Who was John Feaver, pharmacist and prolific photographer?

Natasha McKinney, Pictorial Curator, Puke Ariki

‘Rekindled: Ōpunakē Life through the Feaver Collection’ is a significant project which aims to catalogue and digitise the ‘Feaver Collection’ of over 10,000 glass plate negatives at Puke Ariki.

The birth of this extraordinary collection took place in 1895, when John Feaver immigrated to New Zealand.  He and wife Kate sailed from an English summer into a particularly harsh southern winter, with seven children in tow.  Underpinning this journey was a firm plan to buy out a chemist business in Ōpunakē, Taranaki.

John was a fully qualified pharmacist who came from a family of medical practitioners.  His younger life in Truro, Cornwall had been adventurous.  The seaman-stuntman Captain Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel had trained John to excel in long-distance swimming.  The urge to extend his horizons took hold of John when he reached 42 - he had spent nearly twenty years running his own pharmacy in Hastings, England, but he left it all to pursue a new life on another coast far from home.

The year 1895 was a whirlwind of change.  After arriving in the ‘Ruahine’ steamship to Wellington in August, by early September John was in Ōpunakē busily importing everything he needed for his new business.  Before the year was out, he was taking photographs of the community he had joined – quickly demonstrating that his technical abilities and knowledge of chemicals was wonderfully complemented with artistic flair.  Wedding parties, rugby teams  and school picnics formed his initial outdoor repertoire.

In January 1896 the Opunake Times announced that “Mr J. Feaver has had a very neat studio fitted up and is prepared to undertake all kinds of photographic work.  We have inspected some specimens of his work in this branch, which are very artistic, and finished in capital style” (Opunake Times, 21 January 1896, p.2). The scene was set for John, and in turn his pharmacist son Samuel, to do a steady trade in portrait photography in the decades to come.  The privacy and elegance of the studio brought forth a new sense of self in even the roughest of characters who presented themselves for the Feavers’ lens. 

John also took up farming on Opua Road, where bush blocks were rapidly being cleared.  The camera was taken into the forest to document the felling of large rimu and kahikatea trees which made way for dairy cows.  John did not neglect to photograph his own family also.  On the day this photograph was taken, the family also posed on their horses and cart, clearly proud of the rural life they had constructed in Taranaki.