The Museum’s Australian collections are internationally significant, and include the earliest known photograph of an indigenous South Australian, known as Tenberry, from the early 1850s. The Museum also has a set of ten prints dating to the 1870s that derive from those originally collected by Amalie Dietrich for the Godeffroy Museum (Hamburg) in the 1860s in Queensland (see online article). There are also important 19th-century prints by photographers such as Kerry and Co. (Sydney), Thomas Jetson Washbourne (Melbourne), John William Lindt (Grafton, New South Wales), Paul Foelsche (Darwin), Frederick Kruger (Coranderrk), and John Watt Beattie and Charles Alfred Woolley (Tasmania). Significant field collections include those from the Northern Territory by Elsie Masson (1912–14), Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen (1890s onwards), and Mervyn John Holmes (about 1912). Recent significant acquisitions include the field photographs of anthropologist Peter Worsley from Groote Eylandt (1950–1).
