Queenstown, Wakatipu, NZ

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

Shot on a glass negative roughly the size it is reproduced here, this photograph was quite an achievement to make using the wet-plate process. It would have required a high degree of care and skill to coat the plate evenly, and a huge camera to accommodate the negative. Few other photographers in nineteenth-century New Zealand attempted such large photographs. Queenstown had been founded only
about fifteen years earlier, a year after gold was discovered in the nearby Arrow River in 1862. For two years it had been the sheep run of William Rees, but he shrewdly tore down his shearing shed and reused the timber for a hotel when a canvas town of 1500 miners sprang up. The gold, of course, eventually ran out and Queenstown went into a
long decline. It became a sleepy town of fewer than a thousand people through the first half of the twentieth century. Since the mid-1960s, the increase in tourism has pushed its population growth sharply upwards: to 27,000 for the urban area today and nearly 100,000 for the district at peak times.