by Leo Haks, Colleen Dallimore & Alan
Jackson.
ISBN:
9780987654663
RRP:
$69.99
Format:
Hardback
Imprint:
Kowhai Media
Dist
by: Potton & Burton
Published: 19 October 2015
Post Marks reveals the pioneer roots of New
Zealand culture, the importance society placed on industry and infrastructure
and the rapidly changing shape of our landscapes. It includes reproductions of
more than 500 New Zealand postcards, many of them so rare they may be the only
surviving examples of this early and formative period of the nation’s history.
The aim of this book is to provide an introduction to New Zealand
picture postcards and what they reveal. It presents mainly photography-based
postcards from 1897 — when the first official New Zealand picture postcard was
published — until 1922. This 25-year period includes the boom years in New Zealand
postcard production, 1903–1910, and World War I.
Postcards were mementos of
where people lived and worked, where they went on holiday, what they could buy,
who they should vote for and what they could laugh at. The variety of subjects
illustrated provides an overview of New Zealand’s socioeconomic situation — a
fairly reliable database of the country and its people during those formative
years. Indeed, the widespread availability of postcards on certain topics could
justify individual books in their own right: sport, churches, post offices,
railways and town views.
New Zealand postcards are notable in that they featured everyday
subjects, such as livestock, sport, transport, mining, exploration and
developing the land, as well as more unusual topics: a referendum on
prohibition in April 1919, aviation, Antarctic exploration, road accidents and
taxidermied animals. The coverage of Maori and their lives in this book is, by
necessity, confined to interpretations by Western photographers. Publishers and
buyers preferred posed, formal portraits. Young, pretty Maori women were
especially popular and captions on these cards were frequently incorrect and
demeaning to the sitter. Names were usually omitted, except in the case of
Maori guides. To our knowledge, there were no Maori photographers at work in
the postcard history before 1922. It is interesting to speculate about what
Maori would have chosen to record over the same period.
The pictorial record of New
Zealand through postcards is not always historically accurate. Early postcards
were printed in Germany or Austria, where workers had to rely on their own
limited interpretations of what the postcard publisher had written, leading to
typographical and other errors. Some postcards were published by commercially
or politically motivated clients.
Sometimes it was not so much
what was shown or said on postcards, but rather what was not. There were
hundreds of cards produced on the subject of World War I, depicting people
leaving for war, going into battle, recuperating on hospital ships, fundraising
at home and more. Meanwhile, the postcards which were sent home by the soldiers
were subject to rigid censorship. Words were blacked out if considered
negative, and if a sentence was deemed ‘anti-war’, the card would be destroyed.
This intervention may have made the war effort seem less horrific than it was
in reality to those at home.
Post Marks will have wide appeal because it
offers a rare sampling of images that record New Zealand’s economic and social
history from a period now beyond the living memory of most New Zealanders.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Leo Haks always liked to find things and
discover their place in history. He has been collecting items of artistic and
cultural significance all of his life, particularly items for which there was
little professional or even general interest. He has published books relating
to several of these collections, including one on early Indonesian postcards
which preceded and provided the stimulus for this book. After making his home
in New Zealand with co-author, Colleen Dallimore in 2008, Haks began collecting
early New Zealand postcards and the resulting comprehensive collection,
supported by images from other collectors, deserves to be documented and
shared.
Colleen Dallimore was raised in the hills of Banks
Peninsula, a fifth-generation descendant of French settlers at Akaroa and
great-granddaughter of an English immigrant photographer who exhibited in the
1906 Christchurch Exhibition. After graduating in Fine Arts from Canterbury
University, Colleen pursued a teaching career in Art and Art History and
remains a practising artist with a special interest in photography. She and her
partner Leo Haks continue to explore what constitutes our New Zealand identity.
Alan
Jackson has been
an inveterate collector since childhood. As a boy, he began collecting postage
stamps, and when his interest in these waned, the collecting bug persisted. He
has since formed extensive collections of ephemera, all connected in some way
with the post: New Zealand and other postal markings, pictorial postcards,
Cinderella stamps of the world, especially those relating to World War I. He
has also written extensively on these subjects.
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