The Berlin-born artist Alexander Schramm (1813-1864) emigrated to the British colony of South Australia in 1849, where over the next fifteen years he produced paintings, drawings and lithographs that focused on representations of the local indigenous people in encampments, travelling and interactions with settlers. While this body of work was not large, it constituted the major part of his Australian oeuvre and was made at a time when the Aboriginal population had been drastically diminished and largely dislodged from the centres of settlement. Schramm appears to have had no intention of ethnographic documentation and his works are distinct from those of most contemporaries who employed the modes of portraiture of “representatives of the race” or figures included in the landscape for compositional or symbolic purposes. Rather they showed Aboriginal people per se, full-figured and individual, as they were currently seen around Adelaide. Schramm’s reasons for this focus and his own attitude to these people remain obscure but the works he made provide a unique record of an indigenous group over a decade of dislocation and suggest both the vitiation and the accommodations made by them in response to the expansion of colonial settlement.