Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer and medical practitioner, came to Melbourne from London aboard the Kent in April 1853 and on the voyage edited the handwritten ship’s newspaper, 'Kent Chronicle; or, Bubbles from the Brine’ (La Trobe Library), with a fellow passenger, David Scratton. He was appointed district surgeon at the McIvor goldfields in May and conducted his first inquest in August. By 1858 Sconce was living in Melbourne; he exhibited 'A century of faces, being one hundred photographic portraits of eminent actors and actresses’ with the Victorian Industrial Society in February, being listed in the catalogue as a photographer of 120 Bourke Street East, Melbourne. Sconce was a relative, apparently a nephew, of Sarah Susanna Bunbury ; her watercolour of St Thomas’s Church of England, Mulgoa – where her brother Robert Knox Sconce had been the incumbent in the early 1840s – was formerly in Clement Sconce’s 'Album of photographs of New Zealand, Australian and Tasmanian subjects’ (c.1878) but the photographs in this album have long been dispersed throughout the Mitchell Library’s self-referencing pictures collection.

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Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011