Charlie Dawes: Everybody’s Artist Photographer Exhibition Arrives To Waitangi

Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi is the next museum to have the pleasure of exhibiting the Charlie Dawes: Everybody’s Artist Photographer exhibition. The exhibition features 65 black and white reproductions from the Charlie Dawes Photographic Collection, including photographs of the 1898 Dog Tax War which threatened to bring conflict to the Hokianga.

Te Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe is the ancestral home of many northern hapu, including Ngāpuhi. By the 1830’s it was the heart of the New Zealand timber industry, with the small settlement of Kohukohu at its hub. Kohukohu no longer resembles the bustling township it once was, but through the work of local photographer Charles Peet Dawes, we can see for ourselves the people and communities of the Hokianga in the last decade of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, before fire, cars and intensive farming changed the landscape completely.

Charles Peet Dawes was born in the town of Swadlincote, on the outskirts of Burton-on Trent, England in 1867. By the mid-1880s his family had ventured North to the Hokianga. Charlie was known as a jack-of-all-trades, working as a carrier, mailman, nightsoil collector and orchardist. He was also a photographer, running a studio in Kohukohu probably from 1892 to around 1925.

When he died in 1947, his negatives were dispersed. However, in the 1970s, a box of his glass plates was found at a Queen Street store in Auckland. In 2012, 475 negatives were discovered in a second-hand store in Kaitaia. Together with 1,650 negatives gifted by the Dawes descendants in 2018, these now form the Dawes Collection at Tamaki Pātaka Kōrero | Central City Library.

Curator at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, Owen Taituha, said, “The Charlie Dawes photographic exhibition provides rich insights of what the Hokianga harbour looked like over 100 years ago. We are excited to bring this exhibition to our Northland and international visitors as it helps to tell the stories of a nation by providing a rare perspective from which the intermediate stages between the signing of the Te Tiriti 1840 and New Zealand today, can be better understood.”

Waitangi would like to thank Auckland Central City Library and Te Ahu Museum Kaitaia for their continued support. The Charlie Dawes: Everybody’s Artist Photographer exhibition will be open at Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi Gallery from the 26 August – 10 November 2024.

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