Jackie (JH) Robinson: mining fields reporter

By Nic Haygarth

During the first half of the twentieth century many Tasmanian country towns had at least one photographer who recorded their characters, social life and public events. The survival of their images in some cases seems to have been a case of luck rather than design. For example, the West Tamar Historical Society acquired a large number of glass plate negatives of the Beaconsfield region, probably by the photographer JH Reycraft. Someone offered a member of that society a box of very decrepit-looking glass plates—not to put in a museum, but with the suggestion that they be used to build a greenhouse. The presenter of the plates had no interest in their subject matter or perhaps was not even aware that the plates carried photographic images.

Happily, the Waratah photographer John Henry (JH or Jackie) Robinson (1883–1953) has fared much better than that, hundreds of his glass plate negatives having been preserved by his family and acquired by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Others made their way into the Devonport Regional Gallery collection by an unusual route. Three Robinson brothers were photographers, Vaudry Robinson (1885–1961) in Launceston, Bert Robinson (1892–1953) in Devonport and Jackie Robinson in Waratah. The Devonport Regional Gallery holds the wonderful Bert Robinson Collection of negatives—but amongst them are at least 300 Jackie Robinsons, easily identifiable by their subject matter. It seems that Jackie lent these to his brother but died before they could be returned to him. The two brothers died seven months apart in 1953.

A similar number of Jackie Robinsons survive as postcards and prints in private collections. Many Waratah residents placed Robinson portraits and landscapes in their personal albums. Sometimes the only photos they had of forebears were very professional-looking Robinson portraits featuring what appears to have been his only studio backdrop, of sun streaming across a rickety garden fence. Some holders of these photos have no idea who shot them. The images have come to represent bygone days in Waratah and now belong to anyone who experienced those days. I guess it’s a compliment to the photographer when this sort of community ownership of images takes place. Perhaps the real test of amateur country photographers like Robinson is the number of family albums their work is preserved in.

Jackie Robinson photos could illustrate a primer on early-twentieth-century mining technology. His collection effectively contains a twentieth-century photographic history of the Mount Bischoff Mine and the West Coast osmiridium fields. Robinson was there when the Governor or the Premier visited Waratah. He was present when a Tasmanian mining frontier, Savage River, had big New York fountain pen manufacturers at its beck and call. He was involved when Hollywood came calling, acting as stills photographer for the movie Jewelled nights when it was shot on the Savage River osmiridium field.

But he was also there to capture ordinary people living ordinary lives. You get a real taste of the joys and hardships of a West Coast community. What you don’t get in a Spurling or a Beattie but you do get in a small-town amateur like Robinson is that everyday spontaneity, of the bread being delivered in a wheelbarrow because the van broke down, of the Emu Bay Railway locomotive half-submerged by snow, isolating the town, or of a children’s fancy-dress party. There are plenty of picnics in his photos, with lush rainforest settings, big fish that didn’t get away, weddings, returned soldiers, hockey teams, wood chops, World War One and World War Two victory celebrations, panoramas of crowds gathered for anniversary celebrations or for a masked ball at the Athenaeum Hall, Waratah’s community hub. Unfortunately often we can’t identify the people, and it’s quite confronting to look into the eyes of so many individuals in these very sharp, very detailed crowd shots and wonder about the inner life of each of them, who were they and what they did, all of them now anonymous.

The Jackie Robinson photos in the Devonport Regional Gallery cover many topics, including the life of the Robinson family in Waratah, Launceston and at the beach, a Gordon River cruise, as well as a version of probably his most famous image—Clem Penney displaying his dead thylacine at Waratah in 1924. The themes chosen for this exhibition are Waratah in the late 1920s, life on the Savage River mining fields, the opening up of Corinna as a recreational resort, the day the planes came down near Waratah in 1937 and a trip to the Holdfast Gold Tunnel on the Whyte River. As an employee of the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Company, Jackie recorded all of these as time permitted. He kept water coursing in the Mount Bischoff flumes while training his lens on the flow of everyday life.

Nic Haygarth