Beattie had a grammar-school education and in 1878, aged nineteen, migrated with his parents to Tasmania where he started a farm in the Derwent Valley[1] from where wrote to his father decrying his prospects.

[8]Committed to Theosophy as a founding member its lodge in Hobart in the early 1890s, and an acolyte of Tasmanian-born painter William Pigeunit,[9] Beattie depicted scenes of the island's beauty in the latter's romantic style for his prints, postcards, lantern-slides[10] and albums.

Though Hore[12] notes that Beattie warned that within just a "few years the highlands of Lyell will be bare desolate wastes,"[13] Davidson asserts that he "saw no contradiction in [photographing for] conservation, development and tourism,"[14] and Ennis reports that he "always carried an axe that he used to overcome any faults in his compositions,"[5] and would move grass trees or pandanus in to frame the scene.

How much greater is the necessity existent in a country like Tasmania […] to preserve by every means within her power attractions without which [tourism] would diminish rather than increase, to the serious loss of the state […] a public awakening may be better aroused by a proposition in this form rather than from a more scientific standpoint.

[24] The photographs appeared in the 1900 Cyclopedia of Tasmania,[25] and posthumously in Walkabout,[26] and his images of places such as Port Arthur and the Isle of the Dead were used as postcards into the early twentieth century.

[27][28] He presented at Andrew Inglis Clark’s  the Minerva Club, and with Bishop Henry Montgomery and Professor William Brown founded an Historical Section, with Beattie as its vice-president,[29] of the Royal Society of Tasmania in 1899.

[32] Describing his time in Ambae he writes in his diary held in the Royal Society of Tasmania about gaining the confidence of subjects frightened by his camera by first showing them the view of boats on the sea on its ground glass, to the people’s delight.

In September 1937 the Royal Society of Tasmania in Hobart appealed for subscriptions to memorialise to Beattie in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery[21] and in 1938 the £15/12/6d (a 2021 value of A$1,370.40) raised purchased a collection of "modem books on Australian history, geography and anthropology".

[40] A then current desire amongst Tasmanians to erase the "convict stain" meant that convict-related artefacts in the collections, especially those from Port Arthur that Beattie amassed, were removed or not shown.

His pictures of sublime Tasmanian wilderness and Port Arthur in particular helped settlers and activists argue for the protection of nature, especially as a tourism asset,[42] through the 1890s and into the twentieth century.