This image shows teamsters stopped by the side of the road for meal break and 'smoko'.Teams of draft horses can be seen in the background. By the late 19th century roads were improving across Australia and horse teams were replacing bullock teams as the main means of heavy haulage. Horses could travel much faster than bullocks although bullocks required less feed and could handle rougher roads and heavy mud better than horses.

This photographic negative was taken by an un-attributed photographer between the late nineteenth century and 1935 and is part of a larger collection of 7,900 negatives once owned by Sydney bookseller, James Tyrrell.

Included in this section of the collection is a wide variety of subject matter including Sydney Streets, New South Wales landscapes, World War I portraits and images of the Harbour Bridge from the early 1930s. While many of these images remain un-attributed at present it is likely that some were taken by Charles Kerry and Henry King and were either copied by Tyrrell or one of these photographers at a later date.

Some of the photographs from Papua New Guinea appear to have been taken by Reverend Lawes and these may have been a part of the selection acquired by King in the 1890s. David Millar in his book on Charles Kerry also comments on how Tyrrell's purchase from Kerry contained a number of World War I portraits and these seem likely to be the ones in this part of the Tyrrell collection.

However other photographs, like those of Sydney Harbour Bridge, were taken after both Kerry and King had died and must have been later acquisitions by either Tyrrell or Australian Consolidated Press.

Geoff Barker, Curatorial, December, 2008

References
Millar, David P., Charles Kerry's Federation Australia, David Ellis Press, Sydney, 1981
McGregor, Alasdair, A Nation in the Making: Australia at the dawn of the modern era, Australian Geographic, 2011