Orakei Korako on the Waikato

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

There is a sense in which all topographical paintings document lost places. Charles Blomfield’s trademark Pink and White Terraces paintings are a vivid case in point — records of a touristic Mecca destroyed in the Tarawera eruption of 1886. Tourism was the context for Blomfield’s tireless production line, and critical disparagement was heard long before the eruption itself. According to an 1885 columnist, ‘Well would it be if an artist of such skill could be induced to leave his panorama-work, which, though excellent in execution, is destructive of genius. “Blomfield in Wonderland” should not become a proverb.’1

En route to or from the terraces, Blomfield sketched Ōrākei Kōrako — ‘the place of adorning with white’ — named after a spectacular geyser with its white-rimmed opening evident to the left of the painting. Nearby was a pool with surfaces like glazed porcelain, a favourite resort for the local people and focus of pleasure-seeking European tourists. The Austrian geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter inspected the site in 1859 and described its marvels in Neu-Seeland, published in Stuttgart in 1863 and soon translated into English. Many other writers contributed to the growing fame of these geothermal wonders.

The death knell for Ōrākei Kōrako was sounded not by natural calamity but by the relentless march of modernity. In January 1961 much of the site was flooded by Lake Ōhakuri, the largest artificial lake in the North Island, created for hydroelectric generation. Modern-day tourists still pause on the Taupō–Rotorua highway to inspect the remnant wonders of Ōrākei Kōrako, but the Āniwaniwa (Rainbow) Rapids and some of the more spectacular geysers and silica formations were obliterated.

Blomfield tirelessly replicated his terrace paintings — over eighty-five produced before the eruption and hundreds subsequently — and the seemingly endless chain of cloned paintings helped to generate a potent New Zealand folk myth: the legend of the ‘Lost Terraces’. Theories that the terraces were buried, rather than obliterated, surfaced soon after the eruption. Blomfield himself made an arduous expedition in October 1886 to provide pictorial evidence of their destruction rather than their burial.2 Even today, purported discoveries of the Lost Terraces command widespread attention in the media.

Roger Blackley

1 Mercutio, ‘Calamo currente’, New Zealand Herald (supplement), 2 May 1885, p. 1.

2 Charles Blomfield, ‘The lost terraces: home forever’, New Zealand Herald (supplement), 1 February 1902, p. 1.

This idyllic-looking Māori settlement, deep in the heart of New Zealand’s thermal wonderland, was known as Ōrākei Kōrako, ‘the place of adorning with white’. It was named after a spectacular geyser, seen on the left of the painting.

The artist, Charles Blomfield, made an oil sketch of the settlement on his way to visit the Pink and White Terraces, a magnificent silica formation that attracted international tourists.

Blomfield was best known for his images of the terraces – indeed he was the only painter who gained iwi (tribal) permission to depict them. They came to a dramatic end when Mount Tarawera erupted in 1886.