Two vintage photographs of Point McLeay Aboriginal Mission Station, 1878 (a fine group portrait, and a display of Ngarrindjeri weapons and artefacts)
Original sepia-toned albumen paper photographs (both 158 × 208 mm), unmounted as issued; short sealed tear to the bottom corner of the photograph of weapons; essentially in fine condition.
Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886), sea captain, surveyor and photographer: after he was censured when his ship ran aground in 1875, 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. The colony's foremost documentary photographer of the 1870s, in the early 1880s he was one of the first to use the new dry-plate process' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). 'Point McLeay Mission was founded on the shores of Lake Alexandrina in 1859 by the Aborigines' Friends Association for the Aboriginal people of the Lower Lakes. George Taplin, the Congregational minister, was its first administrator. Following Government administration from 1916, Point McLeay was returned to the Ngarrindjeri people in 1974 and renamed Raukkan in 1982' (State Library of South Australia). The group portrait depicts 55 Indigenous men, women and children posed in five rows in front of one of the thatch-roofed residential cottages at Point McLeay. 'Sweet | Adelaide | 463' is inscribed in the negative; 'Native Mission Station | Ponindie [sic]' is written in pencil (and in error) on the verso. The photograph of weapons and artefacts is inscribed 'Sweet | Adelaide | 462' in the negative, and has an early caption in pencil on the verso ('Native Ornaments & Weapons'). The objects, numbered 1 to 17 in the negative, are displayed against a whitewashed wall of one of the cottages. We have traced only one example of the latter photograph in Trove (in the National Library of Australia), and none of the group portrait. 'Captain Sweet's Colonial Imagination - The Ideals of Modernity in South Australian Views Photography, 1866-1886' by Karen Magee (a 2014 University of Adelaide doctoral thesis, accessible online) notes that Sweet visited Point McLeay in 1878 and 1880. She reproduces the latter photograph in her extensive catalogue (see number 811, '"Ngarrindjeri weapons and hunting implements," 1878, Point McLeay. Private Collection'), but does not record the group portrait. [2 items].
Item #125425
Price (AUD):
$4,500.00