The South Island of New Zealand – From the Road, Robin Morrison
Massey University Press, 2023
Road trips take many forms. You can load up the car, check the map (or not), and head off into adventure and discovery, epiphany and delight. Who knows what beauty and mishap will unfold? Road travel is joy. Or you can do the kind of road trip where you swap a novel or an artwork or a photograph for the lure of a physical itinerary. That too offers adventure and discovery, epiphany and delight. Robin Morrison’s The South Island – From the Road offers the reader multifarious travel, retracing physical roads and then setting you within and beyond the photograph frame.
The documentary photographs of Robin Morrison (1944 – 1993) represent New Zealand land and townscapes with varying degrees of human traces and everyday settings. Like the movies of Vincent Ward and Jane Campion, the poetry of Bill Manhire and Anna Jackson, the songs of Aldous Harding and Tiny Ruins, the novels of Catherine Chidgey and Elizabeth Knox, Robin’s photographs have stuck light and dark, the physical and the ethereal, to my heart from the first encounter. To stand before a Robin Morrison photograph is to absorb the transcendental – to be both of the work and beyond the work. It is traversing the ordinary and gatecrashing the extraordinary. You enter the unsayable: how can I convey the uncanny feeling that sits next to flashes of recognition?
In his preface, Robin claims the 1979 project as a ‘personal view of the South Island’: ‘I travelled 18,000 miles with my family into most corners of the South Island but concentrated more on areas that held my eye – in particular Central Otago. We stayed in the holiday houses of friends and enjoyed the sense of space and sense of being on the edge that we so rarely have in the closeness of a city.’
This project resonates on so many levels, especially as I have lived with an artist for over three decades. We travelled much of the South Island as a family, as he searched for beehive ‘paintings’ on the landscape. Our physical road trips, affording beauty views along with the fascinating pull of found objects on the land, have instilled an ongoing relationship with space, the natural world, an inhabited world, the magnetism of elsewhere.
Thus to take road trips courtesy of The South Island – From the Road is both a reawakening of old itineraries and an ignition of the new. It is a form of travelling though time and place where the white bulging cloud hanging over the grey streaked ocean is as important as a reflection in the Post Office window or a snow dusted mountain. It is what the artist/documenter chooses to frame, the light he attends, the colours that have fallen into view, the trust he builds in the people photographed. Herein lies an alchemy of looking where composition meets colour meets light meets hidden narratives. Weather makes a difference. The general absence of people makes a difference. The pervasive presence of people makes a difference. The beekeeping couple standing outside their wooden villa in Blackball. The women with cream handbags at the race track. Traces of human endeavour and architecture make a difference. Interiors make a difference. The tea trolley with lace doilies and a cut glass vase resonates like a poem, the elderly couple framed by knickknacks, the family mementos. Shadows on walls or hills beguile, track marks on paddock or mountain passes divert.
Does it make a difference that Robin harnessed natural light to take the photographs, that he worked without filters and generally used Kodachrome film stock? I am no expert but for me it does. I have no interest in expanding upon what is missing from these South Island photographs – critics have mentioned grit and grime, a Māori presence, the new industries such as vineyards and hydro power stations, or the hubbub of the cities, dwellings that don’t adhere to Art Deco chic or colour palettes. The stream of thought as you look is paramount. I move from the nostalgic to old hierarchies to hand-knitted jerseys and socks on the line, from the kettle on the wood-fired stove to women in aprons and men in gumboots. Beer and cigarettes. Goats and dogs. To what is missing and missed, to what is missing and not at all missed.
To sit and gaze into the width and depth of Robin’s South Island photographs is to stockpile wonder. It is falling upon beauty in the everyday and the accruing stories. It is falling upon the everyday in beauty, and expanding on the way objects and human interventions fade from view, return to view, raise questions. I keep holding a page out to my family and starting up a conversation. We are road-tripping along an itinerary of anecdote, memory, visual images, affecting colours, mood enhancing light courtesy of Robin Morrison’s mesmerising photography. This elegant book is a treasure. No question. It is an extremely diverting road trip.
The South Island of New Zealand – From the Road was originally published by Alistair Taylor in 1981. After a long period out of print, the much loved book has been lovingly re-presented in a new edition by Massey University Press in association with Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum. The original Kodachrome slides have been digitised using up-to-date technology. There is also a comprehensive essay by Louise Callan, Robin’s friend and fellow journalist, with recollections by Robin White, Laurence Aberhart, Grahame Sydney, Owen Marshall, Ron Brownson, Dick Frizzell, Alistair Guthrie and Sara McIntyre.
Robin Morrison (1944–1993) was one of New Zealand‘s most significant documentary photographers.
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