Samuel White Sweet, former sea captain, masters another skill to be Adelaide's top photographer in 1870s
Samuel White Sweet and (right) his image of English and Australian Copper Company smelter in Port Adelaide, with the manager's house in the foreground. The South Australian-based company began smelting near the wharves in 1861.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia and National Gallery of Australia
Samuel White Sweet became South Australia’s foremost documentary photographer of the 1870s after his career as a ships’ captain ran aground near Wallaroo. In the early 1880s, he was one of the first to use the new dry-plate photography.
Born in 1825 in Portsea, England, he joined the navy in the 1840s, served on the China Station for five years and had several voyages to India as well as becoming a surveyor. In 1858-62, as commander of the Pizarro, he kept the meteorological log for the board of trade, and in 1861 he surveyed Peña Blanca harbour, South America.
After six years with N. J. Myers Son & Co. of Liverpool as a master, Sweet spent two years in Queensland in the early 1960s hoping to grow cotton. In 1867, he moved to Rundle Street, Adelaide, and started working as a photographer. In 1869, Sweet took command of the two-masted schooner Gulnare, later bought by the South Australian government for the Northern Territory survey expedition. Among his supply trips were a visit to Timor and back to Palmerston (Darwin) with18 buffaloes, ponies, monkeys, fruit and vegetables.
In September 1859, in Darwin, Sweet photographed the official party at the ceremonial planting of the first pole of the overland telegraph. He also took pictures of Palmerston township, the men at work and forest scenery. In October 1871, on his way back to the Roper from Darwin, the Gulnare grounded on a reef near the Vernon Islands and by 1872 was condemned. In January, Sweet, a disciplinarian, was piloting the Bengal and other ships, surveying and navigating the Roper, but by the end of April he was back in Adelaide.
He spent the next three years as master mariner in the Black Diamond Line of colliers but in May 1875 his ship the Wallaroo, with his wife aboard, ran aground in a gale on Office Beach, Wallaroo. An inquiry attributed it to Sweet's error of judgment, and he was censured.
He retired from the sea, opened a photographic studio in Adelaide and concentrated on landscapes. With his horse-drawn dark room, he travelled through South Australia taking hundreds of skilful pictures of the outback, stations and homesteads.
After Sweet’s death in 1886, his wife continued his gallery in Adelaide Arcade and sold prints made from his glass-plate negatives. A large collection of his photographs was gained by the State Library of South Australia.