File:Landing of the submarine cable, Port Darwin, 7 November 1871(GN01968).jpg

This image shows a momentous event in Australian history: the landing of the submarine telegraph cable from London (via Java) at Port Darwin in the Northern Territory on 7 November 1871. It is the only known photograph of the event, taken by Captain Samuel Sweet, master mariner and part-time photographer of the Overland Telegraph Line. When the overland component was completed in 1872, Australia was connected with London and the world by telegraph.

Samuel White Sweet (1825-88) was a master mariner and surveyor who in 1869 captained the 'Gulnare', the overland supply ship for the telegraph expedition.He took numerous photographs of the Northern Territory between 1869 and 1871, including 25 of the final cable laying work at Port Darwin. (See Karen Magee, Captain Sweet's colonial imagination: the ideals of modernity in South Australian views photography 1866 - 1886, PhD thesis, 2015, especially p170ff). After careers as a sea captain and surveyor, Sweet 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.