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<p>The Commercial Wharf at Port Adelaide was built in 1877 by the South Australian Company. It was such a large undertaking that a powerful dredge had to be brought from the United Kingdom for its construction (Advertiser, 17 May 1877, p13). By 1889, it was renamed the Adelaide Steamship Company Wharf. 
</p><p>The original photograph was taken by Samuel Sweet (see below). This copy from the original plate was made in 1917. 
</p><p>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, <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sweet-samuel-white-4678/text7739">http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/sweet-samuel-white-4678/text7739</a>, 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 (<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="https://www.daao.org.au/bio/samuel-white-sweet/biography/">https://www.daao.org.au/bio/samuel-white-sweet/biography/</a>).
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The State Library of South Australia holds a substantial collection of his photographs.</div>
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Samuel White Sweet</div>
circa 1885 <div style="display: none;">date QS:P571,+1885-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902</div>
The History Trust of South Australian,  South Australian Government <br> Photo <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://data.history.sa.gov.au/sagpc/media/preview/14272?maxsize=1000">[1]</a> <br> Object record <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://data.history.sa.gov.au/sagpc/getitem/14272">[2]</a>