Prison documentary photo of the Clarkes 1867 (unattrib)
The details given for this photograph indicate that the photographer in 1867 was employed by police to provide documentary proof that the Clarke brothers were safely in chains inside Braidwood Gaol (Victoria). The decorative backdrop, however, suggests two possible oddities:
(a) either a photographer in 1867 with artistic inclinations – did he paint those trees lining the gully onto a cloth, bring it into the gaol, and then set up a corner resembling a conventional photographic studio? The visual codes here duplicate those of the period’s studio-based commercial photography.
(b) or the copyist of the 1900 version has superimposed the original shot over another photograph of a treescape.
Unlike the “mug-shot” records of prisoners long incarcerated in Victoria and Tasmania of the period, for example, Thomas Nevin’s series of Port Arthur convicts dated 1874, and the prisoners’ cartes taken from the Public Records Office of Victoria for their “Forgotten Faces” exhibition, this is a threshold image. Signs of the outside world are still on their clothes, in the manner of holding their hats and in their gaze direct to camera.
Courtesy the State Library of NSW (PICMAN).
Title : Thomas and John Clarke, bushrangers, from a photograph taken in Braidwood gaol (Thomas was shot in the arm)
Date of Work : ca. 1900 (copy of original albumen photoprint, May 1867)
Call No: DL Pd 788
Forgotten Faces
The earliest image of a Victorian prisoner in the Public Record Office Victoria’s holdings is dated 1853. Englishman William Jones the 6th, a shoemaker, was convicted in Castlemaine on 9 June 1853 for ‘robbery with violence’. He was sentenced to 10 years hard labour on the roads. There are no other prison photographs from this early volume.
The first photographic evidence of Chinese prisoners in the prison registers appears in 1863. Gee Dee was sentenced in 1860 to two years imprisonment for robbing a store. In October 1863, at 40 years of age, he was convicted of murder for the brutal stabbing of William Humffries in his Bright store. It was then that a photograph was placed on his record.Gee Dee’s death sentence was commuted to hard labour for life, with the first three years in irons. He was released after 21 years, aged 61, was paid £5.9.11 and given a ‘suit of clothes’.”
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