Head of Lake Te Anau, April 1895

Group of trampers beside a hut. Lake Te Anau is beyond the trees.

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

In 1888, Donald Sutherland cut a walking track to connect the falls he had earlier discovered to Milford Sound. In the same year, Quintin McKinnon opened up a route that met Sutherland’s from the Lake Te Anau end, creating the now world-famous Milford Track. The well-provisioned walking party depicted here was sponsored by two Melbourne newspapers, which published a series of columns about the group’s adventures, and a subsequent illustrated tourist guide to Fiordland. Climber and journalist Malcolm Ross, squatting in front, wrote most of the texts. Standing behind him is Tom Fyfe, who led the first party to scale Aoraki / Mount Cook the year before. The woman with the feather in her hat is Ross’s wife, Forrest, also a mountaineer and journalist and the first female member of the New Zealand Alpine Club. The scene is full of period detail, from the women’s then controversial breeches to the holed box, which probably contained homing pigeons. Though a newspaper photographer accompanied the expedition, most of its male members were skilled photographers themselves: the large field camera held by the man at right is one of five the group carried.