Images capture the art of play

Buckland family photograph: 'Things are not always what they seem!’ c.1898. P1993-011/3, page 23 [detail]. Photo: Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago

Victorian youths had a talent for making art and entertainment, reports Nick Austin.

Unusually for her time, Jessie Buckland (1878-1938) was a professional photographer in an industry dominated by men.

By 1907 she had set up a commercial studio in Akaroa, producing studio portraits for private clients and documentary photographs for news periodicals of the day. She also produced images for the burgeoning postcard market, and much of her work from this period is held at Akaroa Museum.

Tumai House, 1891, watercolour on paper, 168 x 267mm, 26,766 1, by Rachael Susan Christabel Orbell (nee Buckland) (1873-1948)/Peter Gay. Image: Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago

Lissa Mitchell, in her recently published Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860-1960 (Te Papa Press, 2023), charts Buckland’s trajectory to professionalism from the industriously playful Buckland family photographs of the 1890s, a vast number of which live in treasured albums at the Hocken Library. Some of these images provide interesting glimpses of a type of rural settler-colonial life — paddling in home-made kayaks on the Taieri River, say, or the keeping of ferrets for rabbit control. Collectively though, the images represent a group of Victorian youths’ talent for making art and entertainment within their lived environment.

Jessie Buckland was one of seven children from a well-off farming family. The siblings’ aunt, Elizabeth Hocken (nee Buckland), was a painter and photographer married to Dr Thomas Morland Hocken. While the Bucklands lived rurally — Jessie was born at Tumai Station, near Waikouaiti; the family moved to Taieri Lake Station near Rock and Pillar in 1892 — they had frequent contact with Dunedin-based Elizabeth, who encouraged their artistic pursuits. Jessie and her sisters, Susan (1873-1948) and Carrie (1868-1930), and a brother, Harold (1870-1941), were the instigators of the images, but the wider family all played roles in front of the Bucklands’ camera. This speaks to a tight-knit familial network but also to the sparsely populated environment they lived in.

Buckland family photograph: ferret, 1895. P1993-011/3-020b. Photo: Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago

Apart from the more documentary-type images of farm life, the photographs are comprised of tableaux vivants, vaudevillian gags and genre studies, in which the Buckland family and their friends are cast. Early images, c.1892, appear as straightforward recordings of theatrical scenes. Over time, the makers’ sustained attention to their craft becomes more attuned to pictorialism.

A photograph that Jessie Buckland later published as a postcard, captioned ‘‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye’’, depicts the poem made famous by Robbie Burns. It’s a re-making of the poem’s generic illustration except Jessie is dressed as a male. In another, two-part picture captioned ‘‘Things are not always what they seem!’’, what we are meant to assume are a snuggling male and female as seen from behind, are revealed as two men lighting their cigarettes — in a double-twist, Jessie is one of the actors. It would be interesting to study the Buckland albums through a lens of gender, and how ‘‘dressing up’’ extends to the photographs’ authorship.

Buckland family photograph: theatrical scene, 1890s. P1993-011/3-065a. Photo: Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago

Between 1896 and 1903 the Bucklands submitted images to the Melbourne-based newspaper The Australasian, for which they frequently won prizes and publication. While some of those images are credited to Carrie Buckland, more frequently the name P. Gay appears beside them. This nom de plume had remained a mystery until its source was recently found within a folio of watercolour paintings at the Hocken.

On the front of one of several paintings attributed to Rachael Orbell (earlier Susan Buckland), of the family homestead at Tumai, the name Peter Gay is inscribed; on the verso of two others, Peterkin Gay. From a simple Google search we can learn that Peterkin Gay is the name of a cheerful youth in two adventure novels by Scottish author R.M. Ballantyne: The Coral Island: a Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1857) (said to have been William Golding’s inspiration for Lord of the Flies [1954]) and its sequel The Gorilla Hunters (1861).

Buckland family photograph: 'Things are not always what they seem!’ (centre and right) c.1898. P1993-011/3, page 23 [detail]. Photo: Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago

Published photographs by P. Gay have generally been attributed to Jessie, perhaps because she was the only sibling to pursue the work professionally. It seems, however, that Susan deserves greater credit, though it’s certainly possible the sisters shared the nom de plume. In any case, the allusion confirms the Bucklands’ playfulness and their keen appetite for Victorian literary and visual culture, of which their albums are an important record.

Nick Austin is a collections assistant at Hocken Collections, Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago. The Buckland family albums and folios can be requested for viewing at Hocken Collections, 90 Anzac Ave, Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. Free tours every Thursday at 11am; no booking required.