The Fair "Orini" at Ti Eke, King Country

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

These photographs were taken as part of Alfred Burton’s 1885 photographic expedition up the Whanganui River and through the King Country, then considered New Zealand’s final frontier. Burton accompanied a government party surveying for the advance of the North Island main trunk railway, and gained access to Māori settlements unseen by most Pākehā and never before photographed. He named this series of photographs ‘The Maori at home’.

The series was promoted and sold through a mail-order catalogue whose written description of the photographs, in this instance among three negatives captioned ‘Groups at Ti Eke’, provide valuable insight into Burton’s intentions. The listing also tracks his movements, showing us the people and places he visited before and after taking a photograph.

Burton also published his diary of the tour in the catalogue, which provides an accompanying narrative. It describes his visit to the Tīeke kāinga (village) and meeting Orini, the young woman shown in the photograph on the right and whom we see holding a hoe (paddle) in the photograph above. Burton described her as having ‘an almost classical face’.1 She was ‘induced’ to pose for the camera ‘after some little coquetry’. Burton attributed her reluctance to a presumed belief that the camera was a taipō, or evil spirit.

Such insights into Burton’s engagement with the people at Tīeke makes it probable that, while the group in the above photograph appears spontaneously captured, they were persuaded and manipulated. The women are arranged around Orini as the focus of the composition; she holds the hoe as a prop to provide visual interest. Among the cast of Burton’s ‘Maori at home’, it is tempting to see this photograph perhaps not as an authentic portrayal of Māori domestic life but rather as a group of women patiently humouring the photographer as he interrupts their day, and Orini’s in particular.

Christine Whybrew

1 Burton Brothers, The Maori at home: A catalogue of a series of photographs, illustrative of the scenery and of native life in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand, Burton Brothers, Dunedin, 1885, p. 11.