Historic Whanganui photographs added to Unesco Memory of the World register

Garrison Band in the 1870s – part of the William James Harding Collection at the Whanganui Regional Museum.

A collection of photographs by a Whanganui settler in the 1800s has received an inscription on the Unesco Memory of the World register for Aotearoa.

The register, established in 2010, allows for significant pieces of the country’s documentary heritage to be preserved and protected.

William James Harding was an English settler who arrived in New Zealand in 1855 with his wife and children.

He captured images of settler life in photographs taken from the 1850s to 1880s.

“Harding’s choice not to re-touch his numerous studio portraits of local community members imbues the images with a striking immediacy in which the sitters seem to look directly back at us, across time, warts and all,” Alexander Turnbull Library photographic archive curator Louise Garrett said.

Harding made little money from his work but they are now hugely significant for understanding New Zealand’s history.

“It’s quite rare to have a large collection from a photographer who was in one place for a while documenting what he saw,” Whanganui Regional Museum director Dr Bronwyn Labrum said.

The collection is held across three locations – the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, the Whanganui Regional Museum and the Alexander Heritage & Research Library in Whanganui.

“We’ve worked together to highlight the significance and apply to have it registered on Unesco Memory of the World,” Labrum said.

The James William Harding Collection is the first Unesco inscription to be held by three separate institutions.

The collection contains more than 6500 photographs with a range of portraits and landscape images providing detailed visual documentation of both Pākehā and Māori lives.

“It really helps us showcase how important this collection is and it alerts people to the fact that we have this collection,” Labrum said.

The Whanganui Regional Museum holds 200 prints of Harding’s work including a panorama of Whanganui from Pūtiki to Aramoho.

“Unesco is an international organisation so it doesn’t just draw attention in New Zealand but it also draws attention to the collection internationally,” Labrum said.

Other 2024 inscriptions were given to The Frank Sargeson Collection, which showcases the life of author Frank Sargeson, the groundbreaking 1970s documentary series Tangata Whenua: The People of the Land, and Janet Frame: Literary and Personal Papers which contain meticulous details of the author’s life from household and travel documents to correspondence from friends, acquaintances, publishers and family, to the manuscripts for her work.

Olivia Reid is a multimedia journalist based in Whanganui.