Sarah Chinnery

Born Sarah Johnston Neill in Belfast, Ireland, she moved to the town of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, England at the age of 13, where her older brothers operated a dental surgery.

[3] The Chinnerys spent sixteen years in New Guinea, where Sarah regularly took solo trips around the territory to take photographs of the landscape and the indigenous people.

Unlike most ethnographic photography of the time, Chinnery's photographs were not staged and were respectful depictions of local residents in their daily lives.

Chinnery did not exhibit her work during her lifetime, but her photographs were published in several of Australia's major newspapers, along with articles and anecdotes written by her.

Her manuscripts were typed up by her four daughters and donated to the National Library of Australia, which published them in 1998 as Malaguna Road: The Papua and New Guinea Diaries of Sarah Chinnery, edited by Kate Fortune.