Prisoner Henry CAVANAGH



NLA Catalogue (incorrect information)
Title Henry Cavanagh at Port Arthur, Tasmania, 1874 [picture]
Date 1874.
Extent 1 photograph : albumen ; 10.5 x 6.5 cm.
Published in 1909

Henry Cavanagh was sent to Port Arthur in December 1873. His name does not appear in the House of Assembly Journals, Nominal Return of Prisoners sent to Port Arthur since its transfer to Colonial Government in 1871, tabled in Parliament on 11th June, 1873. He was discharged before that date, on the 14th June 1872 after sentencing of one month in Hobart, and arraigned in Launceston nine months later, on the 3rd September 1873. He was received at the Hobart Gaol, sentenced to 6 years, and photographed there on 17th September 1873 by T. J. Nevin.

The numbering on the verso of this carte, according to the NLA notes is "306". This is an archivist's number which could date from 1909-1916, sourced from John Watt Beattie's "Port Arthur Museum" located in Hobart (and not at Port Arthur), or from the 1930s when the QVMAG acquired Beattie's Collection, or from the 1960s with the Gunson Collection acquisition by the NLA, or from the 1980s when the QVMAG copied and/or distributed more than seventy (70) of these cdvs of Tasmanian prisoners to the Port Arthur site, the NLA, the AOT, and the TMAG etc.

POLICE RECORDS



Henry Cavanagh from Victoria, 18 years old, charged at Burnie, Tasmania on 4th May 1872, with being on premises for an unlawful purpose, was discharged from the Hobart Gaol on 14 June 1872.



But a year or so later, Henry Cavanagh, aged 19 yrs, was arraigned at the Recorder's Court Launceston on 3 September 1873 and sentenced to 6 years for stealing a posted letter and uttering. He was admitted to the Hobart Gaol (Campbell St Gaol) and photographed by T. J. Nevin on 17th September 1873.

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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 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.