Thomas Sutcliffe Mort and his wife Theresa c.1847
by an unknown artist
daguerreotype
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2001

Thomas Sutcliffe Mort (1816-1878) was a merchant, shipbuilder, wool broker and pioneer of the technique of freezing meat for export. Mort arrived in NSW from England in 1838, and by 1843 had established the colony's main wool auction house. He soon took on export consignments, stock and station agencies, railway promotion, mining and sugar cultivation. While funding refrigeration experiments in the 1860s and 70s, he also established a dry dock at Balmain, where he progressed from shipbuilding to locomotive production and general engineering. In 1875 Mort established the New South Wales Fresh Food and Ice Company, and the engineering concern became Goldsbrough, Mort & Co. in 1888. The first consignments of frozen meat were shipped from Australia in 1879, the year after Mort died. Theresa, who married Mort in Sydney in 1841, died in 1869.

Daguerreotypes were used from 1840s - 1860s. An expensive and painstaking process involving a very long exposure time (up to half an hour), the image was inscribed on metal. The resulting photograph is a small object usually presented under glass in an ornate case: a single image which could not be reproduced.

[1] Vision and Profits: Studies in the Business Career of Thomas Sutcliffe Mort, by Alan Barnard, Melbourne University Press, 1961