- My name is Simon Nathan. I'm a geologist and an author. I was writing an article on the west coast, and I went to visit my colleague, and he showed me some photographs from what was a forgotten photographer. - This is where the glass plate negatives are stored. All 382 of them. - The photographs were so entrancing, and it's people like him that actually make history come alive. From that moment, I knew I wanted to write his story. - I'm Brian Scadden. I'm a wet-plate photographer and photo historian. I've always been really interested in New Zealand photographers and especially the ones who are probably not mainstream, the ones who sort of slipped under the radar and are not really well known. Got this book recently. It's about a photographer who I had never even heard of. Amazing shots. And he just lived in a small town on the west coast and documented everyday life. I thought, you know, I should go down to the west coast and to this little town ` what's left of it ` and try and replicate some of the photos in the book. - NARRATOR: History is full of stories of accidental heroes, like the miner who left his family and travelled halfway around the world to make his fortune, a forgotten photographer ahead of his time who spent much of his life in the dark and who ended up in a ghost town, shining a light on the past. Captions by Able. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 - After 13 weeks at sea, sailing through three widespread oceans, I am finally at my youth wild dream destination, in the land of true gold. Arriving in Greymouth off the Fifeshire, almost empty pockets but a bundle on my back, I imagined that it would be just enough to dig up a hill and pick out the lumps of pure gold and become rich, as one would say, in a flash. - Here I am in Blackball. This is the first place that Jos Divis came when he arrived in New Zealand. (CROWD SHOUTS) What an exciting time and an exciting place to be, especially as a miner. There were lockouts, union meetings, strikes. There were probably bar brawls. Political stuff happening everywhere. He'd probably didn't know what the hell he had struck, really. Oh wow, that photograph there, that's the famous one that Jos took of himself basically with a group of socialists. That's amazing. - He was a working miner, but also his hobby was photography. He came with a camera, and almost from the start, he had started taking photographs and making a bit of money by selling them as postcards. - So, this is the photo that was in the museum. And there's also one of the pub here, so we should try and replicate that one. I thought it was a one-horse town, but obviously not. No, that's not for you. No. We are setting that to 100. Right. We are all set. - Unfortunately, I couldn't just rush into searching for gold on my own as I imagined. I hadn't realised that I was actually a perfect greenhorn. I didn't even have any necessary tools, neither money. Therefore, I had to step out of my dreams and face the reality. Because I needed to earn money very quickly even for everyday vital needs, I asked for a job at a gold mine called Waiuta. - Waiuta was a raw little town. A very rich quartz reef had been discovered a few years earlier, and so a gold mine had started, and they were clearing the land. And some of Jos's first photographs show what a raw place it was with tree stumps everywhere and houses starting to be put up. - The next morning, I started work and my first journey to the gold mines. I received four candles. I entered a cage in a shaft on a swinging rope. One stop. Second stop. Third! Fourth! And suddenly, I was deep underground. The gold mines were situated in the middle of rainforest. Everyone could chop down as much wood as needed, so soon there grew up a town made of wooden huts and tents around the mine. I borrowed an axe. I chopped down several trees. I cut them. I dug them into the ground. I asked for old bags that I used for a provisional roof. and the villa was done. Can you imagine, my dear reader, what it means when a man can start building a house only three days after arriving in a foreign country without any mortgage, without building plans, without carpentry skills, and with only 18 shillings of possessions in pocket? - So, this is Waiuta ` or what's left of Waiuta. Quite an amazing, amazing place when you think that this was the most lucrative gold mining area in New Zealand. - It was a very prosperous town. Everyone had a job there. Everyone was earning money. And the quartz reef continued to be very rich for the whole life of the mine, and so the total output was over 1.6 billion of today's money. - Wow. This is awesome in here. The fire in here must have been amazing to fire the steam engines to hoist the cages and whatever up and down the mine heads. As they say, a picture is worth 1000 words, and we wouldn't know Waiuta looked like in those days if it hadn't been for him. There might be the odd snapshot around but nothing like the photographic heritage that he's left. - Jos is not just important for Waiuta, which is a ghost town. He also lived in Waihi, and he took photographs there. He's important as the person that recorded what life was like in New Zealand gold mining towns. - Um... That could do it very nicely. This setup is exactly the same as Jos would have used in those days. This camera probably dates from about 1930, 1935. So he would have been probably using a camera a little bit older. I'm now just going to open up the shutter. We use the ground glass to focus and compose the shot. And that's one thing you had to really be careful of, because if you traipsed up to the top of a hill and dropped your camera and smashed your ground glass, then you've got no way of working out what infinity is for focus, so it's always good to carry a spare ground glass. I grab trusty light meter and take a light reading. We have different shutter speeds from one second up to 200th of a second. And then the aperture, which controls the amount of light coming in through the lens, I change that to 5.6. So there's certainly no auto-exposure or auto-focus. So I've got Jos's book here at the moment. Looking at it, sure the image is upside down. It always is on the ground glass. I can see the large chimney, which is here. So we have that. We have the road coming through exactly the same. And, yep, we've got that in. We're cropping slightly. But we can't get any further back because the bush is behind. I think we have it. Great. Then I can put a plate holder into the camera. And these are double dark slides. They hold two glass plates. And once you put them into the back of the camera, you can pull out one of the slides, which leaves the film basically ready to be exposed. Right, right, right. OK. So, we set that. We set my timer for about 10 seconds. And then, just as Jos would have done, I am going to put myself in the photograph. Right. (SHUTTER CLICKS) - My name is Natalie Marshall, and I'm the curator of photographs at the Turnbull Library. We're tasked with collecting material that supports in-depth research into New Zealand and the history of New Zealand and the lives of New Zealanders. Here we go, Simon. Got a selection of some of Divis's original negatives there. The fact these glass negatives have managed to survive for... almost 100 years is extraordinary. - Oh, it's wonderful to see these again. It's over 15 years. I first saw them in Christchurch when they were in the possession of Brendon Wilshire, and we managed to organise for them to be acquired by the National Library. The timing worked out just right because his house in Christchurch was badly damaged in the first of the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010, just a few months after they'd arrived here. - Wow. So many collections must have been lost over the years. - Oh wow. That's a photograph of Jos Divis outside his cottage. That's one of his classic photographs. - So, Divis himself was an immigrant to New Zealand. I guess he was trying to find a home and to get himself settled here. And maybe photography was a way for him to engage with people and engage with the community, and perhaps that meant that he had an outsider's view as well. - As far as she was concerned, Jos was the black sheep of the family who had disappeared, and they really didn't know very much about what had become of him. She emailed me really out of the blue. I was able to tell her when he died and what had become of him. But I think there was no awareness from other family members of what had happened to this relation that had disappeared to the other side of the world. Oh, and this is another classic. This is Jos Divis as underground. On this hand, he's lost a finger, which is very distinctive for people working in the mines. - So, this would have been quite a challenging photograph for him to take. - He obviously was very schooled. This is a flashlight photograph, and he got the illumination perfectly right. - I'm impressed that really there are none that look like they're misfires or that he edited his work. - I discovered that if he was taking a particular scene like this, he would generally take three, four, or five shots to make sure that he got one good one. - We're at the Reefton Information Centre, inside their mock-up mine which looks very, very authentic. We're gonna be shooting these shots pretty much the same as Jos would have done and without burning the place down. Bring in the miners! - (CHUCKLES) Straight on down. - One of the main drawbacks of shooting underground and especially in a goldmine is the lack of light. And when Jos was shooting his photos, he was really innovative in what he was doing. There were no electronic flashes. There were no flash bulbs. He could have used flash powder, which would just go bang in a split second, or he would burn magnesium ribbon. Right. He had to be pretty careful when you're a long way underground about creating too much magnesium smoke. Ow. Right. Jos was a very, very precise sort of chap, judging by his photography. He would have spent a lot of time posing up the other miners in their lunch breaks, which probably weren't very long at all, and he would have had to try and set up the shot just under candlelight, which would be very, very difficult. At the risk of actually getting a pick through my head, can we just go back the other way again, please? He certainly had that charisma to be able to convince people to sit for him. Right. I think we should be all set to go. - (INDISTINCT CHATTER) - Who turned out the light? - OK, go for it. - He was his own man, you know, his own person. He wasn't part of the mob or part of the group. He didn't greatly mix a lot socially with people. But he was a hard rock miner. He was a gold miner. - Old gold miners are mostly very interesting people. You can find people from different social classes and with different professions, from cobblers to lawyers and even to army generals. They all came, and they all tried their good luck. You couldn't possibly find more diverse humankind's characters and individuals. In many instances, these people went bankrupt in their countries, and for that reason, they moved overseas to start a new life. Many of them became rich not only once. They lived in such a way of life that in a short time, they returned to the mine as poor gold miners. - The thing that he was proud of was his travelling, the fact that he had been around the world a couple of times. - Ceske Flovo. Eight of the first, 1930. Famous Czech gold miner and explorer Mr Joseph Divis is leaving at the end of January back to the southern hemisphere to find a new happiness. Thirst for adventure is hard to suppress. When the gold miners get rich, they do not save money in banks. Instead, they enjoy their lives. No wonder, especially after living in the middle of wilderness for tens of years, life becomes severe and monotonous. J. Divis was also devoted to this gold mining tradition. After succeeding finding gold, he set off on a journey around the world himself. He travelled through China, Japan, India, America, Australia, and then he returned back to the gold fields. Later, he went around the world again and hoped of doing it once more. At that time, there were only very few people who would have travelled that much. Mr Divis was almost sure that he was a new record holder in travelling around the globe. - It's always puzzled me. Where did he get the money to do this travel? I can only assume that he did reasonably well as a gold miner and managed to top it up through the proceeds of his photography. - He sent a lot of his photographs up to the Auckland Weekly. That was a second income, of course. - When Jos came back from overseas, he started to work as a photojournalist, and these are two examples of photo spreads in the Auckland Weekly News, the national weekly magazine that had glossy photos in the centre. This is a full-page spread of the mines and miners on the west coast, and you can see that Jos appears in several of them himself. And this one here is a photo spread of the 1931 jubilee of the Blackwater Mine. Now, this was a national event. This was a very successful mine. Not many mines lasted for 25 years. And it looked as if the future was really bright. And here's a photograph of miners who just finished a major strike. This was quite surprising to be in the Auckland Weekly News, which was quite a conservative magazine. But the miners look fairly relaxed. They're not a threat to anyone. Perhaps it was quite a satisfactory ending to the strike. (SOFT MUSIC) - I get a sense from his work that he was very interested in documenting the life of the town. The fact that he was able to caption not just people who were miners but also the community that existed around that, the town that was developed in order to support that industry, that is unique, I think. - Oh, now, this is the barber. - I think one of the great things about his collection is that he captures some of those big events as well as some of these more everyday, I guess more mundane kind of events. - He did take photographs of people around the village and doing their normal activities. - It's the day-to-day events, someone having their hair cut, children playing the piano. People posed outside their house with their kitten and dog. And it captures New Zealand at an event of international significance, the Depression, so it shows that day-to-day life, what people were wearing, where they lived, the architecture, and the human impact on the environment as well. You can see the remnants of the bush that was cut down in the background, the changing town, what people wore when they were going into the mine with very little protective gear. So it's a really valuable visual record of a particular time and place. Not sure what this one is, but you'll be able to... - Oh yes, this is another of his images down the mine. See the plumb bob? And you can actually see the string coming down there. - That's right. - The resolution in these photographs is tremendous. - I don't know of any other collections like this that show mining life or the community or taken within a mine like this. - So, this is the Divis collection that we're digitising. It's glass-plate negs, so we have to be quite careful with the handling. And we photograph our collection using a light box and DSLR camera. - We have very limited resource for digitisation, so we have to be very careful about prioritising collections that we think are going to be of particular interest. - I take two or three exposures, depending on the density of the neg, and then we do all the postprocessing later. - They'll be available on the website. And so that means that people are able to access them from anywhere. - One night I was living in my hut, I had a dream that I was swimming. I woke up at night, and I realised that it was true. My hut and I swam. I was in bed, but it felt like if I were in the shower. Because I couldn't escape the rain in any better way, I laid down in my soaked bed. I threw over myself a rubber coat and opened an umbrella above my head and just stayed in bed and listened to the raindrops hitting my umbrella. (SOFT MUSIC) - See that pine tree? That was at my front gate. Jos was our neighbour. We just called in on the way home from school. Every day we came through and down the hill and home. He had a nice little porch out there. And that was his door, main door. If his bike was there, we knew Jos was home. He was a gentleman, a quiet, reserved man. Extremely friendly. He always greeted us and had doughnuts ready for us or pencils and paper. We'd sit on the stoop and draw pictures, and he'd talk to us. - Jos Divis was very well respected by the community and certainly by us children. We didn't do anything naughty or ridiculous to Mr Divis. We all respected him. Everybody knew that he was a photographer, a very precise photographer. Everything was in order before he pushed the switch. - It was known within our family at least and I presume the wider community that his photos were special. So different from anybody else. - In my view, if he were alive today, he would be right up the top. - NATALIE: His name fell away, and he hasn't been included in histories of photography. Maybe there was no one to carry on that name for him to be able to promote his work and show his legacy, so it took someone to lift the lid, as it were, on the collection. Supercars. Unforgettable. - Writing a biography is very like doing a jigsaw puzzle. But it's a jigsaw puzzle when you don't know how many pieces there are. And so you're always searching for more information. We're on our way to visit Eve Leggett. She has a wonderful photo album put together by her mother, who was a close friend of Jos Divis. We're hoping that we may learn a bit more about Jos because Eve's mother and Jos were very close, and when he died, he left all his possessions to her, so she inherited his photographs. - Hello. - Hello, Eve. - So beautiful. Yeah, well, that's the cover that my mother made when she decided to make this whole book. - This is a work of art, and I think your mother must have thought that Jos's photographs were precious. People knew about this album and had seen it, but no one knew what had happened to it. Eve sent an email saying, 'I've got this album, and I'm getting old now, 'and I'm not sure what to do with it.' - That's Bert, and that's Joe Harvey, my father. - That's a lovely one of Jos. - Oh yes, that's Jos there, looking for gold. - One thing, Eve, that struck me is that he was always quite a snappy dresser. You can see he's in a suit there. - Oh, well, he did. He always liked to have a hat on, you know, all smart. That's him when he's age 60 and needed some crutches. - This is a bit of lettering he did when he was into stereoscopic photography. This was his branding. - My mother went over to see him when he was 80 and took over the cake. - These are Jos Divis's own contact prints from the original glass plates. He didn't have an enlarger, so he never really saw how good his photographs were. To me, this is a treasure for information about gold mining because there's almost no one else that has photographed life in a goldmining town like Jos Divis did. Eve's album was important because there was some early photographs that I hadn't seen before, but also her mother had gone through and had carefully identified a lot of the people in the photographs, and so we were able to put names to people. And the last published photographs he had were at the beginning of 1935, and he seems to have stopped after that, which is a mystery. I wonder if he stopped because he wasn't making enough money or if the Auckland Weekly News stopped taking his photographs or if he'd simply run out of photographic materials. I even wonder whether he was short of money and had sold his cameras. He lived on for another 30 years. And he did take one or two odd photographs. So perhaps he had a camera of some sort. But his photographic days were over by 1935. - He always put himself in the photographs. It was just a thing to do, I suppose. I have a friend who always puts himself in the photograph too. It's a thing that some people do, I suppose. - The extent to which he included himself in his photographs is really interesting. And it's quite a high percentage, I think. It might even be close to half where he's included himself in a group or else inserted himself into a landscape scene. - I'm on a mission to find Jos's house, and I think it's just up ahead. Yeah, so, looking here, we've got, we think, the right side of the house. The fireplace is in the right place. It looks almost like there had been a chimney here. I would take it looking at the same angle as the photo here. I think standing here by the door, and that way we can see down this side of the house. Now, most photographers don't like to be photographed, but it was one of his hobbies, actually photographing himself in front of everything. I call him the inventor of the selfie. Just so many of his shots, he's in them. I think he would just work by himself, and he would have had timers which could be attached to the shutter. This one dates from the early 1900s. You push the button, and this pneumatic piston slowly comes up, and then it would just trigger the shutter. This one is a wind-up one, and it's slowly going around. And then as it's doing that, this is coming down and pushing the cable release, which is attached to the shutter. In my estimation, I would say that that would be something that he would have been using. If not, then he could have used a pneumatic shutter. So, this one we screw into a threaded hole here on the shutter. It's got a bulb, rubber bulb on the end. So, he would have been over here, looking at the camera. He would open the shutter, close the shutter. Done, done, done, done. And this. Right. Try and hide this as much as possible. And... (SHUTTER CLICKS) - I knew from the outset I wanted to write a book about him. I discovered that there wasn't much known about his life. Fortunately for me, Jos left us quite a paper trail right here. I went to Archives New Zealand, and I tapped in his name, D-I-V-I-S. And straight away, up came half a dozen files that no one had looked at. This is a telegram dated March 1939. 'Regret to advise that Joseph Divis sustained fracture of the vertex of the skull 'through accident in the mine this afternoon.' Just signed 'Blackwater Mines'. - They never had a hard hat on. Some of the miners never had a hat. Some of them did, and some of them didn't. But a rock apparently came down, hit him on the top of the head. And according to what I've read, he was never the same after that. - It was the start of a very dark period because six months later, it was the outbreak of war. He was regarded with some suspicion as an alien, and he was subsequently interned on Somes Island. - I was arrested on the 14th of February 1941 and arrived on Somes Island on the 16th of February. I have been interned for over two years now. What am I, anyhow? Poor, insignificant me in this gigantic struggle. I am a victim of circumstances over which I have no control. - We all thought it was ridiculous, really, because he was no more a Nazi spy or a communist spy than what I am an astronaut, really. The feeling was, well, this is the politics of the day, I suppose. - Well, I think one of the problems was that when he went for the interview, he was treating this as a political discussion. And he enjoyed talking, just kept on talking and digging himself deeper and deeper. 'When asked as to his sympathies in the war, he frankly admitted that his heart was divided. 'He could not forget his kindly treatment at German hands in his youth, 'nor could he forget the excellent treatment he had received in this country. 'He said that it was as if two beautiful cousins had come to blows 'and he was unable to choose which of the two he hoped might secure the victory.' He had done no harm to anyone, and I don't think he would have. But he clearly did feel threatened by one or two people at Waiuta. Some of the sons of people at Waiuta were fighting in Germany, and he was a man who said, 'Well, there's something to be said on both sides here.' So I think it's one of those things that happened in wartime. - Anyone with a Japanese face on, they interned them too. That was the politics of the day, which in some ways was quite ridiculous. - He wrote to everyone he could think of. Here's his letter to the attorney general, asking if he could appeal. He liked everything to be done very nicely, so he's made out his own little stamp here. 'Joseph Divis, prisoner of war, Somes Island, Wellington.' 'Having regard to his age and changed outlook 'as well as his candour and good character, 'the Tribunal takes the review that Divis could be safely released from internment. 'He says he has some money and can return to his former home at Waiuta.' He was released at the end of 1943 and return to Waiuta. He started writing a series of letters to everyone he could think of about his head injury. It was really very sad. - I know I am no longer wanted in this country, as I can no longer produce riches. - SIMON: In 1951, the mine closed down, and people moved out very quickly, so within a matter of a few months, Waiuta was a ghost town. Jos at that stage owned his own house, and so he stayed on behind them. - My father was the doctor based in Reefton, but Waiuta was part of his practice. We used to come up regularly when dad came up, and the highlight to see Jos was that under his bed, he had this big suitcase, and he'd bring out this machine that we were allowed to put the photos in ourselves, and he had a whole box of photos that we could just choose from. - This is a stereoscope that was owned by Jos Divis, the photographer. Mabel Harvey inherited Jos's cottage and all the negatives and all the photographs. When Mabel died, her partner knew I was intensely interested in the collection, so I got all of the glass-plate negatives and all the stereoscopic photos. Some of them had Jos's logo on the end of them. I looked after them for 26, 28 years. Then I was contacted by Simon Nathan. Simon scanned them and wrote the book that he's written. From there, they went to the Alexander Turnbull Library, which is the correct place for them. (LIGHT MUSIC) - Well, I think Jos would have been on top of the hill behind me here, a lot higher up, but unfortunately, with the gorse and the scrub, there is no way we can get it from there, so this is where I'm going to have to do the shot today. I knew that Jos experimented with stereo images. And what we have here are two different lens panels of a camera that I think he would have used. If he was doing a single shot, he would have just used the single lens. If he was doing stereo, he would take that. He would put the stereo viewers on the stereo lenses on there. We pull this down. You have both lenses open so you can compose your shot and focus. Then you pull it one more time. And you're ready for your shot. It will shoot two separate photographs. And when they are put into a stereo viewer, then it would look 3D. In Jos's photos, he got everything sort of in the right place. Very, very meticulous with his shot. Change those. And... He obviously loved the place. He went up to Waihi, went overseas, but he always seemed to gravitate, come back here. It was just a really thriving community. And now it's just a field of scrub and gorse. I can't imagine how he would have felt in those last years, being here pretty much by himself. It must have been a hell of a lonely sort of existence. (SHUTTER CLICKS) - 27 August 1952. Dear Mrs Dean, very many grateful thanks for the jar of jam and pickled onions. The news view which I sent you I beg you to keep in remembrance of me and old Waiuta. Who would have thought that the once famous Waiuta would become a ghost town? - I think he would have got lonely towards the end. Because there's not many people coming and going like there used to be. It's nice to come back, look around, and remember. A little bit sad. It was a happy childhood. It was a good community. (BAGPIPES PLAY) - People might wonder, this is a town that was once here and is no longer here, so why is that important? For heritage, really. It's about people. And so the people that remember a place really adds to the significance. Waiuta has just joined one of the few category-one historic places, which is really quite special. Jos Divis is really important to the story of Waiuta. Without his fantastic images, we would have had quite a... I guess maybe an academic study of this town. But his images really bring the town to life. (BAGPIPES PLAY) - We have these incredible visions because of Jos. And Jos Divis's house is really at the heart of the stories that we're going to be able to tell over the next 50 to 100 years. One of you wrote to me in the last week and said how incredibly poor it was that DOC was letting that house go to wrack and ruin in a category-one site, so I'm going to announce 100,000 today. (APPLAUSE) - He was a fairly simple-living man. He didn't crave the limelight. He didn't crave attention. And yet he was an absolute genius, so I think it's amazing that his work now is appreciated. And I'm really, really pleased that Jos is now getting the recognition that he surely deserves. (SOFT MUSIC) - With kindest regards, I remain faithfully yours, Joseph Divis, telephonist of this mystic ghost town. - Simon, I presume. - How nice to meet you, Brian, after all this time. - Yeah, for sure. Yeah. - These are some of your reenactments? - Yeah, we wanted to do them on glass plates, and the only ones I had were probably, oh, 70 years old, so they're not good negatives, but the prints that come off them are not too bad. Here we have just the reenactment in front of his cottage. - Then there's you in front of Waiuta. - Mm. - Oh, there's Blackball. - It probably would have looked the same without the cars in those days. And then we've got our miners. - So that was a 10-second exposure. - That was 10 seconds, yeah, burning magnesium ribbon ` and my fingers. So, yeah, I dropped that pretty bloody quickly. - (CHUCKLES) - Jos is definitely an artist, and to be able to sort of bring him back to life, I think that's quite amazing. Well done on that one. - Oh, well, thank you. I found it quite an exciting journey of discovery, because after 15 years, I keep on finding out more and more about Jos. - Right. So, 15 years, that's how long you've been working? - Well, when I first started. - Yeah. Very good. (SOFT MUSIC) Captions by Able. Captions were made with support from NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024