Remarkable West Coast restoration completed

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from The Press

By local democracy reporter Brendon McMahon:

The restoration of the 100-year-old home of a remarkable pioneering photographer who documented West Coast mining life has been formally opened.

The $100,000 project undertaken by the Department of Conservation has breathed new life into the home of Jos Divis who lived in the cottage from the 1920s until his death in 1967.

Members of Divis' family, including his great niece, travelled from the Czech Republic to formally cut the ribbon on Friday, March 15.

The celebration marked the culmination of a complex restoration by DOC over the past two years which brought the fragile wooden structure back from the brink - amid renewed interest in Divis' photographic legacy.

Born in 1885 in what is now the Czech Republic, he emigrated to the West Coast about 1909, first living in Blackball then following an itinerant life as a mine worker for several years before becoming a fixture of Waiuta.

There Divis worked in the large underground gold mine and documented the community in a startling record of the town which continues to lives on in his images.

As a keen amateur photographer, Divis, documented the mining workplace in often startling photography.

This often included the photographer himself posed within his photos as an early form of the 'selfie' by deploying self timer technology of the day.

Divis was widely published in the national newspapers until the late 1930s.

He also documented the demise of Waiuta as a town when the mine suddenly closed in 1951. At the time it had been the largest underground gold mine of its kind in the South Island.

Divis' remarkable legacy of thousands of photographs is still being discovered amidst a resurgence of interest in his legacy with three current exhibitions including an opening at the National Library in Wellington this week.

Simon Nathan, the maker of a recent documentary on Divis, said the historic legacy of Divis is pure gold.

"One of the things that has been fascinating is, I keep on finding Jos Divis' photographs," he said on Friday.

This included Divis' descendants recently sharing fresh material buried in a family album of his early days on the West Coast, Nathan said.

Divis' work is also contained within many hidden personal albums of families with Waiuta links.

While there is an extensive archive of Divis' work in the National Library of NZ, along with that of Waiuta families links, his commercial post card work was also beginning to come to light, Nathan said.

World Heritage Site evaluator and DOC heritage adviser Paul Mahoney said he did not believe Divis' legacy had been given enough credit yet in New Zealand.

"I don't think there's anyone else in New Zealand who has documented a work place and a community in such a way. He was away ahead of his time," Mahoney said.

Heritage NZ deputy chief executive Nic Jackson paid tribute to DOC and the Friends of Waiuta who in an unique partnership had ensured the fabric of the Waiuta Tohu Whenua site continued to be enhanced, namely through the Divis cottage restoration.

"Here at Waiuta we can say a picture paints a thousand words, with thousands of pictures taken by Jos of life on the West Coast," Jackson said.

The Waiuta township site is one of six Tohu Whenua sites on the West Coast.

While Waiuta is now a ghost town the images taken by Divis of a town which was "a hive of bustling life" was unique, Jackson said.

"Much of the town's physical life has gone but Jos brings it to life for us."