sketcher, amateur photographer and solicitor, son of John Stone, was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. He became a solicitor and at the age of twenty-eight decided to try his luck in Western Australia. He came out in the Caroline , which left Worthing in 1829 with sixty-five people on board. During the rough passage out Stone, who sported a large black moustache and must have been something of a raconteur, regaled his fellow passengers with long stories distracting them from their discomfort. The Caroline arrived at Fremantle on 12 October 1829, four months after the foundation of the Swan River settlement.
Alfred Stone settled into the antipodes quickly, and in December 1829 Captain Stirling appointed him a justice of the peace. The following year he was granted many acres on the Swan and Avon rivers. Some of his fellow Caroline passengers had difficulty settling in the new colony, but Stone prospered. By the end of 1830 he was also clerk to the Magistrates’ Court at £100 per annum. He married Sarah Maria Helms in 1835 and they had a son and two daughters. The family lived in the first house built on St George’s Terrace, accordingly named Alpha Cottage, of which Alfred’s ink plan survives (reproduced in J. Archer, Building a Nation , Sydney 1987). Later, Alfred was appointed the colony’s first Crown solicitor. He died on 7 March 1873. He and his youngest brother George Frederick Stone (later attorney general) founded a family whose descendants still live in Western Australia.
By the 1860s wet-plate photography had come to Western Australia. Alfred Stone became an enthusiast and recorded Perth and its development over the decade. He took photographs of the Old Government House, the Town Hall, the new Government House being built, garden parties and the leading citizens at play, his own house and family, the sandy streets of Perth, and other excellent views of the small but growing colony. He always kept his amateur status as a photographer, yet a great number of his photographs have survived, carefully preserved in family albums. Servants of Gov. John Stephen Hampton outside Govt. House (1868), for instance, is included in an album Stone made for his daughter, Fanny Anne Hampton (BL). His photographs give a valuable picture of Perth in the 1860s and 1870s, especially since the work of his professional counterparts has largely disappeared.
- Writers:
- Pheloung, Ann
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
