Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer, framer and gilder, arrived in Van Diemen’s Land as a convict from England on Christmas Day 1845 (Archives Office of Tasmania, CON33/73) when said to be aged 17 and an 'Impt carpenter’ serving a seven-year sentence. On 13 June 1856 he advertised in the Launceston Tasmanian Daily News as a 'carver, gilder and picture-frame maker’. By 1862, however, 'Cawston’s Photographic Establishment in Patterson-street’ was offering 'PHOTOGRAPHIC WONDERS – Portraits for the Million… A first class likeness for ONE SHILLING AND SIXPENCE, including a gilt frame and glass complete’ ( Cornwall Chronicle , 27 September 1862: cited Lake and Mulford). Later that year he announced his move to a studio in St John Street, Launceston where he continued to work as a photographer until 1891.

In 1863 Cawston showed photographs at the Hobart Town Art Treasures Exhibition. The following year he was advertising cartes-de-visite, album portraits and ambrotypes in Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac . He later advertised as a prize medallist from the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition (where he won a prize for architectural photography). Before 1870 he briefly had a second studio in Hobart Town and had also worked at Stanley in northern Tasmania.

Cawston became quite well known for his large format photographs of views and buildings. In mid 1871 the Illustrated Sydney News published an engraving of the Public Gardens in Launceston from one of his photographs and commented that his efforts 'have been extremely happy in depicting much of the picturesque in Northern Tasmania’. However, about 1887 he sold all his view negatives to A.E. Burrows and continued less actively as a studio photographer only. The St John Street studios became Cawston & Sons from 1888. A collection of his work in the Archives Office of Tasmania includes carte-de-visite portraits, large plate views of Launceston (1860s) and an album, Photographic Views of Tasmania (1880s). Henry Button reproduced a portrait photograph Cawston took of him c.1872 in his autobiography, Flotsam and Jetsam .

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989