Between arriving in Hobart Town as a convict on 3 August 1831 and the last evidence of his residing in Van Diemen’s Land in 1847, Meshach Stevens painted a very competent copy of a famous print after William John Huggins titled Northern Whale Fishery, published in London in 1829 (plate 1).1 For almost a century, Stevens’ painting has been in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, acquired in 1927 from the collection of photographer John Watt Beattie (1859–1930).