Inland Scenic

SUNSHINE, WALKSHORTS, AND MUNICIPAL MARIGOLDS:

NEW ZEALAND LIFE IN BORING POSTCARDS 1960-1980

Steve Kerr

Paper presented at New Zealand Historical Association Conference,

Victoria University of Wellington, 2007

(Click on thumbnails to see larger image and photo credit)

* * *

The title of this paper is – Sunshine, walk shorts, and municipal marigolds: New Zealand life in boring postcards 1960-1980.

When the draft conference program was circulated, in the space where I should have submitted my paper title, was written, simply, ‘boring postcards’.

Some people were a little mystified by that, which taught me two things.

Firstly, that I need a ‘proper’ title for my paper.

And secondly, that I should begin my talk by explaining what I mean when I use the term boring postcards, and by giving a quick background of what might be called the ‘genre’ of boring postcards.

* * *

I have adopted the term itself from a series of books by British photographer Martin Parr.

Here is the cover of one.

Rather than featuring his own work, the books are simply collections of found colour postcards, selected for their comically dull subject matter.

There are postcards of motorway junctions, airport waiting lounges, bunker-like municipal buildings, and any other unattractive, mundane subject you might care to think of.

Flicking through the books, you constantly find yourself asking the question, ‘why the hell did they make a postcard of that?’

And in fact, it is in exactly this question that the cards’ perverse appeal lies.

The books are more than just an exercise in postmodern kitsch, however.

The first book featured postcards from Britain, and Parr has since published collections of American and German boring postcards.

Each collection exposes distinct national or cultural traits, not only in the surface look of things – the architecture, clothing, cars, signage, etc – but also in the very choice of subject matter portrayed.

In the British book the mood is somehow self-effacing, almost melancholic. Here is the reception hall of the Butlins holiday camp in Bognor Regis.

The American postcards, on the other hand, typically show a brash boosterism. Here is the exterior of a big box Sears department store in Houston, Texas, complete with stars and stripes.

* * *

My interest in the New Zealand variant developed while procrastinating during the writing of my Masters thesis at Canterbury University.

I was working out of an office which neighboured a small stamp collectors shop.

Out the front of the shop were boxes of 20 cent postcards which I would trawl trough fairly regularly.

Many of the cards had the same ‘why did anyone make a postcard of this?’ quality of the postcards in Parr’s books – for example these images of the main roads of Te Puke and Temuka – but they had a particular provincial New Zealand flavour.

Other better known images – like this scene of lamb and daffodil – seemed to be making oblique but fairly emphatic statements about the New Zealand landscape, economy, and society.

It struck me that these postcards offered an interesting perspective on how New Zealanders viewed themselves, in the recent past.

* * *

In the present paper, I want to show as many of these cards as possible, discuss the kind of themes that emerge about New Zealand’s ‘national identity’ (for want of a better phrase), and also, discuss the potential value of boring postcards as historical sources.

I’ll begin by giving a short factual overview of boring postcards – dates, places, names – before moving into more interpretive and conjectural territory.

Before I begin, one quick caveat about my use of the term ‘boring postcards’.

The term was coined by an artist, Martin Parr, and clearly not by the photographers or the publishers themselves.

When I use it, I do not mean any disrespect to the photographers.

Some of the images I am going to show, while kitsch, are not really boring at all – they’re beautiful, and occasionally fascinating.

However, despite this, I have chosen to use term because it is memorable, often apt, and because it is evocative of a particular era and a certain ‘look’ – of cheap pulpy cardboard, poor print registration, and questionable colour reproduction.

It also evokes some sense of the ephemerally and disposability of mass cultural artefacts.

* * *

Okay. Today when I use the term ‘boring postcards’ I am referring to photographic postcards produced between approximately 1960 and 1980.

Full colour postcards became available in New Zealand in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

A number of different firms produced them, from small specialists such as Oamaru’s Colourview and Pictorial Publications in Hastings, to major national publishing houses such as Whitcombe and Tombs, and Reed.

More or less the length and breadth of the country is portrayed in the postcards – here are Cape Reinga and Bluff – with a focus on locations and areas of interest to tourists for scenic or other reasons.

The work of supplying images to be printed and distributed provided an income for a number of photographers, who traveled the country capturing points of interest, beauty, and local pride.

One of the most important and prolific of these photographers, Gladys Goodall, was also the only woman among them.

Many, but not all, of the photographs I will show today were taken by Gladys.

* * *

I was lucky enough to visit Gladys a couple of times when I lived in Christchurch, and she explained to me a little bit about her working methods.

She photographed the whole country herself for Whitcombe and Tombs.

It was an arduous lifestyle.

She would travel alone, on the road for up to four months at time, covering all her transport and accommodation expenses herself – even paying any people who appeared in her photographs – all out of the modest royalties she received on sales of her postcards.

And she did this for twenty years, beginning when she was in her early fifties, until her retirement in 1980 at the age of 72. There are now approximately 12,000 of her images deposited in the Turnbull library.

She had to re-photograph each location every few years, to capture any changes since her last round.

This was a way for different publishers to gain an edge over their competitors, by having the most up-to-date images. Here, for example, we see the Beehive under construction.

Gladys described to me how she selected her subject matter – these are her words: ‘I always went to the people who sold postcards in each town and said, what do tourists ask for in this area?

‘I never took a photo until I’d spoken to the people who were going to sell them. There’s no point in taking the most beautiful photograph in the world if it won’t sell.’

Thus, beneath its surface, each image represents a delicate balancing of artistic considerations and business imperatives.

* * *

Now I’d like to give a brief run down of the subject matter of the postcards.

Predictably, many postcards relates to holidays and travel.

There are many postcards of New Zealand’s iconic scenic locations. For example, the cards you’ve just seen of Cape Reinga and Bluff, and here is the Wellington Cable Car, Mitre Peak, the Tasman Glacier, and the Chateau Tongariro.

Beaches and swimming pools were also popular – here is Takapuna beach, Kaiteriteri campground, and swimming pools in Dunedin, Parnell, Hawera (where, according to the caption, the swimming pool complex won the 1974 National Architects’ Design Award), and Nelson.

Other postcards relate to the business and logistics of travel – to trains, ferries, planes, and airports.

Also to provincial motels – for example these in Te Anau, Palmerston North, Hamilton, and Wanaka.

And to the sophisticated interiors of the country’s most stylish hotels – the Hermitage, the Trans Holiday Hotel in Queenstown, the Chateau Commodore in Christchurch, and Wellington’s White Heron.

* * *

Another category of postcard is those which portray the country’s most impressive infrastructural and civil engineering achievements.

Here, for example, is the Benmore Dam, Port Chalmers, the Lyttelton Tunnel, the Veterinary Science Building at Massey University, the Tiwai Point aluminum smelter, and the concrete batching plant at Twizel.

* * *

Other postcards show off New Zealand’s primary industry.

There is even a fully fledged sub-genre here of ‘fields of sheep with snowy mountain backdrop’ – Mt Hutt, Mt Ngauruhoe, Mt Taranaki.

* * *

Somewhere between these depictions of landscape and earlier postcards of civil engineering achievements, is the ‘lonely car on a scenic highway’ sub-genre.

The photos here are from Waipoua Forest and Mangamuka Gorge in Northland, Arthur’s Pass, and Mohaka.

* * *

A more definitively boring genre is that of cards showing the main roads of provincial towns and cities.

Earlier I showed Temuka and Te Puke. Here are – Tauranga, Hamilton, New Plymouth, Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, Gore, a particularly bleak shot of Mackay Street in Greymouth, and a wonderfully symmetrical image of Dee Street, the main road of Invercargill.

In both Kawakawa and Hastings, the main trunk line runs through the centre of town, at street level.

The town clock in Hastings brings us to another motif: the modernist clock tower. Here are Kaitaia, Ashburton, Te Kuiti, and Matamata.

* * *

Finally, many cards show Maori cultural performances and tourism workers.

When any Maori person appears in a boring postcard, they are almost inevitably in Rotorua, and invariably they appear in traditional dress.

In some cards, it is clear that we are being show a performance, or that the subject is a tour guide of some kind – as in these images from around Rotorua.

Others, though, purport to be more naturalistic, with contrived, and sometimes odd, results.

Here, for example, are two Maori ‘maidens’ posing in a stream, three children posing amongst the annuals in this flower bed in Napier, and this card, which shows a Maori ‘girl’ feeding a kiwi by hand, in broad daylight.

There is a sub-genre here of idiosyncratic, even slightly absurd, kiwi postcards. A family of kiwi (Mum, Dad and one and half kids) pose together:

Stranger still, a kiwi poses on a the lawns of the Napier botanic gardens with a dismembered kowhai branch and what looks like a small pile of minced beef.

* * *

Before I go on to discuss the uses of boring postcards as historical sources, I want to make three observations about their aesthetic qualities.

First, although it is not always clear on the cheaply printed postcards themselves, the images contain a massive amount of visual information.

The original photographs were often exposed on 4 by 5 inch colour transparencies, so the action and detail is rendered minutely right up to the edge of the frame.

We are treated to a mass of peripheral information around the main subject of the photograph – details like this class of children visiting Wellington Zoo, and the clothes and cars, and houses on hills, in this shot of the Byrd memorial on the summit of Mt Victoria.

Secondly, the photographs tend to employ strict grid-based principles of composition.

These two streetscapes (seen earlier) follow a consistent pattern.

Here we see two fantastic images by Gladys Goodall, one of the Michael Joseph Savage Memorial at Orakei, the other the New Plymouth power plant under construction.

When the two cards are placed side-by-side, the use of grid composition is so consistent, that the horizon flows continuously from one card to the next. The Savage memorial and the power project chimney balance each other.

Incredibly, the border of the flowerbeds in the Savage Memorial card aligns perfectly with the north Taranaki coastline on the other.

* * *

Lastly, the colour in boring postcards has a super-saturated, hyper-real quality, and subjects are often chosen for their colorfulness.

Hence, the almost fluorescent mountains and patio furniture in this card of the Glencoe Motor Inn in Mount Cook.

* * *

Right, I’ll now turn to look at what possible use boring postcards might be to New Zealand historians.

Several points can be made about their qualities as historical source material.

First, they offer a rich visual source of detail of aspects of our material culture – in particular things like clothing, hair, décor, cars, signage.

Importantly, in general, these details are located in their natural context – of people going about their everyday lives – working, shopping, traveling, holidaying and so forth.

Because everything is in its original context, the mood, the atmosphere, the texture of everyday life – of relations between objects, and between people and objects – remains intact.

* * *

Next, we can be fairly confident that the locations and scenes portrayed reflect at some level the self image of the local people.

We know this not only because postcards are a genuinely popular medium, which people choose to buy and use in large numbers, but also through Gladys Goodall’s explanation of her photographic modus operandi.

Any photograph which failed to reflect local sources of pride and identity would languish on the gift store rack, and would return no royalty to its creator.

In this sense, boring postcards reflect the attitudes of the time, in particular their subject matter reflects those subjects which the local people considered to be the most important and the most ‘pictorial’ (a favorite term of Gladys’s).

Perhaps this is boring postcards’ greatest value, then – as texts about the local and national identity of the people who appear in, and consume, them.

Both photographer and audience are idealizing these locations. Flower beds are in bloom, the streets are clean, the sun is always shining.

* * *

So, having decided the greatest potential value of boring postcards for the historian is as texts of the post-war Pakeha mentalité, I’ll finish by sketching out a few thoughts on the rhetoric of New Zealand boring postcard – what these images tell us about the country and the people they portray.

* * *

First, there is a sense of progress and productivity, reflecting the economic prosperity, optimism and political consensus that characterized much of the period.

In the cities and towns, the postcards proudly show civic buildings, shops, new hotels, and streets full of cars and people.

The geometric grid-based aesthetic of the postcards, and the clean-lined modernist architecture of the buildings they portray, seem to reflect this postwar mood – conveying a sense of positivist control and rationality.

Here for example are the brand new civic buildings in Lower Hutt, and Gordon Smith’s radically modernist civic buildings in Wanganui.

* * *

In rural scenes, grass – the foundation of our national economy – is celebrated.

But other postcards celebrate concrete – the dams, power stations, and highways of an expanding, modernizing economy.

In both cases, land is valued and exploited for its economic potential, reflecting utilitarian contemporary attitudes to the environment.

Landscapes are typically cultivated or modified in some way.

This is in contrast to the kind of images of the landscape we expect to see today, where wild or pristine views of nature are valued.

In boring postcards, there are relatively few scenes of bush untouched by roads or people.

Even wilderness scenes will include view of a road providing access for the sightseer – as in the ‘lonely car on a scenic highway’ genre.

* * *

The postcards showing themes of leisure and tourism portray New Zealand as perpetually sunny sub-tropical holiday paradise.

Many of the motel and hotel cards show the emergence of an international outlook and some effort to appear sophisticated and stylish.

A closer look at much of the motel décor shows just how hard some owners tried to provide fashionable surroundings for their patrons, with varying levels of success, but with a high degree of uniformity.

* * *

The Maori-themed postcards are most notable for their definitively Pakeha lens.

These are highly framed, carefully constructed, views of Maori life.

Often, very colonial assumptions and power relations lurk just below the surface.

Maori appear almost exclusively in the context of tourist attractions at Rotorua, working as cultural performers or tour guides, in traditional dress, and often simply planted in front of a geyser or wharenui.

It is almost as if the Maori people themselves are a location-specific tourist attraction.

There are also clear orientalist exotic-romantic overtones – Maori subjects are almost always children or young women, AKA ‘maidens’.

The Pakeha boring postcard gaze is perhaps most conspicuous in the more ‘absurd’ constructions.

Boring postcards are particularly interesting for the way they remove indigenous people, and indigenous species, from their natural contexts, and recontextualise them – posing or performing for tourists, contained within a botanic garden, or on a grassy lawn behind a fence.

* * *

As far as historical sources go, boring postcards are not the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Much of information they contain can be obtained from other sources.

However, they are vibrant and appealing images, which reach across the divide between the worlds of documentary photography and commercial mass media.

Their value as historical sources lies both in their visual appeal, and in the way that they exemplify, almost inadvertently, themes of national identity.

I think the images I’ve shown today convey a unique sense of the ways in which New Zealanders imagined and idealized their country in the post war period.

Thank you for listening.