The Bulwark and other ships at Queen's Wharf in Port Adelaide, 1878

This photograph by Captain Samuel Sweet shows boats and ships in Queen's Wharf, Port Adelaide. The large ship to the right is the 'Bulwark'.
There were several ships named the 'Bulwark' in Sweet's time as a photographer. HMS Bulwark was a training ship for the Royal Navy in 1885-86 before being renamed, but it is not certain that it visited Australia in this period. The other 'Bulwark' was a cargo ship. It visited South Australia in November-December 1878 and was moored at Port Adelaide. Some at least of the crew were members of the temperance body, the Independent Order of Good Templars, their lodge being 'The Bulwark of England'. Its members visited local Adelaide lodges while in port, held meetings in the Port Adelaide aschoolroom, and even added 'a number of landsmen' to their ranks. The ship had a checkered history: it captized in Hobson's Bay (Port Phillip) in 1881 and foundered at sea in 1882. (Chronicle, 9 November 1878, p8; Advertiser, 23 November 1878, p5; Gawler Standard, 23 November, p4; Register, 14 June 1884, p6; information about HMS Bulwark from Colin Raybould).

The photo was copied in 1917 from the original.

The picture is one from a series taken by Captain Samuel Sweet. 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.