Ngarrindjeri weapons, ornaments and baskets. Point McLeay Mission, 1880.

Albumen print photograph, 140 x 215 mm, mounted recto of a nineteenth-century album leaf of thick card; inscribed in negative at lower centre Sweet Adelaide 462; a number is also scratched into the negative beside each object (these numbers refer to a key that is known to exist which names and describes the objects); a very strong print with rich tones, in excellent condition; the mount with light foxing and three short edge tears (one with tape repair).

This photograph of traditional objects made by the Ngarrindjeri people was one of a highly successful series of photographs taken by Captain Samuel White Sweet in late 1880, in and around the Point McLeay Mission (later officially known as Raukkan) on the southeastern shores of Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. Sweet is known to have taken several variants of this image, for which he painstakingly arranged groups of objects on the external wall of one of the mission buildings (the edge of the thatched roof can be seen at upper left). Each variant is a triumph of composition – striking and highly unusual for photography of the time. The mission’s founder and expert on Ngarrindjeri culture, the Rev. George Taplin, had died the previous year, so Sweet must have used another informant to record information about the objects. 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).