item details
NameTe Aroha, Thames [Waihou] River
ProductionBurton Brothers; photography studio; circa 1884; Dunedin
1875 / 1895
1875 / 1895
Classificationgelatin dry plate negatives, black-and-white negatives
Materialssilver, photographic gelatin, sheet glass, photographic plates
Materials Summarygelatin glass negative
Techniquesblack-and-white photography
Registration NumberC.013351
Credit linePurchased 1943
Overview
Horsedrawn coach crossing the Thames River on a punt.
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 81.
Before bridges were commonplace, ferries often transported stagecoaches across a river —a nice spectacle for a photographer. This ferry seems to be operated by the man standing on the ferry working a winch that pulls the chain seen leading away at right. Some construction work on the shore suggests that the days of the ferry are numbered; newspapers of the time report a drawbridge being built at Te Aroha in 1884.