John Watt Beattie (1859-1930) emigrated from Scotland to Tasmania in 1878. He soon studied photography in Tasmania, becoming the Tasmania’s Government’s official photographer in 1896. In 1906, he was invited by Bishop Cecil Wilson document the Melanesian Mission center but came away with much more.
He starts with a general overview of the island, landscapes showing the development of several sights highlighting now the heritage listed buildings including Government House, Military Barracks, St Barnabas Chapel, the Engineers office, Commissariat Store and ruins of the prison cells.
Norfolk Island was considered the headquarters of the Melanesian Mission. Young people from the surrounding area would come for an education taking back what they had learnt. They would stay for around 6 years visiting home every six months. Beattie capture images of these young people in different scenes where European dress, having picnics, hanging out around the wooden buildings and gates of the property and sitting a tables(either a food hall or school room) as well as looking out over vistas of the cemetery and other valleys and hills with buildings in the distance.
Some Australian portraits of important Norfolk Island figures are included: Reverent John Coleridge Patteson(1827-1871) an important figure in the mission during the 1860s. He was vocal about his disapproval of forced labour for the Islanders. & Captain Thomas Capel Tilley(1830-1900) who captained the Southern Cross during the 1860s, later acting as an agent for the mission for 37 years.
He documents groups of people, students, Islander boys and girls as well as Australia families showing very different lives.
Perhaps the most dramatic and gruesome images are the series on the Whaling Industry Beattie captures men standing in a boat wielding different weapons to kill whales as well as the killing and dividing the whale blubber and taking it back to the Whaling Industry Station which at the time were a couple of timber structures on the stone beach.
While some of these images have turned up in my research at a few institutions they are rare with very few turning up on the market in the last two decades.
2 albums. Half leather and cloth with gilt title and decorations. Measuring 40 x 30cm. Boards with cloth hinges, binding loose and cover coming off. Cloth coming away from covers.
166 albumen prints measuring 20 x 15.5cm. Many have labels printed on the photographs with the location and Beattie Hobart. Many have numbers including the images which were not labelled. The unlabelled images are often in a series of images for example several images of a man whaling with harpoon, gunbomb etc. Pages and images are foxed and some images have faded over time.
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Sunday 27th September – Timed auction 12 midday
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