At Work & Play: Aboriginal People 1905

At Work & Play: Aboriginal People 1905 by photographer Thomas Dick.

At Work & Play: Images of Rural Life in NSW, 1880–1940 is a documentary photography project initiated in 1988 by the State Library of New South Wales as part of Australia’s Bicentennial programme. The project was structured around a state-wide collecting campaign that travelled through regional towns, reproducing photographs from private family albums and local collections. Selection criteria required images to predate 1940 and to have identifiable subjects, locations, and contextual information. The project prioritised vernacular photography rather than professional practice, establishing an archive built from distributed, amateur authorship and grounded in verifiable historical metadata.

The resulting collection contains approximately 7,000 photographs documenting rural life across New South Wales between 1880 and 1940. The images record agricultural labour, domestic routines, leisure activities, and community events, providing primary visual evidence of economic and social structures in regional areas. The project is organised as an archival resource rather than a narrative sequence, with each image catalogued individually for research use. Its function is to support historical, sociological, and genealogical study through aggregated visual data, enabling analysis of patterns in rural life, labour practices, and settlement development over time.

Thomas Dick
Thomas Dick (1877–1927) was an Australian amateur photographer and documentarian based in Port Macquarie, New South Wales. Born in Walcha, New South Wales, he spent most of his life on the mid‑north coast of New South Wales where his family worked in oyster farming. Although his primary occupation was oyster cultivation, Dick developed technical skill with a camera and darkroom, using photography as a tool to record aspects of local natural history and Indigenous culture from around 1910 through the early 1920s.

Between about 1910 and 1923, Dick produced several hundred black‑and‑white photographs of the Birpai (also spelled Birrpai) people of the Hastings River region, organising and staging images that depict people, material culture, and activities interpreted as traditional life. His surviving photographic archive consists of approximately 280 prints and glass negatives held in Australian and international institutions, including the Australian Museum, state libraries, and collections abroad. These images document practices such as canoe building, fishing, food gathering, and shield manufacture, often taken with the assistance of Birpai collaborators and repeated subjects over the project’s duration.

Dick’s work extended into natural history documentation and local scientific exchange; he published notes on Aboriginal shield manufacture and contributed to proceedings of scientific societies. His photographic practice was intertwined with informal ethnographic interests and interactions with professional scientists, although he did not pursue photography as a formal profession. Portions of his archive were acquired by museums during his lifetime, while other materials were lost or dispersed after his death by drowning on 13 May 1927. The surviving collection has been the subject of exhibitions and research projects that situate his work within early twentieth‑century photographic documentation of Indigenous Australians.

Thomas Dick

Music
Kakadu Shade - Jon Bjork

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