painter, amateur photographer and settler, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, son of Captain Alexander Robert Kerr and great-nephew of Governor John Hunter . He left Leith Roads on 2 February 1839 and boarded the Midlothian for Port Phillip (Victoria). Kerr squatted about eight miles from Melbourne, but lost his land in 1841 and was forced to move farther inland. He revisited Britain for two years in 1847, then returned to the colony. With a partner, he purchased a station, Fernyhurst, in the Loddon district about 160 miles inland from Melbourne.
A keen amateur photographer, Kerr used his skills on one occasion to assist in a murder case. Like the murderer, Kerr noted, the suspect had 'dark hair, a short peaked American beard, and one of his eyes was blind… His dress, a blue serge shirt, and moleskin trousers, also corresponded fatally with the report.’ Believing in the possibility of the man’s innocence, Kerr photographed him in full face and profile and forwarded the likenesses to the police in the vicinity of the murder, some 80 miles away. A few days later the suspect was cleared.
Kerr was particularly interested in recording the local Aboriginal people. In 1872 his Glimpses of Life in Victoria by a Resident was published in Edinburgh. In it Kerr tells of his determination to obtain a photograph of a corroboree and how he prevailed upon the Aborigines to dance by daylight:
This was only done for the promise of a considerable present; but no arguments would induce them to allow the lubras to witness the exhibition at that unusual hour, and to complete my picture I was obliged to content myself with a group of young men, wrapped in their skins, to represent the absent ladies.
The lithograph of a corroboree in Kerr’s book appears to be after a print made (in the 1860s?) by Eugene Montagu Scott , apparently from Kerr’s 1850s salted paper print recording this occasion; the Royal Historical Society of Victoria has a photograph annotated 'Corroborie held at night. Fernyhurst, Australia Felix. J.H.K.’, which is conspicuously signed on the mount by Scott. Other Fernyhurst photographs in the same collection are also titled and initialled by Kerr and signed on the mount by Scott, so it would seem that other illustrations in Kerr’s book such as Jamie and his Friend (two Aborigines) and Group of Weapons had the same genesis. All are acknowledged as being taken from photographs.
Kerr was a painter and sketcher as well as a photographer. A lithograph survives after his drawing of a Loddon Aboriginal woman, the elderly Queen Jerrybung (1856, ML), and the 'T.H. Kerr’ catalogued as painting and exhibiting an oil Portrait of a Horse with the Victorian Society of Fine Arts at Melbourne in 1857 is also likely to have been him.
Kerr married Frances Grace Murphy in about 1862. He died at Melbourne on 6 February 1874.
