The annual regatta at Port Adelaide took place on 1 January every year from 1858 to 1914. It was 'the annual redletter day of Port Adelaide ' (Port Adelaide News, 2 January 1883, pp4-5). At the 1883 regatta, of which this is an image by Samuel White Sweet, crowds gathered to watch and participate in rowing, swimming and boat races. The photo is dated 1883 in Karen Magee's study of Sweet (see below).

(See also GN01799)

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, 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. This image is labelled SLSA B15.