Ruatoria, 1963. From the portfolio: PhotoForum - Ans Westra

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

Ans Westra photographed children at Ruatōria’s primary school in 1963. When she was out walking the following day some of them recognised her and invited her home. She asked, without any clear purpose in mind, to photograph them, and shot a series in and around their house. Back home in Wellington, Westra organised the photographs into a story, wrote a text for them, gained publication permission from the family, arranged for them to be paid, and changed their name and location in the text for privacy. But when the resulting Washday at the Pa was published by the Department of Education in 1964, it ran into a storm of controversy. The department was criticised for reinforcing a negative and outdated stereotype of Māori living in rural poverty (and their implied moral failure). The publication’s supporters claimed it was a warm and sympathetic depiction of a loving family, but the booklet was nevertheless withdrawn from schools by the government and destroyed. The underlying question, of the right and ability of Pākehā to represent Māori, would become forever linked with Westra’s name.