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This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 388-389.
This extract was authored by Athol McCredie.
While historians can tell us about what happened and why, Laurence Aberhart’s photographs tell something of how the past felt. Or at least prompt our imagining of how it felt.
In a set of four photographs [O.028024/2-4, O.028024/3-4, O.028024/4-4] Aberhart aimed his camera through gun slits on fortifications built in the late 1880s during the ‘Russian scare’ on Rīpapa Island in Lyttelton Harbour. The images are almost entirely black, with the world outside represented as a severely constrained, bare glimpse, as though one were inside a camera for the brief moment the film is privileged to witness reality beyond its life of enforced darkness.
Aberhart customarily titles his photographs with the bald facts of place and date. This is the case here, but he has also grouped them under the more allusive title The prisoner’s dream, suggesting the experience of Māori prisoners from Parihaka who were incarcerated without trial in the former quarantine station on the island in 1880 and 1881. These were men arrested by colonial forces for ploughing up Pākehā farms and rebuilding Māori fences destroyed for road building after settlers were allocated confiscated land without Māori reserves being set aside.