English and Australian Copper Company smelter at Port Adelaide, c1880 (Samuel Sweet photographer)

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.

The photograph shows the English and Australian Copper Company smelter in Port Adelaide, with the manager's house in the foreground. The South Australian based Company began smelting near the wharves in 1861. See the article on the company at http://www.samemory.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?c=6946&mode=singleImage

The same photograph, reversed, is at https://www.flickr.com/photos/paelocalhistory/16724142547 and is dated c1880.