Scene of Kauri Bush, gumdiggers at work

Charles Blomfield is best known for his paintings of the Pink and White Terraces. Yet he delighted in all aspects of New Zealand scenery, travelling far and wide throughout the country to make views for exhibition and sale.

The dense native bush sparked mixed reactions from settlers. For Blomfield, it was a place of unequalled beauty. He wrote:

<em>Some people dread the bush … The gloom and silence give them an uncanny feeling … But … I delight to scramble through it hour after hour. I never tire of its wonderful charm. I love the glinting sunlight and the mysterious gloom, the sweet smell of moist air and the resinous perfumr of the pines.</em>

The New Zealand bush was not only scenic, it also offered rich resources for both Māori and European settlers. The men in this painting are digging for kauri-tree gum. Māori harvested kauri gum, or kāpia, for a variety of uses, from chewing, to starting fires and for creating moko (using the black soot from burnt gum ground into a fine powder). But for Pākehā, the translucent, golden nuggets were used for making varnish and, later, linoleum. Kauri gum was one of New Zealand’s main exports from 1870 to 1920 and it's estimated that in the 1890s, when Blomfield made this painting, there were 20,000 people involved in the industry. By this time, fossilised kauri gum found in the ground in scrublands, was becoming harder to find, and diggers had begun to collect gum from around the base of living trees. They also began 'bleeding' the trees to collect gum, a practice that was dangerous, both for the workers and for the trees.

Blomfield's painting pictures these workers, dwarfed by the majestic trunks of Tāne Mahuta. Although the trees dominate, a sense of the frailty of nature in the face of the colonial enterprise was already being felt by settlers. Indeed, when this painting was exhibited in Wellington in November 1892, a reviewer for the <em>Evening Post </em>observed that the men working at the base of the tree told of the 'impending destruction of the monarchs of the bush'. Blomfield himself expressed dismay at the impact of colonialism, writing:

<em>It seems nothing short of a crime to destroy so much beauty, but the bushman’s axe and settler’s fire are playing havoc with the finest parts of it. The settler regards the bush as so much waste land. He is ever thinking of how much grass or turnips he could grow there.</em>

Rebecca Rice, February 2022

<strong>Sources:</strong>

Muriel Williams, Charles Blomfield: his life and times, Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979