only to himself, since they serve no purpose. The several hundred mounted cdvs which T. J. Nevin also produced for prison and police records (1874) are held at the National Library of Australia, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Archives Office of Tasmania, and the Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW..

James Harrison: Police Records



James Harrison per Rodney 1 was sentenced to 10 yrs on 5 July 1866 for manslaughter and discharged from the Hobart Gaol on 26 November 1873 (aged 43) where he was photographed by T. J. Nevin on discharge.


First published on
Categories & Tags: , ,

Australia's FIRST MUGSHOTS

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 solely 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 government contractor, 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 when appearing at The Mayor's Court. The Nevin brothers produced over a thousand originals and duplicates of Tasmanian prisoners, the bulk now lost or destroyed. The three hundred extant mugshots were the random estrays salvaged - and reproduced in many instances- for sale at Beattie's local convictaria museum in Hobart and at interstate exhibitions associated with the fake convict ship Success in the early 1900s. The mugshots were selected on the basis of the prisoner's notoriety from the Supreme Court trial registers (Rough Calendar), the Habitual Criminals Registers (Gaol Photo Books), warrant forms, and police gazettes records of the 1870s-1880s. The earliest taken on government contract by T. J. Nevin date from 1872. The police records sourced here are from the weekly police gazettes which were called (until 1884) Tasmania Reports of Crime Information for Police 1871-1885. J. Barnard, Gov't Printer.