Skin and bones of the moa, c.1880

In 1840, British naturalist Richard Owen caused an international scientific scandal when he deduced, from a single piece of moa leg-bone, that a giant, flightless bird had once lived in New Zealand. Moa skeletons were usually displayed among the clutter of a Victorian museum’s display galleries, where they competed with other skeletons and specimens.

Students performing, Whatatutu Primary School, near Wairoa, 1963

Ballarat Street, Queenstown, NZ, flooded 1878

Heavy rain and snowmelt in 1878 caused devastation along the length of the South Island’s Clutha River and dramatically raised the level of Lake Wakatipu, seen in the background of this photograph. The Otago Daily Times observed men wading up to their chests in a bid to rescue articles of household furniture, while the lake lay “in smiling, mocking serenity, priding itself in its newly acquired greatness”.

Worse was to come, for when the water was at its height, a wind sprang up that pounded waves against the buildings, causing some to collapse. Floating logs from a nearby timber yard hammered against walls, doors and windows, causing even greater destruction and, according to the Otago Daily Times reporter, sending “a pang of humiliating pain to the heart, to see how utterly futile are the works of man when opposed by the elements”.

Napier after Hawke’s Bay earthquake, 1931

The Hawke’s Bay earthquake of 3 February 1931 remains New Zealand’s deadliest natural disaster: 256 lives lost, and the region was devastated. With limited water to fight the fires that ignited after the quake, eleven blocks of central Napier were completely gutted.

Mary and Dot Webby at Otaki beach, c. 1924

Milford Sound, cascade from Mitre, 1885

Waterfalls were as popular a tourist attraction in the 19th century as they are today, and a common subject for photographers. The long exposure here has been unable to freeze the tumbling cascade of water, creating instead the impression of a misty wall. 

Waiwhetu marae, Lower Hutt, 1960

Young albatross, Disappointment Island, 1907, from the subantarctic islands expedition album compiled by W North c.1908

Mongrel Mob convention, 1982

Ans Westra’s documentary approach is far from Glenn Jowitt’s embedded semi-participation in gang life. Nevertheless, she has still made us feel very much as though we are there, having a beer ourselves. The boot and outstretched hand at right, and the hand and bottle at left, simultaneously draw us into the frame and tell us there are other people all around. Confronted by a boot in our face and the sight of a Nazi-helmeted tough guy opening a bottle with his teeth, we might feel that this is one party we’d like to leave early; yet this is undercut by the warm, gentle tummy touching and sweet grins of the two at left, pointing to the real people behind the intimidating front of gangs. Westra often captures small human moments, and this is no exception.

Radiata pine with clear felled settings of 80 to 100 acres, Kaingaroa Forest, 1960

John Johns worked at the New Zealand Forest Service from 1951 until his retirement in 1984, at first as a forester but later as its sole photographer. His photographs showed the problems of erosion, clear felling and introduced pests, at the same time as they captured the beauties of the country’s trees, forests and wilderness areas.

Johns traced his influences to early mountain photography and Herbert Ponting’s photographs of Scott’s ill-fated 1910-13 Antarctic expedition, but also to the American modernist Ansel Adams. Both Ponting and Adams had promoted wilderness through the application of highly skilled photographic craftsmanship. But Johns’ photographs were not placed in any sort of aesthetic context until they were published by the photography magazine PhotoForum in 1973. Their descriptive precision and rigorous, sometimes geometric composition could now be seen with a modernist framework – even if Johns had not promoted his work in that way himself.

Mrs Goodson and Opo, 1956

In the summer of 1955–56, the small Hokianga harbour town of Opononi was made briefly famous by a playful and curious bottlenose dolphin named Opo. The painter and photographer Eric Lee-Johnston, who lived in the area, often visited the sleepy harbour side settlement to photograph Opo and the people who flocked to see and play with her.

The fast-moving dolphin was a challenge for even a skilled photographer like Lee-Johnston, who observed that “more film is wasted at Opononi each day by visiting amateur photographers than is usually written off by double exposing and misfocusing of an entire holiday season”. Lee-Johnson became Opo’s chief documenter, sending off prints and film daily to New Zealand newspapers, from where they were syndicated internationally. The image of a bathing-capped Mrs Goodson cradling Opo’s head in her arms became Lee-Johnston’s most published, but it is the series as a whole that best tells the story of how New Zealanders became enchanted by a friendly dolphin.

Two women (Mrs Prince, Tinakori Road), c.1924

Dr. Cockayne, botanist, inspecting native florae, 1907, from the subantarctic islands expedition album compiled by W North, c. 1908

Leonard Cockayne was New Zealand’s most renowned botanist. He was an early ecologist and emphasised observing plants in their natural habitats over the museum practice of collecting specimens. Here he appears in his own natural habitat, dwarfed by a large Poa litorosa during the 1907 expedition to the subantarctic islands. The image appeared as the frontispiece to his classic 1910 book, New Zealand plants and their story. 

The expedition’s photographer, Samuel Page, must have relished the opportunities the long southern days gave him for capturing the subantarctic islands’ botanical diversity. The Star commented that he “was busy during all the long daylight, and took a very large series of photographs, both scientific and generally interesting”. The report also reinforced Cockayne’s ecological approach, saying “[Mr Page] has for the first time put on record the aspect, as they grow, of many Auckland Island plants”.

Card game, Waiwhetu, 1960

Tararuas, Waiopehu Track/Gappers Track, 1927

Leslie Adkin began exploring and mapping the rugged Tararua Range, which formed a backdrop to his Levin farm, from 1905. In 1927, he became a founder member of the Levin-Waiopehu Tramping Club – one of many clubs set up in the 1920s and 30s to pursue tramping as a recreational activity following the establishment of the Tararua Tramping Club in 1919.

In short order the club had formed a track up Mount Waiopehu, Levin’s nearest major peak, and built a hut to enable overnight stays. The tangle of supplejack vines, ferns and saplings in Adkin’s photograph suggests that it was taken while the group was exploring the best route for the track. It represents New Zealand tramping at a point where ‘bush-bashing’ through dense back-country forest was giving way to a more established system of tracks and huts.

At Pungarehu, near Parihaka, 1886

This house, neatly clad with raupo (bulrush), stands at the small Taranaki settlement of Pungarehu. The bearded man in uniform appears to be a member of the volunteer Taranaki Mounted Rifles but nothing is known about him or the women pictured with him. The only clue to the group’s identity is the Scottish tam-o’-shanter hat worn by the infant, whose baby carriage appears between the two women at rear.

Earlier, Pungarehu was also the site of a major armed constabulary camp from 1880 to 1884. Photographs of the camp at Pungarehu show a wooden blockhouse on a central hill surrounded by small military accommodation huts made of raupo – a building material used by Maori and Pakeha alike. In 1881, the camp became the headquarters for the invasion of the peaceful Maori resistance movement at nearby Parihaka. The camp was wound down in 1884 when the government introduced a ‘one policeman policy’ in a bid to settle tensions with local maori.

Mt Ngauruhoe, 1954

Mt Ngauruhoe, in the central North Island, is New Zealand’s most continuously active volcano. When it erupted in 1954, it produced the country’s biggest recorded lava flow and fountains of lava that formed a spectacular sight at night.

Pohutu Geyser, Whakarewarewa, 1920s

In 1924, Harry Moult helped form the Wellington Camera Circle, a radical group dedicated to pictorial photography that broke away from the local photographic society. On a trip to the United Kingdom in the late 1920s, he commissioned a large set of carbon prints to be made from his best negatives. Unlike conventional black and white prints, made using silver gelatin process, long-lasting carbon prints allowed for easy manipulation of tone and were printed with ink, which could be any colour of the photographer’s choosing.

Moult’s prints caused a sensation when they were shown at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington. “Softness, yet with conspicuous detail, is to be found in all the prints,”‘ reported the Evening Post. “Only in one or two instances does the fuzziness, which some amateur photographers look upon as the essence of their art, obtrude, and then not unnecessarily. Clear detail in shadows and softened high lights are conspicuous…”

Maori string games, J. Andersen – Whare-kehua (Caroline Islands house), 1912-26

Museum assistant, artist and photographer James McDonald took at least 185 photographs of Maori string games from 1912 to 1923. In 1919, he made a field trip to Gisborne, where the East Coast members of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion were being welcomed home from the First World War. Here, he reported taking “about 200 plates of maori types, string games (whai) and cooking in the old-time way”.

Workers on the Mangahao hydroelectric scheme, 1922–23

Man wearing a rugby shirt, New Plymouth, 1920s–30s

Studio photography is all about posing. Some people know exactly how to exploit the camera to create the image they want to project; for others, it is clearly all a foreign business.

Nelson High Country, c.1920

The farmer, writer, naturalist and birdwatcher Herbert Guthrie-Smith is best known for his book Tutira: The story of a New Zealand sheep station (1921), a closely observed cultural and natural history of his Hawke’s Bay farm. Guthrie-Smith understood Tutira’s story to be typical of the impact of European settlement on his land and came to doubt the wisdom of his own activities as a farmer; in his 1936 book, Sorrows and joys of a New Zealand naturalist, he called the loss of indigenous flora and fauna due to land clearances a “sad, bad, mad, incomprehensible business”.

This photograph of the remains of a forest burnt down to create a farm reflects Guthrie-Smith’s deeply felt understanding of the ecological impact of farming. It provides a poignant counter to the many 19th century photographs that extolled the taming and settling of the land.