The history of photography in New Zealand dates from the 1840s. Today it’s hard to imagine life without photographic images. Their ubiquity extends from the newspaper to the art gallery, from the billboard to the family album, from product packaging to the internet.
Today Waiuta is a West Coast ghost town. But from 1906 to 1951 it was
the company town for the South
Island's largest gold mine and home to 600 people. The superb photographs of Czech immigrant Joseph Divis provide a
fascinating glimpse of Waiuta in its heyday.
A small prospecting group discovered a gold-bearing quartz reef in the upper reaches of Blackwater Creek, a tributary of the Grey River, on 9 November 1905.
As more houses were built, Waiuta started
to look less like a mining camp. It always had the appearance, though, of a
frontier town dominated by wood and corrugated iron.
Painters and photographers loved to capture the beauty of Parliament's buildings in postcards, and New Zealanders and visitors sent these to friends and family in new Zealand and overseas.
