Episode 307 - Who was John Watt Beattie?
This article is more of a director’s commentary than my usual cut and paste of the script. I’ve included some comment and material that I left out of the video for space reasons.
I wanted to make this episode because I’d made one early on in my YouTube journey and I’ve learned a few things about Beattie (and filmmaking) since then and thought I could do a better job of it now. I also wanted to get some 19th century, Victorian, citizen scientist, Jonathan Creek vibes into an episode.
I would have loved to use Danse Macabre as the music, but I couldn’t find a royalty free version. I think the music I settled on is pretty good. I’m also aware that music behind my voiceover makes the video harder to watch for some people. I spent a lot of time getting the music as quiet as possible and the vocals as clear as possible. I don’t want to leave the music out because it adds to the mood. It helps if you have real speakers for your computer rather than the tiny internal ones most desktop computers have. Good speakers can reproduce more than one sound at a time and keep them all clear, I learned that from my days at the HiFi shop in the 80’s. I’d love some feedback from those affected.
I also had the opportunity to use the same voice actor (for Beattie) as I used in Convict Days. He’s a lovely gent from Scotland and I think his voice is close to what I think Beattie would have sounded like. Despite coming here at 22 and living until 74 years of age, I don’t think that accent ever goes away completely. I have a few Scottish friends and I can hear their accent. I love it.
Beattie ran a macabre museum, he brought tourists to Tasmania and advised the State Government. But I remember him for another reason – the incredible collection of photographs he left behind. I inherited that collection, and the Forgotten Tasmania video series is based on Beattie’s photos. I’m the luckiest duck that gets to take care of that collection now. I love it and it’s an honour.
Tasmania welcomed the camera to our island over 180 years ago (1840 I believe, although definitely by 1846 as that was when Thomas Bock was practising as a photographer in Campbell Street Hobart). One of the great photographers of the 19th century was John Watt Beattie. My grandfather worked for Beattie and bought the business when Beattie died. But who was John Watt Beattie?
To answer that we need to go back to Scotland in the 1870s and look at his father, John Beattie senior, an elder in the West Free Church in Aberdeen. I tried to understand the split in the church and even went back to the 1500s split with the Catholic Church and the formation of the Church of England, the Protestants and the many, many off shoots. It was a rat hole that swallowed a day and yielded little to nothing that I wanted to talk about in the video, but I’ve got to do these things, it’s the way my brain is wired. My conclusion – it’s complicated!
Beattie senior was earning his living as a portrait photographer. He is listed as a house painter a little earlier on. The church features highly in his life and a new minister was appointed against his wishes. He was so affected by this minister’s views on music in church that he decided to uproot his family and move to the colonies to put enough distance between himself and the dreaded music. There’s no mention (that I could find) of what the music was, but I have to imagine it was bagpipes, oh please let it have been bagpipes!
His eyesight seems to have been giving him problems. One night while John was reading to him from a book about sheep farming in Australia, Beattie senior had an epiphany and decided to send young John (22 at the time) to spy out the land and find them a new home on the other side of the world. The dutiful son arrived in Melbourne armed with letters of introduction and made his investigations both in Victoria and Tasmania. He was soundly told that times were tough and businesses were failing, but nothing would sway Beattie senior and so out to Tasmania they came. In 1879 they moved into a house called Murray Hall in New Norfolk and they farmed sheep on 320 acres of land on nearby My Lloyd.
I had previously (wrongly) assumed that Murray Hall was on Mt Lloyd, but a wonderful viewer corrected me and even had pictures of the old house and the one that replaced it. Both are gone now and the site is on the Willow Court campus. The New Norfolk Distillery is roughly where the house would have been. I found a good history of the house and the Murray family that built it. It was certainly a gentleman’s family residence, and I can see how Beattie Senior would have picked it.
The exact location is tricky to figure out. The land title talks about so many chains on the north east side and so many chains on the south west side and frankly, I couldn’t get my head around it. But the address comes out to the Willow Court side, so that’s as close as I needed. There is a house on the other corner that looks surprisingly similar, but it’s a 1970s build and I don’t see how it fits with all those chains and compass points.
Brian and I had an easy time filming there, I even had the drone up to see the top down view. I decided to re-use the footage that I shot some years ago of Mt Lloyd. Firstly it was good footage but mostly I’m a tad nervous driving up there. The place is beautiful to be sure, but the locals like their privacy.
John describes the land as beautiful, but that bushland clearing was not to his taste. This is our first hint of his conservationist views to come.
In 1879, he made a photographic expedition to Lake St Clair. He borrowed his father’s horse, hired a mail cart and with two other gentlemen they set off for the lake. There he exposed gelatine dry plates. The previous technology was the wet plate system, but with his dry plate camera Beattie was able to go places never photographed before. There was no need to carry chemicals and a darkroom tent, but this was no point and shoot, Beattie had to understand the light, the emulsion, the chemistry and every aspect of the process and the camera weighed 27Kg. I read one of his diary entries (I assume that’s what it was) and he lamented that if he’d used a half plate camera, he might have got more done in his life! Given the hundreds of thousands of photos he’s assumed to have taken, I don’t think the camera slowed him down at all. But it is important to remember that the early film was a sheet of glass about A4 size, and it was kept in a wooden frame to keep the light out.
What we don’t have is anything on who owned the camera and where it came from. Was it his father’s or did he buy it along the way to Tasmania? I do know that Beattie didn’t invent any of it, but he was quick to adopt new technology. The 1904 CirKut clockwork rotating panorama camera was a great example. Beattie loved that format, or at least I love Beattie’s work with that format. The panoramas digitise at around 2 gigapixels and I can zoom in and see really fine details. (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirkut_(camera))
One of the men, Mr Alex Riddock, offered to put up two hundred pounds (that’s like $200,000 in today’s money) to start John in business if he would come to Hobart. John declined that offer. I’m now thinking that if the family could afford to move out here, buy cameras, have servants and hire farm hands, then they might have been fairly well off. He possibly didn’t need the money. He ended up buying out the Ansons.
His time on the farm made young John Watt Beattie grow up fast. I get the feeling Port Arthur had a great impact on him and he had first hand access to men who had been prisoners at Port Arthur because the workers on the farm were former Port Arthur convicts. He describes the experience as being “soaked in lore and the romance of Port Arthur”. I like to think that Beattie’s accounts of Port Arthur are fairly accurate because of this access. His 1906 lecture and the Port Arthur photos and slides were my fodder growing up. My late brother (William) produced a book version of that lantern slide lecture called “Convict Days of Port Arthur”. I inherited a pallet load of the books and they sell really well at Port Arthur. You can also buy them from the web site and in some shops, including Winnings and Sorell Antiques.
I made a video version of the book, available here; https://youtu.be/Uwf-jRn8X7E
In 1882 one of the Anson brothers made the long journey from Hobart Town to Murray Hall by horse and cart and offered John a position in their photographic studio. John accepted and he moved to Hobart to make his fortune. Around this time, John’s father and most of the family went back to Scotland, but they would visit Tasmania again.
I’d always believed my late father’s (Alberto aka Bill or AA) view that the 19th century trip from England to Hobart by ship took 6 months and was perilous, with a good chance of death. Dad wasn’t a historian or even a scholar so imagine my surprise when I find that the trip actually took around 6 weeks and whilst not as safe as modern travel, there was a good chance that you’d make it alive. Death being possible but not inevitable. Dad was a great photographer.
Another viewer found the ship records of the Beattie family going back and forth from Scotland to Tasmania. They went back after he moved out of home and they came out again for John’s wedding.
John worked for the Ansons until 1891 when he bought out the last surviving brother and renamed the business Beattie’s Studio. Over 130 years later, the business is still operating under that name. I do get a bit lump in the throat over that statement. As a kid I had zero interest in being a photographer. I’ve told the story of my time in the dark room and as Santa. Luckily, my brother let me come to the collection at my own pace and gave me guidance on how he thought the photos should look. I found my own passion for the collection.
As well as the Anson Brothers body of work, Beattie also received the photographic archives of previous photographers; Samuel Clifford, Charles Woolley and others. Amongst those are incredibly significant pictures; Port Arthur with people living there and of course “The Last Tasmanians”. Politics aside, if you look at the paintings by Thomas Bock (c1831) and compare them to the Woolley photos (1866), you will see the changes in the indigenous people. Remember the settlers nearly starved to death because they thought that there was nothing to eat here and they fed abalone to the pigs. They brought sheep and shot wallaby’s for fur. I wish they had adopted the indigenous people’s diet instead of imposing their diet on the indigenous people.
Beattie had success almost immediately he took over the business. He moved from the small building in Elizabeth Street to Cleburne House in Murray Street, a 3-storey building to house his museum, library, and a huge studio that could hold 80 people. There were separate laboratories for chemicals and daylight printing on the roof. It was a serious enterprise.
I spent a lot of time in that building as a kid. Of course it was the re-built version and part of the Cat and Fiddle Arcade by the 60’s. My video on Cat and Fiddle is one of the most viewed ones.
Beattie became a prolific wilderness photographer long before anyone coined that term.
“I have been essentially an outdoor man, I love the bush and nothing gives me greater delight than to stand on some high land and look out on a wild array of our giant mountains.”
Beattie’s cousin, Jack Cato claims Beattie regarded the West Coast as his true home. Beattie photographed most of it. He may not have been the first to all of it, but he is certainly the most well-known and more of his work has survived than of the other photographers of his time.
He married Emily Cox Cato on 28 October 1886 in Hobart, Tasmania. His father and family came out from Scotland to celebrate. In 1895 their first daughter (Jean Franklin Beattie) was born followed in 1898 by their second daughter (Muriel Denison Beattie), Franklin and Denison being the names of Governors of Tasmania. I believe one daughter worked for the railway office and one went to India.
I traced Beattie’s family tree, the links to the Cato family and his descendants. His siblings went back to Scotland, but he clearly loved the Cato family and spent a lot of time with them. The house he died in belonged to a Cato. He was meeting his wife there for dinner, a regular occurrence.
Beattie kept a museum and lending library. This didn’t sit well with everyone. I recall reading a letter to the newspaper from a visitor to the state who lamented the private ownership of such a fine collection of colonial Tasmanian artefacts. What they missed was that Beattie was the one who bought them when the government wanted to get rid of them.
Beattie promoted Port Arthur, collecting relics in a time when Tasmanians wanted to forget or hide our state’s convict past. Having a convict in your ancestry (known as "the hated stain” of convictism) was something to be ashamed of. In the lead up to the filming of "For the term of his natural life” in 1926 there was much public talk of covering up the convict past. The Attorney General (A G Ogilvie) even suggested that the Censorship Board ban the screening of the film in Tasmania.
In 1921 Beattie spoke out against the destruction of records. He acquired original pardons, tickets of leave and other documents. Records of the convict past were suppressed until the 1970’s. I have dozens of these documents, thanks to Beattie’s collection.
I recall Dad sold a few pardons in the 1970s. The well healed descendants of convicts felt the need to obtain these documents. He never advertised them and wasn’t really in the business of dealing in them, but was approached on the quiet.
Beattie was a patron of the arts and art collector. He purchased paintings by Gould, Forrest and other noted painters of the day. He worked closely with Haughton Forrest, commissioning paintings of the past to recreate the things he couldn’t photograph.
Beattie was an early tourism promoter. He was in the right place at the right time. There was a lack of photos to go with the wonderful things that were being written and said about Tasmania. This created the perfect market conditions and Beattie worked that market well. Beattie was a founding member of the Tasmanian Tourism Board, a member of The Royal Society of Tasmania, a member of the Minerva Club, a member of the Field Naturalists Club and a charter member of the Hobart Lodge of the Theosophical Society. It seems he was interested in everything from science, history and the occult.
Before there were movies, Beattie had a travelling slideshow. He made lantern slides of some of his photos and toured the state giving talks he had written, illustrated with the slides. At least 6 of these are known and we have booklets of the speeches. These lantern slides spread around the world and were common in Britain.
From his biography by Michael Roe, "Making a business of Tasmania never corrupted Beattie. While sometimes over-imaginative in historical reconstructions with pen and camera, he had a scholarly sense. His accounts of Port Arthur, for example, steered between sensation and sentimentality, and he confronted the horror of European-Tasmanian relations. 'For about 30 years this ancient people held their ground bravely against the invaders of their beautiful domain', he wrote of the Aboriginals."
Beattie’s photos were used on Tasmanian postage stamps from 1899-1912. 8 stamps were made, 5 of which had Beattie’s photos. They were used to promote the state and tourism. My picture framer and retired ABC TV producer, Robert Klein, kindly scanned the stamps for me. He purchased some a while ago to sell framed, with the original stamp and an enlargement. Cool idea. I stole that idea and made the two-up views in the video, the original Beattie photo and the stamp version, side by side.
Beattie had become such an expert on the West Coast that the Tasmanian parliament paid him to answer Members questions on matters of road and rail planning, water and timber resources and the likes.
Beattie was a conservationist, speaking out against industrial development on the west coast. In a paper to Parliament in 1908 Beattie says;
“Apart from the aesthetic side of the Gordon’s attractions, its scientific aspect, as contributing a unique display of our West Coast flora, must become apparent to all and should alone warrant beyond question its rigid protection against axe and fire.”
His lobbying efforts were successful in protecting the banks of the Gordon River. He was also in favour of exploring for minerals. This is an interesting balance and not something we seem to have right even today.
In 1906 Beattie set off on the Southern Cross to explore the Pacific. He spent three months at sea and returned with thousands of photos. He visited numerous islands such as Mare, Raga, Vila, Vanua Lava, the Torres Islands, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji and many more. Of note was his brief stop in the Solomons where he visited the Lever Brothers plantation and met some ladies named Kitchen. I reckon they went on to become Lever and Kitchen, the company behind brands such as Ponds, Dove, Sunsilk, Sunlight, Lipton and Dollar Shave Company, to name a few.
In 2020, just before the pandemic hit, we went to Vanuatu for a holiday and re-trace of Beattie’s last photo in the region. I made a video; https://youtu.be/8zh9P1_bxpo
In 1911 Roald Amundsen won the race to be first to the south pole. He sailed to Hobart and the only man he would trust to process his historic photo was John Watt Beattie. The only known surviving original print is in the National Library and made by Beattie himself. We have copies of the negatives in the collection today.
In the story-telling workshops that I’ve done, they always tell me that I need an antagonist in the story. And there is one. I just never mention them, until now… The descendants of a certain Tasmanian photographer maintain a web site about their ancestor. I get the impression that they tar Beattie with the same brush as Joshua Anson. He stole an image from H H Baily (who isn’t the photographer in question) and was jailed for the crime. The Anson brothers started their business after this incarceration and Beattie came along later. To avoid the risk of legal action (from this descendant, and they have a history of legal action) I have chosen not to write anything about their ancestor. If you ignore the venom, their web site is a great tribute and record of the work of that photographer and I can’t add anything meaningful to that story, so I don’t. But there’s your antagonist. And now you know where the next paragraph came from.
Beattie was not perfect. His purchase and marketing of photographs under his own name when he hadn’t taken them himself upset some people. I don’t think Beattie ever claimed to have taken these photos, just that he owned them.
Beattie wasn’t into self-promotion or driving his business out of reach of the ordinary customer. Much of Beattie’s story is told by Jack Cato, who even suggests that Robert Louis Stevenson may have been inspired to write Treasure Island after seeing Beattie’s work. I think this is unlikely. Note that both Beattie and Stevenson were Scottish and our family is Stephenson and we’re not Scottish – that I know of.
I’ll confess to being a bit harsh with Jack Cato. He was Beattie’s younger cousin by marriage. He idolised John and wrote about him in his book “The Story of the Camera in Australia” (1955, 25 years after Beattie passed) I’m not sure if they had the same journalistic standards for history then or not. Heck, my own skills in journalism and history are entirely self taught. I get things wrong – often. I fall for the trap of believing one source instead of verifying with another source. In my defence I don’t have a university education. I do think Jack overstated Beattie’s accomplishments at times. But Jack was a good photographer. He ran Beattie’s Studio for a time after JW’s death – at least that’s what my Dad told me. The Internet does not support this theory.
Beattie’s health seems to have declined around 1925 and he approached Arch Stephenson, a portrait photographer working for Vandyke Studio in Launceston. Arch moved the family to Hobart, joined Beattie’s Studio and went on to purchase the business in 1933. It’s been in the Stephenson family ever since.
The 1927 sale of the Beattie Museum was a long winded, politically charged affair. Launceston decided to invest in the collection to attract tourists. It was eventually broken up into two main parts, one going to the Queen Victoria Museum. Hobart refused to purchase the remaining collection for numerous reasons until later when a benefactor provided funds to TMAG.
On the 24th of June, 1930 John Beattie visited the Cato household before leaving to meet up with his wife at another Cato family member’s house in Sandy Bay. Shortly after arriving there he collapsed in a chair and passed away, an apparent heart attack. He was 74 (I think I said 71 in the video? 1930-1856=74). He is buried at Cornelian Bay cemetery.
My friend Dr Jim Palfreyman has photographed the Beattie grave, but I haven’t visited yet. Arch and Florence Stephenson are buried at Cornelian Bay too and I do visit their grave.
There are history books (by Cato) that say Beattie’s collection was totally destroyed by a fire in 1933, but that is not true. I’m sorry if I get a little ranty in the video. There are two shipping containers full of darkroom and photographic equipment, enlargers, cameras, lights and of course the original negatives, and lots of that dates before 1933. I rest my case!
One day I hope to re-open the Beattie’s Studio Photographic Museum, showing his collection of photos and all the equipment he left behind. In the meantime, about ½ the photos have been digitised and are available to view, free of charge, at www.BeattiesStudio.com
I’m working on a new version of the web site. I started with Zenfolio in 2013 and they are still the only ones that can host the collection the way I want it published. I’d have to write my own from scratch to do any better. Given the technology they use wasn’t new in 2013 and hasn’t been updated since, I have a love hate relationship with them. And in all fairness, they aren’t in the business of hosting photographic museums, they are in the business of hosting websites for modern practising wedding and event photographers. So I should give them a break. The best news is that they have an upgrade and I’ll be moving to it as soon as I can.
There are books and displays of Beattie photos for sale at;
Winnings Newsagency
317 Elizabeth Street
North Hobart
And
Sorell Antiques
15 Somerville Street
Sorell
Cheers,
John Stephenson