Patrick Dawson is believed to have been trained as a surveyor and learnt photography while surveying in Victoria in the 1850s. By 1866, he was operating his own studios in Hamilton and Warrnambool, and he won a medal for his portrait photographs exhibited in the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of that year. Dawson photographed the members of the Aboriginal cricket team and their three non-Indigenous managers individually in his Warrnambool studio and issued the sixteen portraits as a composite picture. Dawson was still in business in Hamilton in 1872 and entered a work in the Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition that year, but no further examples of his work are known beyond this date.
Updated 2009
