A group of flamingoes standing in a pool in front of a stone grotto at the Adelaide Zoo.

This image is from an album of 50 photographs of Adelaide and country subjects, taken by Samuel White Sweet.

In 1883, the Adelaide Zoological Gardens opened on its present site. Birds and mammals had previously been kept at the nearby Botanic Gardens. In 2009 there are only one two surviving flamingoes at the Adelaide Zoo. The older of the two is almost 80 years old and despite its great age, survived a violent attack by several teenagers in 2008.

Samuel Sweet is well known as a photographer but he was also a ship's captain and a surveyor. Born at Portsea, England in 1825, Sweet joined the navy at around nineteen and traveled extensively to China and India. He was commander of the Pizarro (ship) and then the Sarah Neumann (ship) for N. J. Myers Son & Co. of Liverpool.

In 1867 he arrived in Adelaide where he worked as a photographer. He returned to sea again in 1869 and was in command of various vessels until 1875 when his ship, the Wallaroo, was involved in an accident. Captain Sweet was blamed and following an enquiry, retired from the sea.

He then set up a photographic studio in Rundle Street, running a traveling photographic service from there. Sweet concentrated mainly on landscapes and became the colony's foremost documentary photographer of the 1870s.

Sweet, Samuel White, 1825-1886

Cato, J The story of the camera in Australia Melbourne : Georgian House, 1955

Pike, Philip W Captain Sweet's Adelaide Adelaide : Longwood Media, 1983

Robinson, J A century in focus: South Australian photography, 1840s-1940s Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007

Adelaide Zoo

Australian dictionary of biography, online edition: seeSweet, Samuel White (1825 - 1886)

State Library of South Australia, Archival Collections PRG 742 Records of Captain Samuel White Sweet

State Library of South Australia, South Australiana Collections, search Sweet Samuel White 1825-1886