The lad is hunched over the terminal tackle, giving all his attention to the swivels, sinkers, hooks and bait.
Some way to one side, in sandals, hot pants and a skimpy blouse stands a teenage girl, presumably the boy’s sister. She is looking out across the water.
A few yards to the other side stands their mother, also looking out across the water, wearing shorts and a less skimpy blouse. And half-seated, half-lying near her feet is her other son, the fisherman’s younger brother.
The weather, as the clothing suggests, is January faultless. The year is 1973 or thereabouts. The place is Lyttelton.
Back then the public had access to all the wharves in the port. This photograph is taken looking back towards the township. Beyond the fisherman and family is a stretch of calm harbour water then a pair of large docked ships.
One is the ferry Rangatira that used to go from Lyttelton to Wellington overnight.
It ceased to operate in 1976. Smoke is blooming from its funnel and drifting away to the west, suggesting a typical easterly breeze. The other ship’s a freighter, the Port Caroline.
The notes to the photo say it was broken up for scrap in 1985.
Beyond the ships stands the port of Lyttelton, looking much as it does today, half a century later.
I can just make out the first house I ever owned, a bungalow below the cemetery, built in the 1890s. Beyond, behind and above the town stand the Port Hills, raw and rocky with a thin skin of grass and scrub and gorse.
Above that, the sky, which has puffs of cirrus but is otherwise blue – or would be if this were a colour photo. But it is black and white, which is part of the poignancy. For me, black and white images evoke time past more vividly than coloured ones.
Another part of the poignancy is personal. I have lived in this town for close to 40 years.
I feel intimate with Lyttelton’s streets and landscape. To see them here is to touch a chord.
In addition, the youth attending to the fishing tackle looks about 16.
In 1973 I too was 16, and I too was a fisherman, though on the other side of the world. That lad feels like my representative. He will now be of retirement age, that mop of hair long gone.
Every photograph is a trick. It appears to freeze a moment, but the river of time runs always on.
Those tufts of cirrus will have soon dissolved. The shadows in the gullies on the hills will have shifted.
The bloom of smoke from the ferry announces that it was about to depart. And that sense of departure serves as a backdrop to the human story shown on the wharf.
The girl is slender as a wand, and revelling in her youth, as evident from the hot pants, the sleeveless blouse.
But just a few yards away is her mother in a similar pose, also staring listlessly at the water. Mother is no longer slender as a wand. The girl has only to glance to her right to see 30 years ahead.
But it’s the fishing brother who is the focus of the image, its literal and metaphorical centre.
Everyone else is disposed around him like extras on a stage, all doing nothing, ruminative. He alone is busy, engrossed in attending to his fishing tackle. There’s an intimacy to the view of him.
It’s like Vermeer’s famous painting of the maid pouring milk. The point of that painting is the complete absorption of the maid in the everyday domestic task. And just as the maid poured milk in Holland 350 years ago, so the young man fished on Lyttelton wharf in 1973. There is now and only now and all you can do is give yourself entirely to what you’re doing.
The photo is a sermon on the passage of time. Hence the poignancy. Hence too the significance of a detail I’ve only just noticed. On the wharf behind the kneeling youth lies a small dead fish.
