Below is the text from my doctoral thesis chapter
Telling Pictures: Absenteeism, which discusses the absence of Maori in Gladys Cunningham's slides. This chapter was not included in the final 2009 submission.
Telling Pictures: Absenteeism
It is appropriate at this point in the journey through her slides to pause and consider how Gladys Cunningham’s relationship to the earliest settlers of Aotearoa/New Zealand, the tangata whenua, is occasionally revealed, but at other times simply insinuated through absence. In this chapter I discuss how Gladys’s slides’ depiction and circumvention of Maori culture suggest possible answers to questions regarding her lack of connection with Maori. However an analysis based mostly on omission will never be entirely satisfactory. Since Gladys is not present to explain in person the beliefs that these absences represent, it is necessary to consider verbal and written expressions of Pakeha values and culture from the 1950s and ‘60s, as well as more recent writings on New Zealand history, to contextualise her imagery.
Because Gladys was able to make choices over whom she was going to associate with in her community or while travelling, her slide photography became a ratification of those choices (2003). Membership of her respective “families” (nuclear, extended, community and tour group) is endorsed by her slide taking – but it is noticeable that in terms of costume, skin colour and, frequently, age, other members of her groups, particularly older women, look just like her. For instance, because Maori men and women do not appear to have participated in the South Island bus tours that she and Jim joined (their clients were consistently adult and retired Pakeha, judging by the group photos scattered throughout Gladys’s collection), nor were they members of the clubs to which she belonged back home (such as the Onehunga Photographic Society or the Townswomen’s Guild), they are absent from her slides.
Slide 1 Launch Trip Warkworth 1965
The noticeable homogeneity of the Onehunga Photographic Society on a field trip down the Mahurangi River suggests a lack of interracial mixing. Taken near the cement works outside Warkworth, the absence of Maori in Launch Trip Warkworth 1965 suggests that either they were not financially able or willing to purchase expensive 35mm cameras, and/or that they were not interested in the rule-dominated, English-influenced culture of camera clubs. The uniformity of New Zealand camera club membership – they tended to have more men than women in their memberships, and were almost entirely European - mirrored the state of their equivalent organisations in England. As an English club member writes nearly 30 years after Gladys took this slide:
Look around you. We’re white, middle-class, and middle-aged… we do have some women members, but not enough. There’s a lot of members who want to recruit, but they are frightened of getting the wrong sort of people; they want more members but the same as themselves (Yorkshire Art Circus 1992, p. 53).
Whether or not Maori would have felt comfortable in such a club is the fundamental issue. David Ausubel, a visiting American Professor, notes in 1960 that Maori were frequently (and understandably) shy when socialising with Pakeha, and often felt unwelcome, as well as underrepresented, at Pakeha meetings (1960, p. 181). Congalton states that, results of a survey of the residents of Hawera and its outlying areas regarding a proposed community centre in 1954 indicated that Maori seldom participated with Pakeha in formal or organised groups, although some rurally based Maori belonged to a Methodist Maori choir, a branch of the Womens’ Institute, the Maori Women’s Welfare League, or sat on tribal committees.Outside Hawera there was little mixing between Maori and Pakeha, except (for men presumably) during sports matches, or later, at the hotel bar. The involvement of older Maori in activities within Hawera was described as being “very limited”. The consensus among Maori was that, despite any financial contribution they might make to it, any community centre would be run by Pakeha for Pakeha (1954, p. 169,173,178). Such attitudes appeared to have existed in the Photographic Society of New Zealand in the mid 1960s. While June Maslen notes that photographic works by (Pakeha) women were at last beginning to attract notice within the PSNZ, despite their being in the minority, she fails to remark upon the absence of photography by Maori men or women (Photographic Society of New Zealand 2003, p. 35).
Turning a Blind Eye
Like most Pakeha New Zealanders, Gladys would make no effort to pronounce Maori place names correctly, and she would never have used the alternative Maori name for well-known places and geographic features around Auckland, such as Maungakiekie for One Tree Hill (Ausubel 1960, p. 168). Gladys appears to have been oblivious to (or, as a photographer, unimpressed by) remnants of Maori settlement within her neighbourhood - for instance, the pa site terraces, shell midden and kumara pits on Mangere mountain or Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill. Slides located in the latter region concentrate on the exotic flower beds and trees (for instance, the grove of olives in Interlude Cornwall Park 1960) of the colonised landscape, as well as on family leisure activities, spring lambs or combinations of all four.
Slide 2 Interlude Cornwall Park 1960
Slide 3 Maori Memorial Cornwall Park
Although the grave of John Logan Campbell, the “Father of Auckland” who had gifted this farm land to the residents of Auckland, is accompanied on its summit position by a seven-feet, six-inches-high bronze statue of “a Maori chief in the heroic mould”, surprisingly Gladys never photographed it. The statue was intended to “give point and emphasis” to an obelisk, both structures being erected in accordance with Logan Campbell’s posthumous instructions for a monument that would publicly display his high regard for the Maori race (Stone 2004, p. 132-33). While the 100-feet-high obelisk, along with its attendant pine tree, looms in the background of such slides as Maori Memorial Cornwall Park and Xmas 1956 Parade Onehunga, it simply serves as an effective and attractive compositional device, a distant focal point, rather than any lofty declaration of Gladys’s sentiments towards Maori.
Slide 4 Xmas 1956 Parade Onehunga
Slide 5 Xmas Parade Onehunga 1960
Parade
Gladys photographs Maori only when they pursue the same interests or attend the same large-scale community events as Pakeha. In Xmas Parade Onehunga 1960, two Maori girls who have been watching the parade happen to walk towards Gladys just as she takes the photo, while a third marches with the other members of her team, the only difference between her and her Pakeha team mates being that she is chaperoned by an adult female relative. Although all four Maori females wear European clothes and shoes, the youngest girl signals her cultural difference by wearing a large tiki around her neck.
On the surface, Xmas Parade Onehunga 1960 offers what Skinner calls “the classic image of integration” – visual proof of the popular ideology that in the 1960s, ”all New Zealanders [were] equal and the same”; after all, everyone is wearing European clothing and taking part in or observe the same pre-Christmas ritual (Skinner 2003, p. 90-91). But to be equal, states Ausubel, Maori had to do all the adaptation and behave like Pakeha – as in attending Santa parades and joining the local marching team (1960, p. 170).
Xmas Parade Onehunga 1960 confirms the fact that the majority of Onehunga’s residents were Pakeha; Gladys is photographing her own kind, as well as those Maori (and Chinese) whose dress and behaviour conformed to European values (Ausubel 1960, p. 169). Certainly Gladys would never have felt as comfortable as a photographer if the situation had been reversed, and she had been standing at a local marae function, with Pakeha in the equivalent minority.
Disconnections
The almost complete absence of Maori in Gladys’s images from the 1950s and 1960s underlines two facts. Firstly, as established by her family slides, none of their close friends were Maori, and more importantly, no-one within the Cunningham family had married a Maori. Such an act would have been strongly discouraged by older family members. ”The surest way of eliciting the most violent type of anti-Maori prejudice from an ordinarily mild-mannered pakeha is to raise the subject of intermarriage” contends Ausubel. (However he adds that, if such a marriage did proceed, Pakeha parents often eventually reconciled themselves to the act, in some cases by assimilating their new son or daughter –in- law into their Pakeha family (1960, p. 180-83)).
Secondly, the absence of Maori contradicts the abovementioned New Zealand myth of exceptional race relations. Evidently, in Onehunga at least, Maori and Pakeha interrelated only occasionally at key community celebrations.
Pakeha males in Onehunga, Te Papapa and Oranga would have also had opportunities to come in contact with, but not always work alongside, Maori males at such sites of employment as the Westfield, Hellaby’s and Southdown Freezing Works in Penrose, a new industrial area group where rural Maori now provided a supply of unskilled labour (Simmons 2002, p. 12). Or else males would have gotten to know each other through playing such sports as rugby league, rugby and athletics (Skinner 2003, p. 90). But such contact was often superficial, and interracial bonhomie was usually the result of after-match inebriation (Ausubel 1960, p. 181).The Governor-General Sir Bernard Fergusson comments at Waitangi in 1957 that in the 127 years…since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi…there had been a complete failure by Maori and Pakeha to exploit and create opportunities of knowing each other socially…the two races…share in the high spirits of the woolshed and the muster, the pub and the racetrack, the ranges and the rugby field, the freezing works and the forests. But do they go to tea with each other? Do their families get to know each other? (Fergusson qtd. in Palenski 2004, p. 114)
Foster, in her discussion of her mother June Foster’s writing for The Weekly News, notes a similar breach between Maori and Pakeha lives within the rural Far North in the 1950s and ‘60s, with connections occurring only intermittently through work and the occasional interracial wedding. However, citing Joan Metge’s studies in Ahipara, Northland, Foster acknowledges that within the wider community Maori would have had their own discrete community, in which they would have practised a social organisation “that was more foreign to Pakeha imaginings than that of those small and distant islands twelve thousand miles away” (Foster 2000, p. 92, 96).
Unlike Foster’s community in the Far North, Gladys’s community was not strongly bicultural (Maori comprised around 40% of Manganui County’s population in the 1950s); further, no marae existed in Onehunga (Foster 2000, Appendix). Like June Foster a generation later, Gladys’s daily life would have centred on children, husband, her extended family and home. Seldom would she have been involved in events outside her family circle, other than those related to her children’s schooling or sports, and she would certainly never have had cause to attend tangi or hui (funeral ceremony or gathering)
at any marae. Gladys and June’s social activities would have been severely limited by their child-rearing responsibilities, their finances and lack of private transport. By the time her youngest child Tom was born late in 1936, Gladys would have had six children aged 11 and under, with three at home. Unlike the Governor General, she would simply not have had the spare time to “go to tea” in the afternoon with neighbours, of any race. June Foster admits in her fortnightly column in 1955 that recently she had been obliged to refuse an invitation to join a branch of the Women’s Institute, as “my two pre-schoolers do not mix with meetings”, and because she felt that the Institute appealed more “to the woman with some free time”, meaning older women (1955, p. 35). It appears, then, that the first time Gladys stood on the grounds of an urban marae was at the age of 65, when, having been very recently widowed, she moved to her daughter Valerie’s home in Mangere Bridge.
Slide 6 Cubs 1967
Now a woman with “some free time”, she could accompany her daughter Valerie and her grandson David on a Cubs trip to the recently constructed Te Puea Memorial Marae, located at the bottom of their road, in order to learn about marae protocol.
Rotorua
Nevertheless Gladys’s travel slide-taking practices throughout the 1960s tended to signal what Ausubel describes as the then prevalent attitude of indifference towards Maori, in particular towards Maori cultural shows (including haka and poi performances) aimed at tourists (1960, p. 168). A box labelled Rotorua Tarawera Rotoiti Taniwha Springs, containing slides that were taken from the early 1950s through to the late 1970s (a number of them depicting the tourist sights of Rotorua), holds just the one slide – Model Village Rotorua - of Whakarewarewa village (although each set has several slides missing), taken some time between 1963 and 1967.
Slide 7 Model Village Rotorua
Gladys appears to be more interested in the chiaroscuro lighting, texture and forms of the “model” buildings, including the raised pataka (storehouse) and whare (house) within the village (or kainga), than with performances of “old-time Maori life” held at the Rotorua Maori Arts and Crafts Institute (Gilmore 1958, p. 66).
According to Damian Skinner, Maori are often added as cultural embellishment within tourist photographs of the commodified past, at sites such as Whakarewarewa (2003, p. 91-92). John Salmon, in his article on photographic holidays in New Zealand, recommends Maori as a kind of cultural condiment in travel photography, their colour adding a “dashing accent” to the unique New Zealand landscape (1958, p. 192). However, despite the popularity in the 1960s of books displaying what Ans Westra calls a “false, glamourised image of a culture…kept alive just to show the tourist”, Maori as the tourist wanted to see them, or as the tourist industry presented them - for instance, dressed in piupiu (flax skirts) and wearing tiki - are deliberately excluded from Model Village Rotorua, even though the package that Gladys had paid for had probably included a guided tour through the thermal valley and kainga (McClure 2004, p. 219; Westra qtd. in Bayly 1985, p. 68). In her representation, Whakarewarewa’s model village appears to be deserted, like a lifeless outdoor museum, while the guides’ and other workers’ daily lives took place in subsistence conditions in the adjacent Whakarewarewa community (McClure 2004, p. 228).
Slide 8 Maori Storehouse Te Wairoa
Te Wairoa
Outside the cities, Maori culture for many New Zealand photographers of European descent existed as an picturesque adjunct to the landscape, in particular in the North Island provinces of Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Taranaki, Hawkes Bay and Northland (The History Group Undated). When Gladys and Jim visit Rotorua in 1958, Gladys concentrates on some of its many lakes: Okareka, Green, Tikitapu and Tarawera. Within Te Wairoa - the Buried Village - she takes just the one slide of the moss-encrusted, weathered sandstone pataka (Maori Storehouse Te Wairoa) before she and Jim move on to photograph Te Wairoa waterfall.
Drawn to Maori architecture, particularly to the authenticity (as opposed to Whakarewarewa’s “modelled” inauthenticity) of this rare stone storehouse (which is harmoniously surrounded by native bush), Gladys’s interest in the pataka illustrates Sir Peter Buck’s statement in the 1920s that for some Pakeha, Maori people had less value than “the carvings our brains designed and our hands executed” (1924, p. 362).
That interest is partly based on the pataka’s novelty value as a “picturesque curiosity of the overwhelmed”(Park 2006, p. 81).
Gladys deliberately attempts to include the interpretation board within her frame. Possibly she wished to preserve its information for her own educational benefit, or else simply to show the facts to her family later; however the slide’s matte will eventually excise much of the writing. Signalling a sight that is worthy of the tourist gaze within Te Wairoa, the text explains in vague terms – but only in English, not in Maori, to an assumedly non-Maori audience – why the pataka is unusual.
Gladys’s slide-taking confirms the site’s importance and indicates her approval of its design and location, while also documenting the information for further dissemination (Urry 2002, p. 10).
Figure 1 Distant view of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Augustus Earle, 1827. National Library of Australia.
In a manner that recalls the carved figure which is being ignored by a European explorer in Augustus Earle’s painting Distant view of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, the carved faces of the pataka at Te Wairoa return the viewer’s gaze as they guard the land, symbols of a civilisation whose cultural expression Gladys is obviously affected by, but does not understand. She is sufficiently impressed by the pataka and its staring faces, seen in alternating bright daylight and gloomy shadow, to take her single slide; yet, as in Earle’s painting, the resulting composition is gloomy and disquieting, signalling a hostile, ominous disjunction between Pakeha and Maori cultures (Mitchell 1994, p. 25-27).
Shifting Authenticity
But this disconnection between Pakeha visitor and Maori resident is further complicated by textual and spatial misinformation. Gladys is deceived into paying photographic homage to an “authentic” site. It is officially described as such (the information board states it is a “very old Maori storehouse”). The location of the pataka consists of a partly excavated space, with a clearing in front of it for viewing and photography, and a backdrop of volcanic ash covered in native bush to contextualise it. This position is then numbered and located on a map of places of interest within Te Wairoa. Finally it is reproduced and praised in booklets and postcards featuring Te Wairoa (“such storehouses are very rare” confirms Keam) (1958, p. 45, 47).
In fact tourists are venerating a pataka that may have looked ancient but was built after the arrival of European settlers to the region. According to Pam McGrath, the storehouse was constructed around 1852 by members of the Tuhorangi hapu (sub-tribe) from Kariri, who had been persuaded by a missionary, Seymour Spencer, to come to Te Wairoa expressly to inhabit his model village. The sandstone, which was quarried locally and also used in the fireplaces of many European homes, was almost certainly shaped by metal tools (2007). It therefore presents an appearance of authenticity and age, when in reality the site was constructed on the suggestion of a Christian minister, so that both Pakeha and Maori might profit from the flow of tourists visiting the Pink and White Terraces at Lake Rotomahana. Slightly pre-dating the Tarawera eruption, the pataka was barely 100 years old (MacCannell qtd in Urry 2002, p. 10).
The pataka, then, raises issues of cultural integrity. While it would have been used for storage (and, being close to the stream and made of stone, its interior must have been pleasantly cool), its creator sculpted it in the knowledge that it would be displayed to Pakeha tourists. However, Edwards argues that while a Maori product or performance may be produced principally for the tourism market, and could therefore be considered “authentically derived” rather than “authentic”, at least such productions allow visitors to receive an insight into Maori culture. In addition their existence gives Maori the opportunity to “be themselves” at day’s end, that is, within the privacy of their European homes and on the family marae. This way the wairua or spirit of the ancestral marae and its people remains intact, rather than weakened by the continual presence of camera-wielding tourists (a concern about Maori culture that was raised when the Arts and Crafts Institute was first proposed) (McClure 2004, p. 219). According to Edwards, Maori who operate tours in Rotorua believe that, regardless of their modification, the values of Maoridom remain within such tourist-inspired buildings, crafts and performances: ”The cultural product is always changing, but then again so is the culture and lifestyle of the Maori“ (1996, p. 151-53). In short, the pataka is able to offer Gladys and Jim a taste of Maori culture; despite being non-traditional, it can still be appreciated for being out of the ordinary, and for its aesthetic appeal.
Side-tracked
Gladys and Jim subsequently leave the Buried Village loop walk and move onto an adjoining track that leads to the waterfall; there they take at least two slides. The decision to deviate indicates that Gladys was not interested in immersing herself for any length of time in Maori culture, regardless of its alleged rarity and antiquity, preferring to photograph landscapes. Her prejudices frame her slides, preventing her from learning from Maori that there may be other “ways of being civilised and civil”, and that, judging by the faces carved into the pataka, there might also be other ways of viewing the landscape (Mazierska and Walton 2006, p. 7). Nevertheless she has taken one slide - it is a start. Always interested in reading about places she intended to visit, or had visited, the spectacle of the Buried Village may have increased Gladys’s willingness to find out more about the history of the Tarawera explosion and the culture of Te Wairoa’s inhabitants (Edwards 1996, p. 152).
Slide 6 Rotorua Band 1969
Brass Band Parade
Although Gladys is to be commended for not using the Maori woman who would have guided their tour or elderly kuia and children at Whakarewarewa for portraiture photography (a then popular genre within camera clubs), her failure to dwell upon Maori in her slides would oblige any overseas viewer to conclude that New Zealand was a monocultural society within which the few Maori left had become modern, brown-skinned Pakeha (Goldson and Victoria University of Wellington 2006, p. 37).
The slide Rotorua Band 1969 shows the Rotorua brass band (at that time in the C-grade competition) performing a street march.
While it is highly likely, given the previous history of Pakeha brass bands amalgamating with Rotorua’s Maori bands, that the band membership consisted of both Pakeha and part - Maori men (but not women), Gladys took the slide because of their attractive, bright red uniforms and because she enjoyed brass band music and parades, not because she wished to highlight New Zealand’s allegedly successful race relations (Matthews and Matthews Architects 2006, p. 43). Two further slides in this series, Masterton Bd.1967 and Rotorua 1967, provide proof of her interest in the National Brass Band Championship which was being held in Rotorua for the first time (Newcomb 1980, p. 55).
Slide 9 Rotorua 1967
Slide 10 Rotorua Band 1969
Indeed Gladys and Jim’s holiday to the Bay of Plenty (the set also includes slides taken in Tauranga and Mount Maunganui) appears to have been organised to coincide with the championship.Rotorua Band 1969 documents spectacle: the colour (a recent development in brass band uniforms, which had traditionally been black, as worn by the Skellerup Woolston band in Rotorua 1967) and military precision of the local band as it performs a street march for the judges. However it also underlines Rotorua’s difference. Not only is it a unique tourist destination (by the late 1950s Gilmore is declaring it to be New Zealand’s main holiday and conference centre), where both domestic and overseas tourists assemble to gaze upon vivid-hued lakes, thermal activity and performing Maori, the city’s difference can also be perceived within the leisure activities of its residents (1958, p. 66). In Rotorua Band 1969 the band includes part-Maori and Samoan members, unlike the bands “back home”, home being possibly North America for the well-dressed Jewish couple (the male wears a skullcap) standing in the background, or Onehunga, for Jim and Gladys (Werren 2007).
Urry contends that while Gladys is experiencing an out–of-the-ordinary event, she is in fact “seeing unfamiliar aspects of what had previously been thought of as familiar” (Urry 2002, p. 12-13). Brass bands were a common sight in New Zealand towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each Victorian park or domain possessing a band rotunda.
But the familiar event (for Gladys at least) of a brass band parade is made extraordinary, particularly because of the band’s radically different uniform, but also because of its racial composition and location.
However the viewing experience is still pleasurable and safe. Gladys would not have felt uneasy or “out of place” in Rotorua; after all, Maori and Pakeha are apparently integrated, Maori having been “Europeanized in habits” via participation in that English cultural performance, the brass band parade (Ausubel 1960, p. 180). And “place” inside the composition, although not Onehunga, consists of two buildings that visually signify New Zealand’s architectural links to Britain: the reassuringly familiar Tudor-styled Rotorua Post Office (a prominent visual reminder of New Zealand’s place within the British Empire) and the “Continental” home cookery (Skinner 2003, p. 88).
Not the Slightest Disharmony
Figure 1 A poi dance for the visitors
As discussed previously, Gladys’s photographs are additionally the result of scant reporting of Maori history within contemporary Eurocentric tourist media
texts (Goldson and Victoria University of Wellington 2006, p. 37). Kidson, in his account of the Wanaka region’s history in Gladys’s cherished booklet The Wanaka Country, devotes just one paragraph to Te Puoho’s epic but savage passage to Southland (he makes a point of noting that “two maidens were eaten by the invaders”) before pushing on to describe more positively the later, civilised, European explorers (Kidson 1968, no number). The Weekly News likewise set a poor example, portraying Maori visually as charmingly “rustic and backward”, or else through the tourist gaze as “static performers of the past, stable and unchanging”, in ceremonial costume (Skinner 2003, p. 85; National Library of New Zealand. et al. 1991, p. 8). In a 1959 issue for instance, a smiling and attractive Arawa woman, wearing a stylised piupiu and a Christian cross, performs a poi dance against the backdrop of Whakarewarewa’s “thermal wonderland” for the many cameras of the British Lions rugby team in 1959, her poi actions reportedly reciprocating the Lion’s “bright and exciting” entertainment on the rugby field (Anonymous 1959, p. 34; National Library of New Zealand. et al. 1991, p. 8; Skinner 2003, p. 85).
Pakeha hegemony within popular magazines of the period is further represented by Gilmore’s travel article on Maori in Rotorua. Any historic dissent between Maori and Maori, then Maori and Pakeha, is swept speedily under the mat, the reader being assured repeatedly that Maori now live harmoniously with Pakeha, having been assimilated into the Pakeha workforce as “clerks from the telegraph office, shop assistants, truck drivers”. While Gilmore’s intention appears, on first reading, to be to flatter Maori, his motives are suspect. Each patronising assertion refutes anxieties or rumours to the contrary, implying that the foreign tourist may be expecting surly, unattractive savages: “All speak English perfectly; all are sweet-tempered and good humoured, and most are handsome”(1958, p. 68-69). Gilmore’s account of how a Rotorua hotel manager recommended that his overseas male guests “have a beer in the public bar with Maoris” suggests that both the Pakeha manager and travel journalist considered Maori to be inherently inferior but good entertainment value, and certainly worth observing “close-up”. More subtly, this proposal implies that Maori would of course be found within the hotel, because they were not discriminated against, contrary to then current debates within New Zealand newspapers (Foster 1959, Appendix).
Gilmore’s final advice is significant: tourists should try to attend a Whakarewarewa concert party performance, because such entertainment would provide “satisfying contacts” with Maori (1958, p. 69). Obviously such commodified contact would have been cursory, impersonal and far from satisfying. Performing, in the 1950s, within the Pakeha cultural space of Rotorua’s municipal cinema, Maori would have been objectified as practitioners of a set of cultural items - role players and representatives, rather than individuals with distinct identities.
Perceptions
To conclude, Gladys is not alone in her artistic monoculturalism. Her slides, creations of her time, reflect Pakeha society’s arrogance (at worst) and ambivalence (at least) regarding Maori (McFarlane 2004, p. 58; Goldson and Victoria University of Wellington 2006, p. 34). Born at the very start of the twentieth century, Gladys would have absorbed colonialist attitudes towards Maori from her mother, her many aunts and uncles and her English maternal grandparents, all of whom lived with her throughout her Edwardian childhood in the inner-city Auckland suburb of Newton East. Within their urban settler culture her mother’s family would have undoubtedly maintained entrenched beliefs regarding the supremacy of British empiricism that had been transposed from Victorian England via India, where Gladys’s grandfather had served in the British Army.
Nevertheless Gladys was dissimilar from them, for she was born in New Zealand. By the first decade of the twentieth century, more than 60 per cent of the population had been born in New Zealand (King 2003, p. 281). Michael King contends that although British-born parents or grandparents may have expected Gladys’s generation to uphold an image of New Zealand as a “Better Britain”, this age group in fact experienced a “double patriotism”: a sense of loyalty towards Britain, but also of being a New Zealander, a country with its own identity (2003, p. 281).
However in adulthood Gladys could never have been described as being doubly patriotic. Although interested in British writing, and curious about images of British life and royalty (unavoidable, given she regularly scanned the photo pages of The Weekly News), Gladys was not “artificially English”, was never one to call England “home” , nor did she ever express a desire to travel there (Graham 2000, p. 134).
In the 1950s and 1960s, Gladys’s attitude towards Maori would have been predicated on a lack of opportunity to experience their culture. To urban Pakeha, Maori were almost invisible, the majority living rurally and self sufficiently at a distance from Pakeha communities (Phillips 2004, p. 275-76). In 1926, around the time of the birth of Gladys’s first child Ivan, only 9 per cent of the Maori population resided in cities and boroughs.
This figure had climbed to 24 per cent by 1956, as rural Maori migrated to cities to seek work (a trend that first became evident between the censuses of 1936 and 1945) (Walker 1992, p. 500; McLintock 1966, p. 456). Gladys’s daughters Verna and Valerie recollect that when they attended Onehunga Primary School in the 1930s, there were only “three or four [Maori] families… and not many at [Manukau] Intermediate… it was a mainly Pakeha area” (McIntosh 2007). In a discussion of amateur British travel movies, Heather Norris Nicholson sums up how such factors influence the way people view other races:
Prevailing assumptions and prejudices frame how observers contemplate the people and places around them. Their tourist voyeurism, however apparently benign, is imbricated with notions of superiority shaped by gender, class, education, race, culture and geography (Norris Nicholson 2006, p. 26).
It is pointless condemning Gladys for her visual silences regarding Maori. Largely unaware of Maori values and beliefs, her assumptions of racial superiority were based upon a national history of British colonisation and fed by populist racial stereotyping and media misrepresentation. It would have been difficult for Gladys to make a conscious effort to remedy this deficit, given that the few Maori or part-Maori she was acquainted with conformed to Pakeha standards of dress and behaviour, and given the lack of educational opportunities available within the Onehunga community.
By way of illustration, although L.W. McCaskill notes that the Canterbury township of “Littledene” had an “Historical Records” group by 1973, it would have been exclusively Pakeha, membership consisting of those residents who were interested in the preservation of settler society narratives (a goal that was shared by the Onehunga Fencible and Historical Society, to which Gladys belonged) (qtd. in Somerset 1974, p. 172).
If Gladys’s slide collection can be considered a “writing of the self”, her omissions signify her private prejudices and her disinterests (Goldson and Victoria University of Wellington 2006, p. 34). On the other hand, certain deliberately taken slides symbolise an attempt to gain some rudimentary knowledge of a culture that lay outside her understanding. Given the opportunity, Gladys finally stepped onto a marae in Mangere Bridge with her family, as usual with camera in hand. Belonging to the Tainui tribe, Te Puea Memorial Marae had been completed two years earlier in 1965, the first urban marae to be built in Auckland (Walker 1992, p. 504).
In 1902 a young Auckland woman, Charlotte Amy Over, had removed herself from Auckland to the anonymity of Ngaruawahia in the Waikato to give birth to her first child; it was entirely appropriate then, that 65 years later Gladys, that daughter, should finally cross the line between her social world and that of Maori on a marae belonging to the tribe on whose land she had been born.
Copyright (2012) Julie Benjamin
Anderson, Alfred Robert, F. Lennard Casbolt, and Photographic Society of New Zealand. 1967. Camera in New Zealand. Wellington: Reed.
Anonymous. 1953. News in Brief. Te Ao Hou.
———. 1959. The Lions at Rotorua. The Weekly News, September 16.
———. 1962. Hostel Luxury at Freezing Works. Te Ao Hou The New World (41 ):27-28.
Ausubel, David P. 1960. The Fern and the Tiki: An American View of New Zealand: National Character, Social Attitudes and Race Relations. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Bayly, Janet. 1985. Finding A "Place" in New Zealand. In Witness to Change: Life in New Zealand : John Pascoe, Les Cleveland, Ans Westra: Photographs, 1940 -1965, edited by J. Bayly and A. McCredie. Wellington, N.Z.: PhotoForum/Wellington Inc.
Belich, James. 2001. Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000. Auckland, N.Z.: Allen Lane: Penguin Press.
Congalton, Athol A. 1954. Hawera: A Social Survey: A Report of a Community Venture. Hawera: Published jointly by Hawera and District Progressive Association and Hawera Star Publishing Co.
Duclos-Orsello, Elizabeth Ann. 2003. Bonds of Fellowship: Imagining, Building and Negotiating Community in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1900 -1920, History, Boston University, Boston.
Edwards, Deborah. 1996. Tourism and Culture: An Examination of the Maori Tourist Product in Rotorua, University of Auckland, Auckland.
Foster, Catherine. 2000. Past Perfect: An Examination of Jane Foster's Writing in The Weekly News from 1953 -1960. M.A., MA--Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland, Auckland.
Foster, Jane. 1955. Enjoyable Company at "The Institute". The Weekly News, 25 May.
———. 1959. Racial Feeling Hard to Find. The Weekly News, 6 May.
Friedlander, Marti, and James McNeish. 1974. Larks in a Paradise: New Zealand Portraits. Auckland and London: William Collins (New Zealand) Ltd.
Gilmore, Robert. 1958. Rotorua: Maori and Thermal Centre of New Zealand. In New Zealand Holiday Horizons, edited by J. H. Richards.
Goldson, Annie, and Victoria University of Wellington. 2006. Memory, Landscape, Dad & Me. Wellington School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.
Graham, Jeanine. 2000. Settler Society. In The Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by G. Rice, W. H. Oliver and B. R. Williams. Auckland, N.Z.: Oxford University Press.
Keam, R. F. 1958. Tarawera Eruption: The Volcanic Outburst of June 19, 1886, Waimangu Geyser, The Round Trip Today. Auckland: Keam, R. F.
Kidson, H.P. 1968. The Wanaka Country. Christchurch: South Island Publicity Association of New Zealand.
King, Michael. 1999. Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native. Auckland, N.Z.: Penguin.
———. 2003. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Auckland, N.Z.: Penguin Books.
Levien, Ian. 2007. Slides Received [Email] 2007 [cited 24 February 2007].
Mazierska, Ewa, and John K. Walton. 2006. Tourism and the Moving Image. Tourist Studies 6 (1):5-11.
McClure, Margaret. 2004. The Wonder Country: Making New Zealand Tourism. Auckland, N.Z: Auckland University Press.
McFarlane, Kyla. 2004. Sentences Forming Stories: Ans Westra's Maori and Edward Steichen's The Family of Man. In Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs, edited by A. Westra, L. Bieringa, C. Parekowhai, Blair Wakefield Exhibitions and PhotoForum. Wellington, N.Z: BWX.
McGrath, Pam. 2007. Buried Village 2007 [cited 1 March 2007].
McIntosh, Verna. 2007. Re: Maori [email] 2007 [cited 31 January 2007].
McLintock, A. H., ed. 1966. An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand. 3 vols. Vol. 2. Wellington, N.Z.: Govt. Printer.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. 1994. Imperial Landscape. In Landscape and Power, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
National Library of New Zealand., Athol McCredie, Alexander Turnbull Library., and National Library Gallery (N.Z.). 1991. Fields of Golden Daffodils: Themes in New Zealand Magazine and Newspaper Photography 1890-1970. [Wellington, N.Z: National Library of New Zealand.
New Zealand Tourist Association. 1971. This is New Zealand: The New Zealand Tourist Association's Travel Guide. First Quarter ed. Vol. 5. Auckland: Caledonian Publishing Company on behalf of The New Zealand Tourist Association.
Newcomb, Stanley Peter. 1980. Challenging Brass: 100 Years of Brass Band Contests in New Zealand 1880-1980. Takapuna: Powerbrass Music Co. Ltd.
Norris Nicholson, Heather. 2006. Through the Balkan States: Home Movies as Travel Texts and Tourism Histories in the Mediterrannean, c. 1923-39. Tourist Studies 6 (1).
Palenski, Ron. 2004. Kiwi Milestones: New Zealand's Population through the Millions. Auckland, N.Z.: Hodder Moa Beckett.
Park, Geoff. 2006. Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria University Press.
Phillips, Jock. 2004. Afterword: Reading the 1940 Centennial. In Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand's Centennial, edited by W. L. Renwick. Wellington [N.Z.]: Victoria University Press.
Photographic Society of New Zealand, ed. 2003. Camera: The First Fifty Years: Gallery 2003. Edited by B. Sinclair. Auckland`: AGM.
Salmon, John T. 1958. A Photographic Holiday in New Zealand. In New Zealand Holiday Horizons, edited by J. H. Richards.
Simmons, Laurence. 2002. Casting Aside Old Nets: John O'Shea's First Fight Against Racism. Illusions (33):12-19.
Skinner, Damian. 2003. Accidental Tourists: Ans Westra, Gregory Riethmaier and the National Publicity Studios in Rotorua, C.1963. In On Display: New Essays in Cultural Studies, edited by A. Smith and L. Wevers. Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria University Press.
Somerset, H. C. D. 1974. Littledene, Patterns of Change, Educational Research Series; no. 51. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Stone, Russell. 2004. Auckland's Rememberance of Times Past. In Creating a National Spirit: Celebrating New Zealand's Centennial, edited by W. L. Renwick. Wellington [N.Z.]: Victoria University Press.
Turner, John B. 2004. Beginnings: A Personal Recollection of Ans Westra and the 1960s. In Handboek: Ans Westra Photographs, edited by A. Westra, L. Bieringa, C. Parekowhai, Blair Wakefield Exhibitions and PhotoForum. Wellington, N.Z: BWX.
Urry, John. 2002. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage.
Walker, Ranginui J. 1992. Maori People since 1950. In The Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by G. Rice, W. H. Oliver and B. R. Williams. Auckland: Oxford University Press.
Werren, Doug. 2007. Rotorua Band. Auckland, 2 April.
Yorkshire Art Circus, ed. 1992. Kept in a Shoebox: The Popular Experience of Photography. Edited by B. Lewis and C. Harding. Bradford and Castleford: Castleford: Yorkshire Art Circus
Bradford: National Museum of Photography, Film & Television.
