The Camera, the Convict and the Criminal Life1
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1 ‘Through a Glass, Darkly’: the Camera, the Convict and the Criminal Life1 Julia Christabel Clark B.A. (Hons.) Thomas Fleming Taken at Port Arthur 1873-4 Photographer: probably A.H. Boyd Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D) University of Tasmania November 2015 1 ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ 1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Bible. 2 This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis, nor does the thesis contain any material that infringes copyright. This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Julia C. Clark, 14 November 2015 3 ABSTRACT A unique series of convict portraits was created at Tasmania’s Port Arthur penal station in 1873 and 1874. While these photographs are often reproduced, their author remained unidentified, their purpose unknown. The lives of their subjects also remained unexamined. This study used government records, contemporary newspaper reportage, convict memoirs, historical research and modern criminological theory to identify the photographer, to discover the purpose and use of his work, and to develop an understanding of the criminal careers of these men. The photographer was probably the penultimate commandant of Port Arthur, Adolarius Humphrey Boyd. Rather than representing the entire inmate population at the time of the station’s closure, the project photographed only the men who were probably regarded as a risk to the community. The purpose of these photographs was assumed to be associated with policing but, unlike the practice in Britain and Europe, this turned out not to be the case. Instead, these images were adhered to each man’s Hobart Gaol record. Tasmanian police refused to adopt the practice of circulating images of offenders, claiming that their local knowledge was sufficient. This confidence was misplaced. Most of these men were arrested by members of their own community, exploding the myth of mateship. In asking why these men continually reoffended, I developed criteria based on modern theories of recidivism, and tested the life experience of these men against them. I found that this group of men met all the pre-conditions developed by criminologists for recidivism. In Britain and Tasmania they were chronically disadvantaged. In Tasmania they were brutalised as convicts, tainted forever by their time at Port Arthur and, as a result, rejected by society as emancipists. The criminal sub-culture, defiantly opposed to conventional standards of respectability, offered them acceptance. These photographs played their part in a society and a regime fated to create recidivists. They proved to their subjects, and to the world, that the subjects were outcasts. Almost 150 years later, they continue to affirm the criminal identity of these former Port Arthur inmates. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank my supervisors Prof. Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Assoc. Prof. Stefan Petrow for their unfailing help, encouragement and enthusiasm for this project. I am particularly grateful for Hamish’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the convict period and his guidance towards the right questions to ask, even though I was reluctant to ask them if they involved statistics. And for Stefan’s wide-ranging knowledge of the later colonial period, and for his eagle-eyed editing, especially his insistence that I not start sentences with ‘And’. Hugely grateful thanks also go to Sylvia Carr, then Pictures Reference Librarian at the National Library of Australia: Alan Davies, then Curator of Photography at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales: Vicki Farmery, Manager of the Photograph Collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart: Susan Hood, Resource Centre Co-ordinator at the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority and her then assistant Ken Lee: Chris Long, photographic historian: Rhonda Hamilton, then Librarian, at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston: Brian Rieusset, then Curator of the Penitentiary Chapel, Hobart: Kim Simpson, then Assistant History Curator at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. They all contributed their enormous expertise with unfailing generosity and good humour and I cannot thank them enough. This project has been going on for so long that many of these wonderful people have now either retired or moved on to new positions, and I wish them all the best. Those who remain continue to support and assist research like mine, which indeed would be impossible without their deep and broad knowledge. In this regard I would particularly like to thank Susan Hood, who has been involved since the beginning and has never flagged in her interest and support, even though I have tested her patience sorely at times! I would also like to thank Tony Marshall and Ian Pearce at the Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office, who answered weird research queries with great forbearance. The Director of the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Stephen Large, and 5 the Directors of Conservation Peter Romey and Jane Harrison have all generously permitted me to pursue this passion in work time. Prof. Philippa Mein Smith picked up yet more typos and guided me to a final submission. I thank them all. 6 CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Table of contents 6 Preamble 7 Introduction 8 Chapter 1: Through a glass, darkly: convict photographs in their historical context 11 Chapter 2: The convict stain: anatomising recidivism 29 Chapter 3: ‘. rendering our criminal procedures more perfect’, criminal photography in Britain, 1840-90 58 Chapter 4: ‘. a police system without [photography] is obviously incomplete’: criminal photography in the Australian colonies 110 Chapter 5: ‘…a mania for Amateur photography’: the authorship of the Port Arthur photographs 136 Chapter 6: ‘Well-known here as a daring burglar’: policing Tasmania 173 Chapter 7: ‘I always worked hard for my living but hunger drove me to it’: life after Port Arthur 205 Chapter 8: ‘He bore a very bad character’: chained to the criminal life 246 Chapter 9: ‘They belonged to that class…that might be called incorrigible…’: Tasmanian society and the Port Arthur man 277 Conclusion 320 Appendix 1: Sources of images of men photographed At Port Arthur 324 Appendix 2: Pre-transportation profiles of men transported to Port Arthur 334 Bibliography 340 7 PREAMBLE While walking down a street in a poor area of Calcutta in 1972, I saw a small crowd gathered around a shiny new billboard. On the left hand side of the picture it featured a couple with two children; all were well-fed, well-dressed and looked pleased with themselves. On the other side stood a couple with six children; all were dressed in rags and looked undernourished and depressed. I asked a little boy of about ten what it meant. He explained carefully that the couple on the left had put all their efforts into obtaining worldly goods, and so had only had two children, and one a useless girl at that, to support them in their old age. The other family, while poor now, could look forward to a secure old age because they had three sons. This was obviously not the message that the executives of the advertising agency, probably based in swank offices far from this slum, intended to send. For them, limiting the size of families meant prosperity, health and security. Those at whom the campaign was aimed, however, were not persuaded. While they understood perfectly well what the campaign was trying to say, it was not a message that had any value or meaning for them, and so they had ‘read’ it according to their own world view. It struck me then that photographs must be read in the same way that we read documents, within their own contexts, and that we must also bring to that reading an awareness of our own theoretical position. It was that Damascene moment that ultimately led to this research. 8 INTRODUCTION As the Port Arthur penal station was being broken up and its inmates transferred to various institutions in Hobart, someone decided to take photographs of some of the last remaining men. These photographs are now very familiar to anyone interested in Tasmanian convict history but, despite their wide currency, they remain shrouded in mystery. The first question to be asked is who took them? Looking for the answer, I will investigate the claims of the two main candidates, the penultimate Commandant and enthusiastic amateur photographer, Adolarius Humphrey Boyd, and Thomas Nevin, a professional photographer known to have done work at Hobart Gaol. Why were they taken? In Britain, Europe and in the other Australian colonies such ‘mug shots’ were used to identify suspected offenders. Was this the case in Tasmania, and if not, why not? How did police identify offenders otherwise? The subjects of these images were men who had been sent thousands of miles across the globe to provide free, or cheap, labour, in a world very different from the one in which they had grown up. They spent many years, sometimes almost their whole adult lives, in and out of gaols of various kinds, and endured appalling punishments. Given the boundless fields of new opportunity to which they were delivered, what went wrong for them? Were they bad men, or was the system bad? To answer that question, I will use modern criminological theory that addresses the issue of recidivism to illuminate, and to reflect upon, their historical experiences.