Ballarat Street, Queenstown, NZ, flooded 1878

Long before photographs were used in newspapers, William Hart took this picture of Queenstown in flood. Like so many news images of later times, it draws on the extraordinary spectacle of people boating in an urban street – and in this case, even the possibility that a ship might be about to literally steam into town. Photography was still a relative novelty, so the townsfolk were out in force to be recorded for posterity. Their presence reinforces the sense in which photography can be both witness and performance.

---

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

Heavy rain and snowmelt in 1878 caused devastation along the length of the South Island’s Clutha River, and dramatically raised the level of Lake Wakatipu, seen in the background of this photograph. The Otago Daily Times observed men wading up to their chests in a bid to rescue articles of household furniture, while the lake lay ‘in smiling, mocking serenity, priding itself in its newly-acquired greatness’.1 Worse was to come, for when the water was at its height a wind sprang up that pounded waves against the buildings, causing some to collapse. Floating logs from a nearby timber yard hammered against walls, doors and windows, causing even greater destruction and, according to the Otago Daily Times reporter, sending ‘a pang of humiliating pain to the heart, to see how utterly futile are the works of man when opposed by the elements’.

1 ‘The floods: The Clutha’, Otago Daily Times, 16 October 1878, p.1.