Tailings - Black and white photographs by Alan Knowles
At Idiom Studio 29 August – 23 September 2006
As a small boy in Queenstown, Alan Knowles remembers an ounce of gold nuggets from the family gold claim in the Kyeburn
Diggings, magnified by water in a pill bottle, on the mantelpiece of the family home.
Both Alan’s parents had an Otago goldfields family heritage, and his childhood was full of stories of fabulous finds,
bushrangers, drownings and disasters. On family outings he would be found panning for colours with any picnic utensil he
could find.
As a teenager, he and friends reassembled the sluice gun at the mine on top of Queenstown Hill and blasted the hillside
in the hope of finding the mother lode. At Glenorchy they activated the unattended State Battery that serviced the
scheelite mines of Mt Juda and dropped rocks into the maw of the jaw crusher to watch them crack and turn to dust.
Over the last three years Alan Knowles has revisited with his camera the sites of his childhood exploits. He followed in
the footsteps of his great great grandfather, Warden H.W.Robinson, who adjudicated on disputes and misdemeanours
throughout Otago's goldfields. He trod the silent tailings of his father's family claim in the Kyeburn, and visited the
sites of famous and infamous events, to exhume Otago's past in this suite of photographs.
Alan Knowles is a Queenstown-born photographer now based in Wellington. His documentary work has been published in most
major New Zealand newspapers and magazines and numerous books. He was the organiser of Wellington´s fotofest 98 fringe
representing independent photographers. His work is held in many private collections; and he is represented by
Photospace Gallery and Idiom Studio in Wellington and the McNamara Gallery in Wanganui.
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