Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, amateur photographer and salesman, was born in Loughton, Essex, on 1 March 1833, son of Thomas John Morris. He lived at Loughton until 1855 and was, he said, 'practising a little photography’ in nearby Leystone. Morris mentions that he sketched on board the mail-clipper Boomerang which brought him to Hobson’s Bay, Victoria, on 11 May 1855, and some undated, rough sketches of ships are clearly youthful efforts. Eleven days later he left for Hobart Town in the steamship City of Hobart , disembarking on 24 May. In 1860 he travelled to Sydney and Newcastle then up to Queensland, stopping at Gayndah before going on to Maryborough. He returned to Hobart via Brisbane and Sydney. Notes made on his Queensland trip include a description of a 'Corroboree of the Blacks at Gayndah’ which he witnessed on 14 October 1860. In 1862 he tried his luck on various New South Wales goldfields, mainly Lambing Flat (Young) and Yass, returning to Tasmania later that year. After working in Hobart Town, Launceston and other places, he settled in Fingal and opened a general store.

Morris’s small notebook containing items dating from 1854 to 1906 survives in family possession. In it are newscuttings and notes on various matters, mainly records of the births, marriages and deaths of the Morris and other Tasmanian families. Included are scattered references to the talbotype, electrotype and collodion photographic processes, various chemical formulae for photographic work and a newspaper cutting about collodiotype portraits as produced in Sydney by Edwin Dalton in the 1850s. Earlier notes mention Fox Talbot’s 'Improvements in Photography’ and 'Preparing Photographic Paper and Copying by the Sun’s Rays’. A small paper print of a young woman holding a baby pasted inside the back cover must be Morris’s wife Sarah Rebecca, eldest daughter of John Rothwell, under-sheriff of Hobart Town, whom he married at Hobart on 11 January 1869, and their first child, Percy. It looks like a salted paper print but it would have been taken about 1871 by which time the process was virtually obsolete. It may be an example of the 'dry tannin process’ known to have been used by S. Clifford in 1866 and presumably sold from his Hobart Town sho

Morris retained an interest in photography all his life. Another photograph held by the family is of James Blackburn’s Glenorchy Presbyterian Church, which must date from the 1880s; it is stamped verso 'W.K. Morris, Hobart’. At the Hobart Photo and Art Association Exhibition in 1893 he showed 'a number of very nice finished opalines as well as an ingenious polariscope’. As late as 9 March 1903 he was noting that he had sent a clergyman friend in New Zealand a photograph of the Hobart Baptist Tabernacle, together with a copy of the lecture programme of the Ebenezer Band of Hope Church and Congregational Temperance Society (founded in 1854), to which he seems to have been attached. He also continued to draw, a plan of his garden at Fingal being dated 1869.

Morris sold his store and left Fingal with his family on 29 June 1877 to settle in Hobart Town where he spent some years working for the merchant L. Susman, then for the Hobart Mutual Benefit Society (1885-1901). He died on 6 January 1912, survived by several children, including his younger son, Robert James Morris (1880-1963), a well-known bookseller in Hobart.

Writers:

Morris, John Rothwell
Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011