A review of Nigel Tattersfield's monograph on Philip Louden Slager, the Hessian-born engraver transported to NSW in 1807 who produced the first views published in the colony, issued by the emancipist Absalom West. Sturgess welcomes Tattersfield's discovery, made in Thomas Bewick's account books, that Slager worked for the Newcastle master engraver in the 1790s under the pseudonym William Fittler. He is critical of the book's account of Slager's convict experience, correcting the claim that he was sentenced to death and reprieved rather than given seven years' transportation, and challenging its uncritical acceptance of Roger Butler's speculative dating of Slager's earliest colonial engravings.