Grahamstown

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Daniel Mundy’s series of photographs of gold-mining activities and settlements around the Thames area are among the first industrial photographs taken in New Zealand. Mundy’s photograph shows Grahamstown (now part of Thames) when gold extraction was at its height, prior to being superseded by the nearby Waihī mine. Grahamstown features a crowded industrial settlement with quartz batteries at work, crushing stone to extract gold, as well as the foundries required to supply mining equipment. Nestled amongst the industry are signs of the domestic necessities of human habitation — small wooden houses with clothes on their lines strung across tiny yards and a few tents on vacant lots. Smoke wafting from factory chimneys and into the sky mingles with the clouds, conflating industry and nature.
After compiling over four years a set of about two hundred and fifty wet-plate collodion negatives of the colony, Mundy spent 1874–75 in London promoting his work. He gave a talk to the Photographic Society of Great Britain which was the basis for an 1874 article in the Photographic News. Here he described the geological features of the landscape and discussed his photographic method and subjects.
In London Mundy appears to have been attempting to disprove a claim made in 1872 that his photographs should not be purchased by the New Zealand government as, while ‘excellent from an artistic point of view, they were not of a character likely to force the colony into greater notice, or to induce any great increase in the emigration from the United Kingdom’.1

In 1875 Mundy used a new process for printing from his negatives when he had a London firm turn a selection of his photographs, including Grahamstown, into large-format carbon prints. The arrival of this new photographic printing process provoked excitement among photographers. During 1875 Mundy was back in New Zealand and lobbying the colonial government to purchase a set of his large carbon prints, but the outcome is unclear. However, a set was acquired by Te Papa’s predecessor, the Colonial Museum, and — in photographs taken about 1895 — they can be seen hanging in the main exhibition hall of the museum.

Lissa Mitchell

1 ‘Petitions’, Daily Southern Cross, Auckland, 15 August 1872, p. 3.