Talk’N Tours Audio Blog

The Alfred & Roy Dufty Maritime Heritage Collection of Historic Maritime Photographs .

This is a fantastic collection of historic maritime photographs taken mainly in the Sydney Harbour environs that are now available online in a searchable data base via the Gosford City Council Maritime Heritage Collection.

Alfred William Buchanan Dufty was born at Kingston upon Thames, England in 1858. His father Francis was an early photographer in Bristol, England and the family emigrated to Australia in 1868.
After working as a photographer in Fiji with his brother Francis, producing an important body of work recording the local people and times, Alfred eventually settled in Sydney.

Many of Alfred Dufty’s maritime photographs were taken prior to 1900 and he established a studio in Erskine St Sydney, near the Sussex St intersection, close to Darling Harbour/Sydney Harbour and provided photographic prints to the seamen and officers of visiting ships, many of which he hand coloured.

This collection gives a great insight into the expansion of Sydney as a port and also into the early tourist souvenir trade with postcards of the visiting ships sold to passengers. There must be many tucked away in old boxes and collections throughout the world even to this day.

It is to photographers like Dufty we owe a great gratitude for preserving a snapshot of history. Will today’s digital images still be as available to historians of the future? I wonder?

For more information and access to the collection visit Gosford City Council Maritime Heritage Collection