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Several unidentified men are standing on the framework of a partially-thatched faletele, grass in foreground and trees and palms in the background.
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).
Thomas Andrew’s photograph is an almost too perfect representation of the underlying structure of a Samoan faletele —a large house for meetings of chiefs and important visitors. Building a faletele was and still is a huge undertaking, requiring not just timber for the supports and framing and leaves for the thatching, but gifts for the tufuga fai fale (master builder) and food for the workers. One half of this faletele is already covered with thatch; the unfinished side shows the supporting framework. The photograph looks much like the sort of diagrammatic, cut-away illustrations used to explain the internal workings of a machine or animal, but it is unlikely that the building process was staged for Andrew.