professional photographer and labourer(?), was working as a photographer in Smith Street, Kempsey, New South Wales, in 1867. He moved to Sydney the following year and established C. Drinkwater’s Chromo Gallery at 621 George Street South, advertising lowest prices for cartes-de-visite. In 1870 he was listed at 410 George Street. Soon afterwards he appears to have travelled around New South Wales country towns taking photographs, being noted at Wallabadah in 1874. Between 1886 and 1889 he worked at Peel Street, Tamworth, and at 69 Hunter Street, Newcastle, in 1889-90. Fifty-three of his photographs of Tamworth and surrounding districts were included in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London, among the New South Wales exhibits; two frames, each containing twenty-eight photographs of Tamworth and other places ('from the Imperial Jubilee Institute’), were hung in the 1887 Adelaide Jubilee International Exhibition.
Drinkwater is listed as a photographer of 111 Hunter Street, Newcastle in 1896-97. The Charles Drinkwater who died at Watson Street, Wickham, near Newcastle, on 29 January 1902, aged eighty-three, sounds like the same person, except that his daughter, Jane Farrer, gave his occupation as 'labourer’. He had come from Oxfordshire to New South Wales with his wife Harriet, née Gascoigne, in about 1859 and they had a family of twelve children; perhaps the photographer Charles Drinkwater worked primarily as a labourer to support them.
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- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
