Studio portrait of Nellie Handfield, aged 11 years. Melbourne, 1875; [together with] a second portrait of Nellie around the age of 3, taken in Williamstown, circa 1867.

I. Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 102 x 62 mm (mount); verso with the imprint of ‘T. F. Chuck, Photographer to His Excellency the Governor, the Trustees of the National Gallery, and Prize Medalist, London Exhibition 1874. Royal Arcade, London Portrait Gallery, Melbourne’, and with a fully contemporary inscription in ink identifying the sitter as ‘Nellie Handfield, 11 years, 1875’; both the print and mount are in excellent condition.

II. Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 98 x 62 mm (mount); verso with the elaborate imprint (in the form of a ship’s mast) of ‘A. Rider, Williamstown, Photo Artist, Prize Medallist Intercolonial Exhibition 1866’, and with a fully contemporary inscription in pencil (quite faded) ‘Miss Handfield’; the print has some very light foxing, but the mount is clean and stable.

These two cartes de visite were sourced together in an album that had been compiled by a member of one of the branches of the Handfield family of Melbourne in the second half of the nineteenth century. They are both studio portraits of Nellie Handfield (b. 1864, Melbourne). The earlier one, by the maritime photographer Rider of Williamstown, shows her around the age of three, while the later one shows Nellie grown into a confident and intelligent-looking young girl aged 11.

Nellie was the first child (and only daughter – she was followed by six boys) of Lieutenant Frederick Oliver Handfield – a naval lieutenant who had served on the expedition of HMCSS Victoria to the Gulf of Carpentaria in search of Burke and Wills, and was later commander of the Victorian Colonial Navy’s training ship Sir Harry Smith – and his wife, Mary Ellen Tatham. Frederick had resigned from the Royal Navy to follow his brothers, Henry Hewett Paulet and William Hopton Handfield, to Melbourne in 1858. (His brother William had married Isabelle Tatham, Mary Ellen’s sister, in Melbourne soon after his arrival).

Nellie’s parents, Frederick and Mary Ellen, were married at St. Peter’s Church, Melbourne, on 14 May 1862, by the Rev. H. H. P. Handfield, brother of the groom.

Some two-and-a-half years later, on 8 October 1864, the following birth notice appeared in The Age (Melbourne):

‘HANDFIELD.— On the 6th October, at St. Peter’s Parsonage, Melbourne, the wife of Mr F. O. Handfield, late H.M.C.S. Victoria, of a daughter.‘

Eleanor Frederica Handfield was known informally to family and friends as ‘Nellie’ – a popular abbreviation of the name Eleanor in the nineteenth century. Very late in life – in 1913, at the age of 48 – Nellie married Arthur Alfred Kenny Walker, who was thirteen years her senior.

The Australian War Memorial holds in its collection the naval uniform of Lieutenant F. O. Handfield, and a brief summary of his interesting naval career can be read on the AWM website https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C110208