The Afterglow of Industry brings together photographs from a ten-year project in which artist Chris Corson-Scott repeatedly travelled the extent of Aotearoa New Zealand, seeking out unknown, or remote sites which illuminate our dysfunctional present. Following this, several years were spent researching and writing on each of the 79 photographs featured in this book. In these texts, colonial and industrial histories weave in and out of geology, pre- European Māori history, outside forces from the United States and Europe, and contemporary issues like privatisation, asset sales, the New Zealand housing crisis, and the country’s rebranding as a ‘clean & green’ tourist destination.
Similar to the collapse of America’s industrial Midwest, New Zealand has also experienced the whiplash of industry vanishing. Here though, this has been complicated by much of this industry first emerging in conjunction with European colonization. Corson-Scott’s work focuses on these tensions, particularly in Te Waipounamu South Island, where the regions of the West Coast and Otago see industrial remnants contrasted with vast and complex landscapes. From these areas come images of freezing works on sacred rivers, contested mining projects, dwellings of 19 th century Chinese miners, gold processing plants still contaminated more than a century later, floods of acid mine drainage, and the demolition of factories which once built the country’s modern infrastructure. Elsewhere, on a remote sandspit is one of history’s largest whale strandings, industrial spaces are repurposed by artists, controversial hydroelectric schemes divert rivers, ancient forest remnants become tourism, and city fringe orchards are bulldozed for development.
(above) St Heliers Beach (New Year’s Day), Auckland, 2013
Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest city, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, lies between the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific Ocean, on a volcanic isthmus in the upper North Island. From the downtown port where it was founded, the city sprawls between the estuaries, peninsulas, and beaches of its two harbours: the Waitematā to the north and the Manukau to the south. On the Waitematā, pale sandstone cliffs expose ancient geological layers, below which sandy bays slope to harbours that sparkle in UV-dense light. On the cliffs, the thick twisting branches of pōhutukawa trees, which can live for up to 1,000 years, bloom in summer with seas of red flowers that reach towards the water.
Māori settlement in Tāmaki Makaurau dates back to at least 1350, when the Tainui waka (canoe) arrived from the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki carrying chiefs who settled the isthmus and continued south into the Waikato region. Despite these centuries of settlement, the Waitematā remained breathtaking in its natural beauty up to the point
of European colonisation. In 1840, the city of Auckland was founded under the leadership of New Zealand’s first governor, William Hobson, who sought to control the wider region and open land up for settlers. It was named for George Eden, First Earl of Auckland in Surrey, England. A friend of Hobson’s, and of its best-known governor, George Grey, Eden never visited this country; however, his career as a politician, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Governor- General of India is indicative of the circles those who would lead the colonisation of Aotearoa moved in. By the end of 1841, the British Crown would own almost all of the isthmus.
(above) Remains of the Controlled Mine Base, Rangitoto Island, 2013
Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland sits on a field of more than fifty-three volcanoes covering almost 500 square kilometres, from the Waitematā Harbour to the rolling hills that become Waikato, beyond South Auckland. Erupting just 600 years ago, Rangitoto Island is the youngest of these volcanoes and the only one dormant rather than extinct. Lying at the mouth of the harbour, barely ten kilometres from the central city, and rising 260 metres from the ocean in a near-symmetrical cone, Rangitoto is so prominent that it is difficult to imagine Tāmaki Makaurau without it.
In 1854, the British Crown purchased Rangitoto from Ngāti Pāoa for just £15 (£1,400 today), yet still felt it had overpaid for an island that was ‘all rock’. In 1898, the Auckland council opened a scoria quarry near Islington Bay on the east side of the island. Over more than thirty years, thousands of tons of scoria would be blasted and cut from the lava flows. Most of it travelled just a short distance across the harbour, where it was used in vast land reclamations that expanded Auckland’s central business district and port, and created Tāmaki Drive. From 1925 to 1936, the justice department stationed prisoners on Rangitoto, which they described as ‘the Dominion’s third-class waste land’, for ‘reformative’ hard labour. The prisoners took over the backbreaking work at the quarry, and were tasked with building the island’s kilometres of gravel roads. Their labour was especially gruelling, since much of the island was treeless, offering little shelter from the heat of the sun, which intensified as it reflected off the water and was absorbed by the black lava flows.
(above) Reservoir Pipeline at Dusk, Big King / Te Tātua-a-Riukiuta, Auckland, 2013
In the centuries before the founding of Auckland, most of the mountains in the region’s vast volcanic field were at some point occupied by Māori. These tūpuna maunga (ancestral mountains) supported vast settlements, including pā fortified with palisades, trenches, and deliberately steepened slopes. Terraces were created providing space for housing, the storage of kai (food), and gardens where crops like kūmara (sweet potato) were cultivated.
As Europeans began arriving in Auckland in the 1840s, extensive quarrying and clearing of the maunga began. Summits, cones, smaller peaks, and foothills were swiftly cut away. At Maungarei (Mount Wellington) and Maungawhau (Mount Eden), entire mountainsides became sheer quarry walls and pits. Other maunga were quarried away completely. In 1967, a stadium was built in the land depression where Rarotonga (Mount Smart) had once risen 100 metres above the surrounding land. From 1888, beginning with Maungawhau, concrete reservoirs, both above and below ground, were installed at almost all of the remaining maunga. In just decades, most of the tūpuna maunga and their Māori history had been blasted and crushed into material for the construction of Auckland’s roads and railways or buried beneath concrete.
(above) My Father (Ian Scott) Painting Beneath a Pōhutukawa, Okoromai Bay, Whangaparāoa, 2013
My father, Ian Scott, was born in April 1945 in the West Yorkshire village of Baildon. Human habitation in this part of England reaches back almost 3,000 years to the Iron Age, with even the town of Baildon being 1,000 years old. For most of these centuries, Baildon was a small farming community, but during the industrial revolution it became a hub of the woollen industry. Opening in 1823, its Providence Woollen Mill occupied the centre of the village like a medieval church. Its importance to the community was made clear during the Second World War, when tanks and searchlights were stationed on the surrounding moors to protect it. At that time, my grandfather (who was a cinema projectionist) was enlisted to screen films for the troops, but as the war ended, Britain fell into an economic depression. Industrial towns like Baildon were hit particularly hard, and no longer having work, my father’s parents immigrated to New Zealand in 1952. Back in Yorkshire, meanwhile, the Providence Mill closed its doors for good in 1964.
Arriving after a two-month journey at sea abord the Captain Cook, my father’s family settled in Sunnyvale, a new Government subdivision in the foothills of the Waitākere Ranges. My grandfather took one of the only jobs going as a local butcher, and my grandmother became a typist. In England, my father’s early interest in art had been nurtured by his grandfather, an amateur artist who taught him watercolour painting on the Yorkshire moors. Now, living by the comparatively wild Waitākeres, landscape painting became his obsession. With the encouragement of his teachers, his skill quickly developed, and he claimed that by the age of fifteen he could live off the sales of his landscapes.
(above) Land Development Beside Waikumete Cemetery, Glen Eden, Auckland, 2014
Two years after Auckland’s founding in 1840, its first cemetery opened at Symonds Street, at the far end of the Karangahape Road ridgeline two kilometres from the downtown port. At this time, the town’s population was still just 2,000 people. On the cemetery’s eastern bank, bracken fern traced the slopes of Grafton Gully above native forest remnants that grew along the Waipārūrū Stream. For decades, the area remained rural; in 1850, Partington’s Flour Mill and its famous windmill opened near the cemetery’s edge. But by the 1880s the city was closing in, and as the cemetery ran out of space, plans were made for a new one.
In 1880, Auckland’s western rail line reached Glen Eden, then on the edge of the Waitākere forest. Industry in the area centred on logging or burning of the same, and the neighbouring suburb, Henderson, was even named after the most prominent Waitākere sawmiller, Thomas Henderson. The surplus of former forest land, combined with the optimism that West Auckland would be a new city centre, saw a site just above the Glen Eden railway station selected for the new cemetery. In 1886, Waikumete Cemetery opened. Covering 267 acres, it became Australasia’s largest cemetery. A regular Sunday train service was established to increase access to the still-remote location, and this included a separate funeral carriage for the deceased and accompanying mourners that arrived at its own platform.
(above) Nihotupu Auxiliary Reservoir, Waitākere Ranges, Auckland, 2014
When Europeans first sailed into the Manukau Harbour and saw the cliffs of the Waitākere Ranges, ancient kauri trees stretched over the hills and valleys as far as the eye could see. The visitors reacted with awe, describing a cathedral-like forest, in which pale grey trunks metres wide rose a hundred metres into a dense canopy. Yet within just decades, only isolated patches of the forest remained. Trees were felled for timber or burnt to clear land for settlement and pasture. Over time, though, an awareness of the loss grew. A public outcry, led by Algernon Thomas, professor of biology at the University of Auckland, and several other prominent Aucklanders, saw the creation of the Waitākere Ranges Regional Park in 1894 and the protection of a small area of forest from logging.
At about the same time, Auckland was suffering from increasingly severe water shortages. As the population swelled, the city’s main source of water, Western Springs, began to run dry, a problem exacerbated by summer droughts. In 1898, the worst drought to date took place, said to be so severe that another week without rain could have led to deaths. That year, the Observer newspaper wrote, ‘For nearly twenty years past the inadequacy of the Auckland water supply has been admitted. For nearly twenty years past the Auckland City Council have been paltering with the question of procuring a supply that shall be permanent and inexhaustible.’ After a lengthy, and widely lambasted, period of indecision, the Council selected the Waitākere Ranges as the site for a new reservoir scheme. There may have been no good alternative, but the decision condemned some of the area’s most pristine rivers, waterfalls, and valleys to permanent flooding.
Rain Over a Development, Whangaparāoa Peninsula, 2014
The noise, pollution, and crime that went hand in hand with the industrial revolution saw many large cities become places where few lived by choice. Often confined to crowded slums, factory workers experienced living conditions very different to those of their managers, many of whom returned each evening to estates beyond the urban smog. Towards the turn of the nineteenth century, labour movements had won battles for increased wages and shorter working hours, and these gains coincided with the development of social programmes and public transit networks. Concurrently, urban planning theories such as the ‘garden city’ grew in popularity, together with the desire for clean air and space. As the twentieth century advanced, these factors made the aspiration of suburban living a possibility not only for the upper classes but also for working people.
In a 2007 essay on a Stephen Shore photograph, artist Joel Sternfeld summarises the ideology of American suburban expansion: ‘When the town/country duality is made, town is portrayed as the dark urban merchant, evil in comparison to the bright virtues of nature and rural living. Nothing trumps Nature—it is pure, it is good. Its mythic credentials run deeper than those of any old ‘tun’ (town).’ The ideology Sternfeld here describes explains a key motivation for European colonisation of the wilderness of Aotearoa in the early nineteenth century: a desire to escape the evil of the cities. It is a persistent irony that this same impulse is a direct cause of the consumption of nature by city suburbs.
Mark Adams Retouching Photographs at Studio La Gonda, Karangahape Road, Auckland, 2013
For over 600 years, Te Ara o Karangahape was a trail used by Māori to travel between the Waitematā and Manukau Harbours. Following an elevated ridgeline behind what is now the central business district, it encompassed nearly panoramic views of the lush isthmus landscape. As Auckland grew, from its establishment in 1840, the arterial Queen Street sprawled uphill from the port, and by 1882, it had reached the trail, which it absorbed into the city grid as Karangahape Road. Largely due to the prevailing wind, which made it smell better than the manure lined, open sewer of Queen Street, Karangahape Road became Auckland’s most affluent shopping district. It housed ornate Victorian buildings and arcades, and, by 1902, electric trams ran at all hours of the day on streets paved with wooden tiles.
With the mass adoption of cars in the 1930s and 1940s, New Zealand rapidly changed. By 1955, road usage had increased such that the Government purchased a swathe of residential property in Newton Gully, just south of Karangahape Road, for a new motorway. The resulting interchange, Auckland’s first and largest, came to be known as ‘Spaghetti Junction’. As with urban motorway projects by Robert Moses in New York, it constituted an act of social engineering, displacing more than 50,000 lower income residents, many of whom were artists and other creatives. The motorway also disconnected Karangahape Road from its surrounding neighbourhoods, leading its department stores and small businesses to atrophy while suburban shopping malls grew. By the 1970s, the once boutique shopping area had become the city’s red-light district. Eventually, though, Karangahape Road began to flourish again, as spaces became available to artists and specialist businesses at affordable rents, spurring new creative life.
Chris Corsen-Scott
Chris Corson-Scott is an artist from Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. His photography has been exhibited in over 40 museum and private gallery exhibitions in Aotearoa, and his work is held in permanent collections including: Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, and Ngā Puhipuhi o Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington Art Collection. His previous publications include Evanescent Monuments (2018), and Dreaming in the Anthropocene (2017), both on Compound Press.
Christina Barton
Christina Barton is a writer, curator, editor and educator based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. She is the former director of Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University, Wellington, and was previously a curator at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
