Te Aroha, Thames [Waihou] River

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).

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.