In the winter of 1979, photographer Robin Morrison took his family on a road trip across the South Island, producing many of his most iconic images. His son Jake talks to Joanna Wane about a new exhibition dedicated to his father’s work — and picks a few personal favourites.
Jake Morrison was 8 when his parents loaded up the roof rack of a secondhand yellow Mazda Capella, bundled him into the back seat next to his younger brother, Keir, and drove out of Auckland, heading south.
Only slivers of memory remain from the seven months and 29,000km the family spent on the road, exploring the South Island from Cape Farewell to Bluff: listening over and over again to Spike Milligan’s Badjelly the Witch; stopping by the roadside to play in the snow; overnighting on Arthur’s Pass and discovering kea had savaged the car’s vinyl roof. Tearooms and pubs and pink lemonade.
“It was a wonderful experience,” he says. “We had this funny old car and we lived in some pretty crazy places while Dad went off with his camera, sometimes for a couple of days or more at a time. No one takes their kids out of school now. I suppose they didn’t really back then, either. But it was the 70s — there was a richness to the life we had.”
Jake later learnt that his father, photographer Robin Morrison, was given the car by his publisher in part-payment of an advance for his book, The South Island of New Zealand: From the Road, which has risen to near-mythical status since its release in 1981.
That same year, Robin would turn his lens on the explosive Springbok Tour, as he had done at the Bastion Point protest a few years before. Jake considers those photographs among his father’s finest work; a black and white shot taken at Bastion Point is framed on the wall of his apartment, a stone’s throw from the Morrison’s old family home in Ponsonby, which his parents bought in 1972, long before the suburb became gentrified. Yet it’s the candid images Robin captured on that South Island road trip — now echoes of a New Zealand lost to the passing of time — that resonate most strongly today.
“A lot of the buildings and landscapes Dad photographed aren’t there anymore,” says Jake, who shares his father’s love for Central Otago. “It’s another planet down there. Tussocky and sort of golden. But I went to Lake Hāwea a few years ago and it was like someone’s just rolled out green carpet and put cows on it.”
On Friday — three decades almost to the day after Robin’s death from cancer at the age of 48 — a new exhibition, Robin Morrison: Road Trip, opens at Auckland Museum featuring a selection of his South Island photography. The following week, a new edition of his book From the Road goes on sale, with an opening essay by journalist Louise Callan. In the mid-70s, she worked with Robin on a magazine story about the flooding of Cromwell to create the Clyde Dam. “We were both affected by the town’s plight and the extraordinary landscapes,” she writes. “The photographs that accompanied the story seem to me now as harbingers of this book.”
The year before his death, Robin donated his entire collection of some 100,000 photographs and negatives to Auckland Museum. To create both the exhibition and revised book edition, pictorial curator Shaun Higgins spent countless hours digitising more than 4000 Kodachrome slides from the Morrison family’s South Island trip; all had been shot using natural light. Fourteen lost originals, including the famous picture of Canterbury farmer Norm Smith and his pet sheep, Pebbles, have been replaced by another frame as close as possible from the same photographic sequence.
There’s a poignant intimacy to many of the images — an old-fashioned hand wringer on the porch of a wee pink crib, with oversized cotton underwear, hung out to dry — and few of the people in Robin’s From the Road portraits are alive today. Tim Jamieson, photographed sitting in the house he and his father built from old steamship memorabilia, was killed in the Aramoana massacre. Rachael and Fanny Short were already in their 90s when Robin passed through Bannockburn, the old goldmining town where the sisters had spent their entire life.
Jake, who’s been closely involved with the book and exhibition, vividly remembers meeting Ben and Balthazar, two young brothers who lived at the Fox River Commune and had their hair dyed with henna. Robin’s shot of the boys in their ragged, knit jerseys and muddy gumboots is one of his favourites.
“I mean, we were from Ponsonby and here were these wild kids about the same age as us with orange hair! Balthazar says he remembers the photograph being taken because it was cold and his gumboot was leaking.” Now a barrister with chambers on Auckland’s Shortland St, Balthazar is about to turn 50. Both he and his older brother Ben, who lives in Australia, will be guests at the exhibition opening and book launch.
Robin rarely photographed his own children; a handful of family snapshots reproduced in Road Trip are polaroids taken by Jake’s mother, Dinah. Jake, who was 22 when his father died, remembers the house being filled with interesting, creative people. “The party was at our place,” he says. “I’d come out of my room and see Dad riding up and down the hall on my bike. After he was diagnosed with cancer, I was in denial right up until the last weeks before he died. I was furious because it just seemed so unjust [to lose] someone who everyone loved.”
Robin’s most recognisable photographs are his portraits of everyday people, depicted with what Jake describes as a certain nobility. He’s also drawn to his father’s art photography — “If you look at a Grahame Sydney painting and some of Dad’s images side by side, you can sometimes not know which is which” — and his wild landscapes. “I love this one,” he says, singling out a stormy shot taken at Seventeen Mile Bluff, on the West Coast near Punakaiki, where a scattering of vulnerable houses face the encroaching sea. “We live on the edge and there’s a sort of feeling that people and places are being washed away all the time. That’s quite relevant now, too.”
* Robin Morrison: Road Trip opens at Auckland Museum on March 3. A new edition of Robin Morrison’s 1981 book, The South Island of New Zealand: From The Road (Massey University Press, $75), is on sale from March 9.