Time after time
Digital technology can pull more detail from an old photographic plate than was ever seen before. So when John Stephenson viewed an 1816 image of Hobart from the same spot a century later — one of thousands he is now curating — he says it was the closest
John Watt Beattie’s photographs of early Tasmania are considered to be one of the best visual records of historical images of the state, from the late 1800s to early 1900s. Following his death in 1930, his massive collection of photographic plates and other historical artefacts was divided between the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart.
But his Hobart photography business lived on, sold into the hands of Arch Stephenson, and it continued to operate under the name of Beattie’s Studio until it eventually shut in 1993, by which time it was said to be the oldest photographic business operating in Australia. Arch’s son Bill followed him into the business, and so did Bill’s son William. But the two big museums did not get everything. There was still a vast amount of stuff in the studio’s storage rooms, including historical documents and thousands of old photographic plates and negatives.
When the Stephensons were packing up the studio, from its final location in the Cat and Fiddle Arcade, they moved all the old inventory to Bill’s home, and later into William’s home. And the treasure trove of photographs they have in their private collection would surely be the envy of any museum.
John Stephenson, another son of Bill and brother to William, says nobody is quite sure why such a large portion of Beattie’s collection was not handed to either museum in the 1930s, but he and William take their responsibility to care for it very seriously.
“In 2013 Dad passed away and William said, ‘Hey, we should put all of these photos on the internet’,” John says. “I’m not a photographer myself, but I looked at it as an IT project, scanning these things, putting them on the internet.
“William’s initial estimate was that we had about 5000 images, but now that number is at 10,000 and still going up. These things were never catalogued, it’s just thousands upon thousands of negatives in brown paper bags with four-digit numbers written on them.
“We’re not sure if these are the negs and the museum has the prints, or maybe these are the multiples, the seconds, or just overlooked — all of the above maybe. But we are digitising them and cataloguing them so they can be there for everyone to enjoy.”
And while John used a digital camera, a lightbox and Photoshop to digitise and repair the precious images from their century-old glass plate negatives, brother William develops them the old fashioned way, in chemical baths in a dark room.
The latter method is much more labour-intensive, but William prefers the analogue result over the digital and, between the two brothers, they are steadily creating an impressive archive of the old photographs, which form a sprawling record of life in Tasmania from the 1870s to 1930.
While he represents the third generation of his family to work for Beattie’s Studio, it is with the barest trace of regret that John, 56, says he never got into photography, moving into a career in computers and IT instead. But he has been involved with the family business in some way since childhood, nonetheless.
He remembers working in the darkroom as a teenager, helping develop photographs, including professional Santa Claus portraits being shot by his dad in a Hobart shopping centre.
In the summer of 1980, when John was 17, he was deputised for an unexpected job.
“Santa had a few too many and was sent home by my Dad. I was forced against my will to step in and play Santa, despite my protestations of ‘child labour’,” he says.
“I do apologise to the parents of kids whose Santa photos of 1980 feature a very young and grumpy Santa. And that was the end of my photographic aspirations. I rarely touched a camera for decades.”
William, 80, did follow in his father’s photographic footsteps, though, becoming a professional portrait photographer, and he has retained his love of doing things the old way. He even produces prints of Beattie’s old panorama photos using a method that rolls the paper around a large drum as it is developed.
Working from William’s home, both brothers have kept Beattie’s Studio alive, using both traditional and modern methods to reproduce the photos for sale online, and to archive for posterity.
It is the kind of industriousness and innovation that John Watt Beattie himself would probably approve of.
Born in Scotland in 1859, Beattie came to Tasmania in 1878, closely followed by his father, who purchased Murray Hall at New Norfolk for the family.
Beattie’s father was a photographer, and he continued the family tradition by becoming one as well, joining the Anson Brothers’ photography studio as the business manager in 1882, and then buying their business 10 years later, renaming it Beattie’s Studio.
Beattie has a passion for landscape photography, as well as recording images of people and everyday life around Tasmania. His work became an invaluable window to the state’s past.
He also was an early conservator of Tasmanian convict history. His family farm at New Norfolk employed a number of labourers, many of whom were former convicts. So, as a young man, Beattie spent a great deal of time with these ex-convicts, hearing their stories about life under Tasmania’s infamous penal system.
But Beattie’s fascination with what was then a very recent chapter in the island’s history came at the same time as Tasmania was actively trying to distance itself from its brutal beginnings.
Transportation had only ended a little over two decades before. Convicts who had arrived in shackles were now citizens in the streets, a constant reminder of the island prison the place once was. And the so-called “convict stain” was considered a huge source of shame, particularly for anyone with a convict in their family.
In the late 1800s, the government was actively trying to obliterate all physical trace of the convict “stain” from the state — tearing down buildings, burning records and destroying or selling off artefacts.
And Beattie was one of those speaking out to save these dark but important relics of our past, seeing their historical value even then, as uncomfortable as those memories might be.
“He had this passion for all things Port Arthur,” John says.
“He went in there when the government was selling off what they considered rubbish, all the things that were left behind when it was closed down — leg irons, bits of furniture, even old convict records. Beattie bought a ton of it.
“And through the business, which had been photographing Tasmania even before he arrived, he inherited photos of Port Arthur and the convicts that were taken when it was operating.”
With his impressive collection of convict era artefacts, Beattie created his own private museum, with the bulk of these items going to the TMAG when he died. But, like the photos, some of those items remained behind as well, with the Stephensons still owning some old prisoner records, pardons, tickets-of-leave and other documents.
They also have all of Beattie’s old photographic equipment, including his King Billy pine developing tanks and the old wooden cameras he used.
Surrounded by so much history and immersing himself in these old images day after day, John has developed a feverish interest in Tasmania’s history as seen through Beattie’s lens.
A keen documentary addict, he has even started making his own mini-documentaries on YouTube, exploring the history of the images and trying to recreate them, taking new photos from the exact spot where Beattie stood, to compare the scene then and now.
“My brain craves stimulation in the form of new information,” he says. “I love learning stuff, I love documentary style videos, so I decided to tell the stories of these photos, researching the history behind what was going on in them.
“At first I was doing it for me, just because I like to know the story, but other people seem to be really enjoying them as well.”
And, as he points his modern digital camera at these glass plates that are more than 100 years old, he is constantly astonished by how much detail they hold.
“There’s a Beattie photo of Elizabeth St, standing about where Banjo’s is now, looking down through what is now the Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO. It’s one of my favourite photos.
There is so much happening in it — there’s trams, horses and carts, shops.
“It was taken in 1916 and the glass plate is huge, about A4 size. I was able to date it quite accurately because all I had to do was show it to some tram experts and they could tell me exactly when that route was being run, when that type of tram was in service. G
He even looked at the driver’s face and knew who he was and the years he worked as a driver — it’s remarkable what they can tell you from a single frame.
“In 2016 I took that image and stood in that exact spot on Elizabeth St, looking in the same direction as that camera and, I tell you, it was the closest thing to time travel I’ve ever experienced. It was a profound experience.
“Digital technology pulls out more info from a negative than was ever seen before. The resolution of a glass plate is the equivalent of an 80 megapixel photo of today, and with the big panorama images you measure them in gigapixels, it’s quite extraordinary.
“And the old photographic process using paper and silver crystals, it never achieved that kind of resolution on paper. So when I digitise them now, I’m getting a much better quality image than has ever been produced from them before — details too fine to have seen previously — and if they’re damaged or chipped or scratched, I can retouch them in a way that restores what was lost.”
William is retired, and John’s last IT contract expired recently, so at least the two brothers have plenty of time to devote to their shared passion.
And with thousands of images still to be processed, even they don’t know exactly what treasures they might find hidden inside the next brown paper bag they pick up.
Browse the archive of digitised Beattie photos at beattiesstudio.com. All photos are available to purchase either as prints or in digital form. Watch John Stephenson’s documentary series on his YouTube channel, Forgotten Tasmania