spinofflive
Farm-House-in-the-hills.png

SocietyMay 18, 2024

A life story

Farm-House-in-the-hills.png

David Hill remembers an old friend, who you’ve probably never heard of.

Doug (I’ll call him that) died in March. You won’t know him.

How do you measure the significance of a life? If you go for public profile, legacy of work, dramatic deeds, seminal ideas or discoveries, then Doug seems to sit well towards the Insignificant end of the spectrum. And yet…

I first knew him decades back, at our boys’ high school: a powerful young rugby player and competent-plus student. He was genial, sociable, easy in his own body. At regimented dances with the local girls’ high, figures in stiff petticoats and ponytails gravitated to him, while I glowered from a corner, skinny and spotty and sullen.

In our small, final-year class, we were thrown together. And Doug was friendly. Genuinely friendly, with the focus that means you’re being registered, being acknowledged as an individual.

He helped me bloom. What a… florid phrase. Yet, to have this proto-Apollo from a little farming town, this 1st XV captain and deputy head boy say “You’re bloody great with words, Dave. Wish I could do stuff like that”, helped me stand a bit taller, believe there could be a future beyond awkward, acned adolescence.

Then we left school, and I never saw him again for 55 years.

I remade contact because our high school began sending me Old Boys’ newsletters. Maybe they were hoping for endowments (from a writer??). One newsletter included names and last-known addresses for pupils from my decade. Beside the names was a column with ticks scattered down it, and the heading DEC – as in Deceased. A number of my peers were dead.

It jolted me. So over the next weeks I emailed or wrote to some of the unticked. “Saw your name… just want to say I remember you… hope you’ve had a good life… All the Best.”

Replies ranged from pleased to wary. One of the former was from Doug, a hand-written letter on lined notepaper. Bloody brilliant to hear from me; he was on the family farm, been there for ever; next time I was anywhere near…

Three months later, I was. A tiny rural town. Weatherboard houses alternating with paddocks. I stopped outside a big old place backed by fruit trees and bush. An XXOS garage held car, trailer, quad bike. A pair of working gumboots stood by the front door.

That door opened, and I was startled. The figure grinning at me was stooped and seamed. The hand that gripped mine was hard but strangely tentative. (He’d broken a coupla fingers when a fence-strainer jammed once; couldn’t be bothered seeing a quack.) The voice was a smoker’s rasp. “Shit, you’re taller than I remember.”

His partner June was out at her part-time local council job, “knockin’ some sense into the buggers”. She’d told Doug to look after me properly, so he brought through a plate of her muffins; brewed two mugs of bituminous coffee.

Talk came easily. Bloody brilliant idea of mine to make contact. He reminisced about some of the newsletter names, the teachers we’d had. He’d always meant to go to a reunion; never got round to it.

He smoked all the time: skinny, noxious roll-your-owns. He didn’t ask if I minded; that wasn’t relevant. This was his domain, and he was paying me a compliment by acting like he usually did. He coughed occasionally; laughed with a background wheeze.

He took me outside to see his orchard. Plums, peaches, nectarines, pears. Most of the trees were younger than him; after all, he’d been here for 55 years.

He told me about it as we strolled. “Been plannin’ to do Ag Science at Massey. Then the old man got crook; I came home to help him; never left.” He’d married a local girl, who died a fair while back; he didn’t say any more about that.

He was happy. I saw that almost instantly. And fulfilled. Five-plus decades in this little town, and he was replete with friends, activities, issues. His son-in-law ran most of the farm now. Doug gave him a hand sometimes (translation: told him what he should be doing). He didn’t boast, but contentment lay beneath all he said. He touched his trees as we walked; pointed at distant hills where he used to hunt till his useless bloody knee gave out. Four… five cars or trucks passed while we were outside; all of them tooted.

He wanted to know what I’d done; grinned when I told him about my wife Beth. “She’s a gun with words, too, eh? Good on yer.”

The Great World didn’t interest him much. It was vapour trails in the sky – remote and evanescent. But local as in village politics engrossed him. “Take ya down the pub, next time ya come. It’s a bloody debating society down there.”

June came home, neat and grey-haired, found us in the gargantuan vegetable patch, where Doug was prodding an aubergine. “Like to try somethin’ new each year.” She checked I wasn’t condescending to him, hugged me when I left, laden with sweetcorn and broccoli. I drove away smiling.

Beth and I saw them three or four times over the next few years. She liked his utter lack of affectation, his pleasure in our visits. (“Y’made my day.”) She even managed half a cup of his coffee when June wasn’t there one time.

I mustn’t sentimentalise him. Local bodies and government departments brought out his inner redneck. “I gave the buggers an earful and walked out” was a phrase I heard too often. Left-wing parties needed a kick up the arse – meanwhile, he was being a de facto union advocate for a sharemilker getting a raw deal. The Greens? “Don’t get me started on those pricks.” One of his several iterations of this came as we walked the stand of native trees he’d planted to replace a grazing paddock. I never could think of a reply.

He hadn’t been out of New Zealand, hadn’t been out of the North Island, I suspect. But then, Jane Austen’s Emma had never seen the sea, and Austen’s “families in a country village” were enough to keep Doug full and rewarded as well.

He was Ngāti Pākehā, yet had become a district kaumātua. Artefacts and taonga were brought to him for advice or safekeeping. Whānau, even iwi disputes had been settled in his living room. He didn’t say this; I heard it from June. He had little te reo (“English is bloody hard enough”), but he knew the whakapapa of everyone nearby. Troubled tamariki sometimes worked on his farm, learned skills, got a boot up the bum – his terminology again – if they slacked.

He was delivering a load of his fruit and veges to a family one day. I went along for the ride. Just outside town, we turned into a road of poplars and magpies, via a clattery wooden bridge. “Planted a few trees back there,” Doug said, nodding at what looked like 100m of flourishing riparian greenery.

Ahead of us, a Māori man was checking his mailbox. Doug slowed, yelled “G’day, ya black bastard!” This is interesting, I thought; I’m going to die by a rural roadside. The other party grinned, and replied “Hey, honky!”

He never did get me down to the pub. A mutual friend had told me of Doug’s consumption, and the times he’d lost his licence, or the local cop had given him yet another warning.

When the pub and those roll-your-owns finally caught up with him, it wasn’t an easy dying. His leathery body resisted hard, till the final weeks seemed to bring their own quiet and analgesic.

I couldn’t get to the funeral. Ironically (I hear Doug’s wheezy laugh), our own health issues prevented it. But that mutual friend told me how the church was thronged, how dozens stood outside. Waiata were sung; a korowai draped his coffin as it was carried through the gate to burial beside a big macrocarpa. “A lot of guys were crying,” said our friend on the phone, before choking up himself.

Doug got no media obituary. If there had been any, I suspect he’d have asked “What the fuck for?” Hardly anyone outside his community knew him. Everyone inside that community did.

A limited life? By most criteria. Not by his, and I never doubted that fulfilment, that contentment I’ve mentioned. “He’s a happy man,” Beth said once, and she (of course, dear) was right. My heart lifted each time I made the turn-off into his little settlement. Did he do the William Blake thing and see heaven in a wild flower? He’d more likely have rooted the cheeky bugger out, especially if it was in among his aubergines.

He gave us a dwarf kōwhai one time. I see it each time I go out our back door. Yes, it makes me remember Doug. It also reminds me that I never found a riposte to his insults against the Greens.

‘Help keep The Spinoff funny, smart, tall and handsome – become a member today.’
Gabi Lardies
— Staff writer
Keep going!
Who are thee? (Photos: Auckland Museum)
Who are thee? (Photos: Auckland Museum)

SocietyMay 18, 2024

Do you recognise anybody in these 150-year-old photographs?

Who are thee? (Photos: Auckland Museum)
Who are thee? (Photos: Auckland Museum)

Some of the earliest photos of life in Aotearoa are on display at Auckland Museum right now – but the identities of some of the people in them are a mystery.

What was it like to be one of the first people in New Zealand to have their photo taken? In a word, “awkward”, says Shaun Higgins, pictorial curator at Auckland Museum. He saw plenty of wooden poses and bewildered expressions while putting together A Different Light, an exhibition of some of this country’s earliest photography.

The oldest photos in the collection are daguerreotypes dating back to the 1850s, which would have required subjects to hold still for somewhere up to 45 seconds. This meant candid smiles or indeed any facial expression other than a steely gaze was largely out of the question. “They weren’t necessarily all miserable,” Higgins says, “though they quite often look like that.”

Higgins teamed up with curators from Wellington’s Alexander Turnbull Library and the Hocken Collection in Dunedin to put together the exhibition, with their combined collections offering a “vast pool” of photography from around the country to choose from. But rather than simply picking out the best, most spectacular images of Aotearoa in the 19th century, he says they wanted to let audiences see some of the more “everyday” material.

The result: lots of portraits of everyday people who likely never imagined they’d end up on display in a museum, and whose heads probably would have fallen off if you’d tried explaining “The Spinoff” to them. 

And yet, here they are. These are some of the people featured in the exhibition that the museum has little to no information on, and wants to find out more about. 

Portrait of unidentified sitters, circa 1895 (Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-576-73)

Admittedly it’s a long shot that a Spinoff reader in 2024 would recognise someone in a photo from the 1870s, but it wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented. Recently a museum visitor IDed their ancestors in a family photo that was on display, despite the photographer having got their name wrong. “It was wonderful,” says Higgins, who was then able to track down another photo of a different family member for them.

You can get a lot of information out of a photo if you know what you’re looking for, and Higgins knows just about every trick in the book. For really old photos the first thing he inspects is the cases they come in, and can usually narrow it down to within a couple of years from when a particular type of case was in use. “It doesn’t always mean that the picture itself was taken at that time, but it gives you a start.”

Left: Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-575-152. Right: Auckland Museum Collection: PH-1970-9-10

From there he inspects the photograph itself. He can tell at a glance what kind of technology was used (“daguerreotypes were used from 1848, for example, and then they shifted to the ambrotype…”) – and with the pace at which photography evolved in the 19th century, that usually narrows it down quite a bit too.

But often the best information is found on the other side. “It’s funny,” Higgins says, “on one hand it’s very bad to write on a photograph – over time it can bleed through and damage it. But on the other hand, often the writing on the photographs is how we find out more – a name, a number that a photographer’s used, a message written for a family member… all clues to investigate.”

Higgins’ forensic analysis leads him down some extremely niche wormholes. “I love looking at props or details like tablecloths,” he says. “If somebody’s sitting next to a table, I can sometimes nail the tablecloth down to a specific studio.” 

Left: Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-575-35. Right: Portrait of an unidentified child, circa 1890 (Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-400-2)

The least reliable part of the photograph tends to be the subject themselves. You can’t read too much into the clothes people are wearing, Higgins warns – studios often provided costumes for people to wear, and if not they’d at least have got dressed up in their Sunday best. 

A Different Light charts what Higgins describes as the “democratisation” of photography through the 19th century. The first daguerreotypes would have been prohibitively expensive – he estimates somewhere in the region of $500 in today’s money – but towards the end of the century cameras became more accessible, meaning more and more people could start documenting their own lives, while it also became more affordable to visit a portrait studio. 

Left: Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-575-91. Right: Portrait of an unidentified sitter from the Teutenberg family album, circa 1880s (Auckland Museum Collection: PH-ALB-112-p43-1)

One of the things Higgins enjoyed the most while putting the exhibition together was seeing the ways people found to express themselves despite the technological restrictions. “One of my favourites is a very big daguerreotype of a couple that was taken in 1952,” he says. “They’ve still got that very wooden ‘we’re-sitting-for-a-long-exposure-and-we’re-not-happy-about-it’ expression, but they’ve got one hand over the other’s. They’re showing their intimacy… it conveys quite a lot.”

Then there’s what’s been dubbed “the creepy eye photo”. The “drawn-on eyes and eyebrows” on this portrait of the Thompson family from 1893 are an odd feature, Higgins says, likely added because somebody blinked or there was a problem with the exposure. “What’s interesting is this particular studio, Elite Photographers, I’ve seen them do a few others the same way,” he says. “I’m almost wondering whether it was something like a specialty or trademark they were known for.”

Portrait of the Thompson family, with drawn-on eyes and eyebrows, 1893 (Auckland Museum Collection: PH-TECH-385-8)

Touch-ups like this were more common than you might think, and understandable when you consider how much subjects would have paid to have their portraits taken, Higgins says. He thinks of it like an extremely early precursor to Photoshop: “You always could edit photographs, right from the very beginning.”

A Different Light is open to view at Auckland Museum until September, after which Wellingtonians and Dunedinites will get a chance to see if they can recognise a great-great-great-grandparent, or at least imagine what it was like to be knocking about in the 19th century.

And as you stare into the sometimes drawn-on eyes of the people in the photographs and put yourself in their shoes, just remember this: “They would say ‘prunes’, not ‘cheese’,” Higgins says. “Saying ‘cheese’ is a 20th century thing.”

Picnic party at Thames, circa 1884 (Auckland Museum Collection: PH-NEG-B4086)
But wait there's more!