Charlie Dawes, Enos Pegler and three unidentified men in front of Dawes’ studio tent. Photo / Dawes collection, Auckland Libraries
Charlie Dawes, Enos Pegler and three unidentified men in front of Dawes’ studio tent. Photo / Dawes collection, Auckland Libraries
An exhibition exploring an historic and controversial “dog tax” in the Hokianga is showing at the Waitangi Treaty Grounds Museum over the next couple of months.
The Charlie Dawes: Everybody’s Artist Photographer exhibition is open at Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi Gallery till November 10.
The exhibition features65 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.
Waitangi Treaty Grounds curator Owen Taituha said Te Hokianga-nui-a-Kupe is the ancestral home of many northern hapu, including Ngāpuhi.
By the 1830s 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,” Taituha said.
The controversial Dog Tax of two shillings and sixpence per dog was introduced by the Government in the 1890s.
Māori in Hokianga objected to paying a tax for their dogs, which led to an armed standoff in Rawene.
Historians have described the conflict as the last gasp of the 19th-century wars between Māori and Pākehā settlers.
Dawes was born in England in 1867 and had moved north to the Hokianga with his family by the mid-1880s.
Known as a jack-of-all-trades who worked as a carrier, mailman, nightsoil collector and orchardist, he was also a photographer, running a studio in Kohukohu 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 St store in Auckland.
In 2012, 475 negatives were discovered in a second-hand store in Kaitaia.
Government forces with a Maxim rapid-fire gun in Rawene, Northland for the 1898 Dog Tax Rebellion. Photo / Charlie Dawes, Auckland Libraries
Together with 1650 negatives gifted by the Dawes descendants in 2018, these form the Dawes Collection at Auckland Central City Library.
“The Charlie Dawes photographic exhibition provides rich insights of what the Hokianga harbour looked like over 100 years ago,” Taituha said.
“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.”
Links to the tumultuous time in the Hokianga were brought to light after the discovery of a mummified dog in 2020.
Contractors found the dead canine under the former Wesleyan church in Rawene while undertaking foundation works as part of the restoration of the building.
It still had a collar around its neck with a corroded licence tag, proving its owners had paid their dog tax during a period where tensions ran high between Māori and the Crown over the issue.
Jenny Ling is a news reporter and features writer for the Northern Advocate. She has a special interest in covering roading, lifestyle, business, and animal welfare issues.
