We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“WORKING LIVES c.1900 – A Photographic
Essay” by Erik Olssen (Otago University Press, $NZ50)
Nearly
three years ago, I had the great pleasure of reviewing on this blog An
Accidental Utopia? (look it up on the index at right), written by
Professor Erik Olssen, Clyde Griffen and Frank Jones of the University of
Otago. It was the last major publication arising from the “Caversham Project”.
This was a careful historical and sociological study, undertaken by a team of
Otago researchers and historians over about thirty years. The aim of their
study was to examine as fully as possible the (largely working-class and
lower-middle-class) south Dunedin borough of Caversham between the 1880s and
the 1920s, charting the material lives of men and women, workers and
schoolchildren, the married and the single, by means of all the available
documentation. This particular borough was chosen because, until Auckland
became New Zealand’s most industrialised city, Dunedin was the centre of
industry and therefore the possible centre of working class culture. But, as
was carefully explained in An Accidental
Utopia?, the notion of class was a very fluid one, and at least one aim of
that study was to test whether class solidarity was any match for New Zealand’s
social mobility and notions of egalitarianism.
As I said in my
review, remarkable work of documented social history though it is, An Accidental Utopia? is not a book for
the casual browser, but a work of serious theory and documentation, dense with
statistics and other data. It references everything from voting registers,
census rolls and school enrolments to drainage reports, private diaries and
electioneering propaganda.
This is where Working
Lives c.1900 comes in.
As Erik Olssen
explains:
“When
[the publisher] Wendy Harrex and I
decided at the last minute to exclude from An Accidental Utopia? the
photographs I had spent months collecting and researching, the idea of this book
was born. Like all ideas, it has taken on a life of its own. Although the
larger transformations of the landscape and the polity remain of interest, the
primary focus is on workplaces, workers, and work.” (p.11)
Working Lives c.1900 is in effect the visual
supplement to An Accidental Utopia?
This belittles
it as a work in its own right, however. On its own, this is both a window into
a past world and – often enough – a reminder that the past was as diverse as
the present. Not always quaint and pretty, but not a wasteland either.
It is also a
book that is eminently browse-able.
Most often, the
phrase “photographic essay” tends to designate publications that are short on
text and long on images. This term doesn’t quite fit Working Lives c.1900 as it remains a serious piece of historical
sociology and Olssen has arranged his five chapters thematically. Chapter One
looks at the geographical development of Caversham – the growth from small
rural settlement to industrialised suburb and borough. Chapter Two documents
the physical realities of factories, shops and offices. Chapter Three covers the
workers themselves – not only posed photographs of the staff of factories and
workshops, but also images of workers at work and the tools and machinery they
used. Chapter Four (called “A Less Unequal Society?”) faces the matter of
social class in terms of images of different social classes at play,
disparities in housing between the working class bungalow and the more spacious
homes that aspired to be mansions, and photographs of weddings which sometimes
showed a degree of social mobility. Finally, given the historical period that
this book covers, Chapter Five looks directly at the workers’ own movements –
trade unions and political parties prior to the formation of the Labour Party.
Every chapter
has a generous amount of analytical and explanatory text by Olssen and every
one of the book’s many photographs has a long and detailed caption. On Page 48,
for example, the top half of the large page is taken up with a 1900s photograph
of Rutherford’s General Store, in Caversham Village, with its staff in white
aprons posed before it. But the lower half of the page is three columns of
caption, giving the history of Rutherford’s store and its rival McCracken’s
store, and amounting to a short essay on local grocery.
In reading this
book, I did follow Olssen’s arguments about class and culture, but inevitably I
found myself spending more time admiring and looking closely at the fine
details of the photographs. And wool-gathering. And speculating about what
exactly they meant.
That photograph
on Page 23, showing a semi-urban landscape with a line of cottages built near a
railway line. Each cottage has its own privy out the back, reminding us of a
time when night excretion meant either a chamber pot or a walk over wet grass.
The panoramic photo
on Page 35 of St Clair’s Beach in 1912. How very modern the high-rise accommodation
house looks – as if it has been transported there from the 1940s by a time
machine.
And speaking of
housing, the double-spread photo at pp.45-46 is another panoramic one, taken in
1898, of the Dunedin City Corporation gasworks. But, in the background, how
rusty so many of the corrugated iron roofs of the workers’ houses look. Even
when it was a relatively new building material, was corrugated iron never
maintained or re-painted, or were the workers’ wages too meagre for such
maintenance?
As for masculine
working class culture, it is hard to beat the wonderful photo at page 86-87. In
a factory yard when the sun is high – presumably on a lunch break – a ring of
workers are spectators to an amateur boxing match between two of their fellow
workers – or perhaps it is a genuine fight? Clearly another worker has been
given the role of referee. Just as the row of privies reminds us of other
material realities from a past world, so does this image show vividly a defunct
culture in which ritualised fights were not only acceptable but were positively
honourable.
There is a
similar oddity to the shot (pp.114-115) of the uniformed delivery staff of the
Dunedin Chief Post Office. They look more like policemen than postmen,
reminding us of that society’s respect for uniforms and its degree of regimentation.
Obviously I
could extend this review for many pages by simply noting the realities that are
revealed by these century-old photographs. But I think you’ve got the point.
This is a lesson in images where An
Accidental Utopia? was a lesson in statistics and prose.
One final image
to part with – and probably my favourite for no reason that has anything to do
with sociological history. It’s the double spread (pp.28-29) of a snowball
fight in the streets of Caversham, during the particularly hard winter of 1901.
The snow lies thick on the roadway. As a pampered Aucklander, I was not
prepared for the shudders and shivers I was given by an ordinary Dunedin winter
one year when I was sojourning down there – black ice on the pavements, heavy
frosts and a general freeze that the locals seemed to take for granted. I dread
to think what the winter of 1901 must have been like. The thickness of the show
in the photograph gives me some idea.