File:SS Tararua at Roper River 1872(GN01807).jpg

The label on this image (Jaraena at Port Darwin) is in all probability incorrect. There appears to be no ship by that name.

The image in the Sweet Collection (of which this is a detail and a 1917 copy) held by the State Library of South Australia identifies the ship as the SS Tararua, the location Roper River, and the date taken as 1872 (SLSA B4643). The State Library description of the image is as follows: "The SS 'Tararua' moored on the Roper River, 96 miles from the mouth. The ship is reflected in the water. Three men are seated in a rowing boat in the foreground and another man is standing on the yard-arm of the vessel. Copy in Sweet Collection folder 5 has Sweet signature (Sweet Adelaide 887). This ship, seen in such a peaceful setting here was later wrecked at Waipapa Point, New Zealand on 29-30th April, 1881 with 133 lives lost, New Zealand's worst maritime disaster. [On back of photograph] Tararua' at Roper River / 1972. (Chartered for conveyance of horses and stores for the Overland Telegraph) / Presented by Mrs. C. Trinne." (See also SLSA PRG742/5/104.)

After careers as a sea captain and surveyor, Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886) established himself in Adelaide as a well known photographer. '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.' (Allan Sierp, 'Sweet, Samuel White (1825–1886)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sweet-samuel-white-4678/text7739, published first in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 5 June 2019.) After his death in 1886, his wife continued his gallery in Adelaide Arcade and sold prints made from his glass plate negatives (https://www.daao.org.au/bio/samuel-white-sweet/biography/).

The State Library of South Australia holds a substantial collection of his photographs.