WRONG PORTRAIT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26558, 5 September 1947, Page 5

WRONG PORTRAIT

SPECIAL STAMP DESIGN CARELESS HISTORIANS BLAMED SYDNEY, Sept. 4. The discovery that the portrait of the wrong man has been used on the special 2£d commemorative stamp to be issued next Monday to celebrate the sequicentenary of Newcastle is causing some embarrassment in the Postmaster-general’s Department. Descendants of Captain John Shortland, who discovered coal at Newcastle in 1797, state that the portrait used on the stamp is that of his father. Lieutenant John Shortland, who came out as Governor Phillip's naval agent in 1788, and left a year later. A thorough search of the archives of the Mitchell Library proves this to be correct, for the same portrait appears in Phillip's journal of his voyage to Botany Bay at a time when Shortland, the discoverer, was only a midshipman. The mistake is not recent. It seems to have been made originally during the centenary celebrations of Newcastle in 1897, when it appeared on an official pamphlet, and it has been frequently repeated. Careless historians have thoroughly entangled the lives of three John Shortlands who arrived in Sydney in 1788. Some accounts see the discoverer of Newcastle as a retarded naval lieutenant, aged 68, who had devoted his life, without reward, to most of the major naval battles of the second half of the eighteenth century.