amateur photographer and surgeon, arrived at Sydney on Easter Monday, 9 April 1852, as surgeon-superintendent of the David M’Ivor which brought 344 assisted migrants to the colony. When released from quarantine (there having been deaths from fever on the voyage) Ward decided to stay in New South Wales. He settled on the North Shore, initially in Berry Street, becoming the first medical practitioner in the district and continuing to practice his profession for almost fifty years. He remained a member of the New South Wales Medical Board until his death, aged eighty-two, at his residence, Dalzell, in West Street, North Sydney, on 2 May 1902. Buried in St Thomas’s Cemetery beside his wife Mary Louisa, who had died about a year earlier, they were survived by their only child, Catherine Montez Ward.
A colourful figure who reputedly dressed in a duck suit and pith helmet when visiting patients on his extensive North Shore rounds, Ward was a keen amateur photographer, mainly taking local views. The Mitchell Library holds twenty-six of his stereoscopic glass negatives, all views of North Sydney taken about 1860, while the Historic Photograph Collection (University of Sydney) owns similar examples of his work. The major collection of his photographs, however, is held by the Stanton Library at North Sydney: five albums and eighteen views originally presented by Ward to the St Leonard’s School of Arts, of which he was a trustee from July 1865. His best-known photograph is a panorama of Sydney Harbour taken from the North Shore and showing Observatory Hill, Millers Point and Darling Harbour; the University of Sydney can be glimpsed in the distance. Ward exhibited photographs with the Philosophic (later Royal) Society of New South Wales in August 1856 together with most of Sydney’s other amateur and professional photographers. Much later, he was president of the Sydney Amateur Photographic Society.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
