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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Although James Bragge operated a photographic portrait studio in Wellington for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, his main focus and inspiration was the production of landscape and panorama photographs. He travelled the region in a horse-drawn covered cart (occasionally featured in his images) with his name printed on the side and provisioned for developing his large-format glass-plate collodion negatives. His photographs documented a landscape under the pressure of change; Bragge photographed the Forty Mile Bush, near Eketāhuna, one of the last habitats of the huia, just before it was milled.
One of Bragge’s practices was to photograph the same view over a number of years, enabling a documentation of the developing city and surrounding areas between the late 1860s and the early 1880s. A selection of his prints taken between 1876 and 1878 was later assembled into a series of impressive albums entitled Photographs of New Zealand scenery — Wellington to Wairarapa, which document his journeys from the city to newly settled areas in the north and celebrate the development of Wellington and the Wairarapa. Bragge’s scenes of the Wellington region depict a significant transitional moment in New Zealand’s colonial history: the beginning of the clearing of vast areas of native forest in the lower North Island.
This image, however, is not included in either of the copies of his albums now in the collection of Te Papa, and it shows the ugly scars of past progress. The building on the left is a dilapidated flour mill at the start of the Ngāūranga Gorge. Freshly denuded hills are in the background. Wellington baker Francis Bee leased some land from local Māori in 1850, and by 1852 notices appeared in Wellington newspapers advertising that top-quality flour from his Ngāūranga mill could be purchased at various stores in the settlement.
The ravaged hills above a series of wooden buildings, a bridge and fences demonstrate the asset to the colony presented by trees; this was a landscape ready-made with building materials.
Lissa Mitchell