Aboriginal camp, Point McLeay, South Australia, 1880

Albumen print photograph, 170 x 210 mm, mounted on a contemporary album page of thick card, inscribed in negative at lower left Sweet Adelaide 455, a very strong print in excellent condition with rich tonal range, small section of loss to surface of the paper at right edge.

The National Library of Australia's copy of this, one of Captain Sweet's best known photographs of Aborigines, is captioned 'Blacks whurlie'. Although the NLA dates their copy to 1870, the photograph was in fact one of a highly successful series of portraits of Ngarrindjeri people Captain Sweet took in and around the Point McLeay mission late in 1880: Sweet's number scratched into the negative shows it is from the same sequence of photographs as the celebrated individual portraits of a man in a possum skin cloak and a woman in a possum skin cloak carrying her baby. (See the short essay by Philip Jones in A century in focus : South Australian photography 1840s-1940s, edited by Julie Robinson and Maria Zagala, Adelaide : Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007, p 116).