Focus on photographic legacy
Photographs of Pohangina adorn the walls of Manawatu¯ cafes and libraries. An environmental historian is highlighting the man behind the images, Charles Wildbore.
Environmental historian Dr Catherine Knight is a writer who handles timely, even controversial, issues with a clarity and punch all her own.
Her first book, Ravaged Beauty, 2014, laid bare European settlement’s drastic effects on the once-pristine Manawatu¯ landscape.
She followed that with New Zealand’s Rivers, ahead of the controversy about many of this country’s no-longer-swimmable waterways, and this year published
Beyond Manapouri: 50 years of environmental politics in New Zealand.
Now, Knight is about to launch a more personal work: Wildbore, a Photographic Legacy, a biography of early Manawatu¯ photographer and beekeeper Charles Wildbore. The Pohangina Valley, where Wildbore lived and worked, has always held a fascination for Knight.
‘‘The very first environmental history article I ever wrote – for the
Manawatu¯ Journal of History – was about the history of Totara Reserve, which I visited as a child and remembered as an utterly magical place,’’ she says. Later, when the adult Knight returned to Palmerston North to take up a post at Massey University, the old magic was still strong.
Now she, her husband and two children live just a few kilometres from the reserve. The family are serious about bush regeneration and wildlife and they’ve planted hundreds of native trees on their property.
It was while researching
Ravaged Beauty that Knight came across Wildbore’s photographic legacy. ‘‘I knew very little about Charles Wildbore or his background,’’ she says. ‘‘It was his photographs that attracted me to him as a subject ... I felt sure, though, that a person who could take such memorable photographs must have been a bit of a character.’’
Wildbore captured landscapes and scenes of everyday life as the valley’s wild bush was bit by bit burned and felled to create pastoral farms. He pictured everything – even occasionally himself. In one scene, he’s posing as a travelling tinker, watched by some of his own children.
The speed of environmental change in the valley, mirroring the clearance of Te Ika-a-maui/north Island forest, says Knight, ‘‘was something I learned of only later’’.
Wildbore’s name might not be widely known, but his photos of Pohangina around the turn of the 20th century, Knight writes, adorn ‘‘the walls of Manawatu¯ cafes and libraries, and his images of timber milling, bush-whacking and newly hewn farmscapes have featured on the covers of and within books documenting New Zealand’s history’’.
In telling his story, Knight goes into great detail about Charles and his parents’ life and times, starting with his birth in a working-class tenement estate in London’s Islington in 1864. His parents Charles Sr and Emma suffered remarkable hardships and, like many others, leapt at the chance to emigrate to New Zealand. Even in Manawatu¯ , life wasn’t easy, but young Charles first made his mark as a beekeeper and honey producer.
At 27 he married 19-year-old Jane Dallison, of Bulls. They would have 13 children, buy land in and around Pohangina township and run a hospitable household.
In the 1890s, he found his true forte: photography.
This coincided with an era when photography was becoming accessible to ordinary enthusiasts. ‘‘Until that time it had been limited largely to dedicated professionals.’’
Laborious, expensive wet-plate photography was replaced by dryplate photography, where glass plates were pre-coated with a gelatin emulsion of silver bromide – more convenient and with shorter exposure times.
Then, along came celluloid film. ‘‘The use of roll film was pioneered by the Kodak film camera, which was available in New Zealand from the 1890s, and grew increasingly popular from the early 20th century.’’
Wildbore used a roll-film camera from about 1915, but still employed glass-plate technology as well, ‘‘because, in spite of the greater convenience of hand-held cameras, he valued the quality that could be achieved using large-format glassplate cameras’’.
Wildbore’s pictures included community events – weddings, picnics, school events and gatherings.
In 1903, he was commissioned by Palmerston North seed merchants Barraud and Abraham to take a series of photos of bush clearing, sowing and harvesting grass seed.
Knight writes: ‘‘It features the image for which he is probably most known – a great plume of smoke billowing from a bush burn on a farm at Mt Richards. This photograph subsequently won first prize at an international exhibition in San Francisco.’’
In July 1905, Wildbore’s picture A travelling tinker and his interested onlookers appeared in the Otago Witness. Knight reveals: ‘‘The photograph was entirely staged. The travelling tinker was Charles, mending a pot, while the interested onlookers were his children Kathleen, Mana and Sylvia.’’ Charles Wildbore died in 1937. ‘‘There are no descendants, at least that I know of, in the Pohangina area itself,’’ Knight says, ‘‘but you don’t have to go far to find them: A¯ piti, Feilding, Palmerston North, Levin, Waikanae ... but also Nelson, Auckland and Rotorua . . . a number of these descendants got in touch and offered information and photographs not held in the public collections.’’
The book launch for Wildbore, a Photographic Legacy will be held at the Palmerston North City Library (second floor) on Wednesday next week at 5.45pm.
Email tinawhite29@gmail.com