IT looked for all the world as if National Portrait Gallery director Angus Trumble had missed his vocation when he took up a copy of the Anglican Book of Common prayer this morning and intoned to the media, “He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.”

The occasion was a preview of the quirkiest Christmas exhibition in town, “Sideshow Alley: infamy, the macabre and the portrait”, a show the NPG hopes will “simultaneously captivate, repulse and amuse the inquisitive minds of visitors”.

In sharp contrast to the light and squeaky-clean Tom Roberts view of Australia across the walkway in the NGA – and Trumble seemed rather pleased with this – this exhibition focuses on unnerving and sometimes passed positively macabre images of Australian criminals.

The exhibition that began as a modest exhibit of a dozen death-masks, like the famous Ned Kelly mask, but as curator Joanna Gilmour researched this rich and fascinating area it ballooned into a substantial exhibition of over 100 items, photographs, masks, and even Staffordshire pottery representations of the 19th Century’s famous crooks.

Gilmour has produced a fascinating publication to go with this exhibition, the perfect antidote to too much turkey and cheap champagne over the silly season.

While 20th and 21st century Australians have been taught to keep at arms’ length from dead bodies and modern funeral directors make the practice of being as discreet as possible, our forebears were exceedingly familiar with the dead body and some even paid visits to police stations to view the corpses of executed bushrangers.

Curator Gilmour invited us to consider that the age of a ghoulish delight in death was not over, reflecting on her own mother’s fondness for reading about serial killers and the predilection of most Australians for crime and forensic shows on TV.

“Sideshow Alley”, she believes, looks at the ways in which artists, photographers and entrepreneurs used portraits of Australian convicts and criminals: the canny publishers trading in salacious prints and penny dreadfuls; the studios doing a brisk trade in portraits of heroes and villains; and the waxworks proprietors who, with their ‘Chambers of Horrors’, turned violence, scandal and misfortune unto a lucrative art form.

Trumble reminded us of the 19th century fashion for phrenology, the ‘science’ in which people thought that you could judge person’s character by the shape of their skulls and the way they looked. A rare picture of the elusive Capt. Moonlight of the Wagga Wagga region gives us all a chance to speculate on whether he looks like a villain and another of bushranger “Mad” Dan Morgan invites you to speculate on his sanity.

I must confess to a long but morbid fascination with JW Lindt’s revolting photo of Joe Byrne strung up outside strung up at Benalla police station after he’d been shot down and several viewers remarked that it was inconceivable that such a shot could be so widely circulated these days.

Back then it was almost sport, and a waxwork entrepreneur who made the death mask of Ned Kelly had it on view within a day of the famous bushranger’s death in Old Melbourne Gaol, for all to pay and see.

“Rest in peace,” Trumble recited to the press as he got into the mood for the summer show.

“Sideshow Alley: infamy, the macabre and the portrait”, at the National Portrait Gallery, Saturday, December 5 until Sunday, February 28, Monday – Sunday, 10-5pm.