A chance online encounter with an arresting 19th-century oil painting depicting a scene of forlorn industry on the banks of the Saltwater River, executed by one of Australia’s foremost portrait painters of the Victorian period, and its offering in a Hobart auction may have misled some to assume it depicted a scene from Tasmania’s long abandoned, convict-driven experiment at Saltwater River on the Tasman Peninsula. For Sam Nichols, it prompted recollections of a six-year residence in inner-west Melbourne and walking the banks of the Maribyrnong River, surveying the relics of the city’s 19th-century livestock-based industries in the area of Kensington and Footscray.