Ohura CHAT (Community Hospitality and Tourism Shop)

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 303.

Sara McIntyre was working as a rural nurse based in Taumarunui when she took this photograph on her travels around the King Country region. Ōhura was a coal mining town for forty years until the mines closed in the early 1970s. A new prison then provided employment, but in 2005 this too shut. As residents moved away, the town’s shops gradually went out of business. We see two examples reflected in the window of a surviving shop in this complex combination of interior and exterior. The rusting corrugated iron and peeling paint of the buildings across the street blend harmoniously with the dilapidated items inside the CHAT second-hand store as both approach their end of life. Today, even CHAT stands empty, completing the line of derelict stores in the town’s main street. Like Les Cleveland’s image of the European Hotel sixty years earlier, McIntyre’s photograph reminds us of the eventual sad fate of so many single-industry towns.