Photos of the West Coast by Damer Farrell
Damer Farrell’s photographs were taken from circa 1979 to 2008 of Greymouth and other localities in the West Coast. The photos provide a unique perspective on the West Coast way of life.
Damer Farrell — photographer
Damer Farrell worked as a freelance photographer for the Greymouth Star from 1979 until 2004. Damer was born in Westport in 1943. He lived for 37 years in Greymouth, then moved to Kaikoura where he taught at Kaikoura High School.
In 2008, the Alexander Turnbull Library purchased his collection of approximately 115,000 images, the majority of which are colour negatives.
Photograph of Damer Farrell. Ref: PADL-000278. Alexander Turnbull Library.
Picking up the collection
Damer Farrell’s collection was collected at a rendezvous in a carpark overlooking Picton. John Sullivan (former, Curatorial Services Leader) and Mark Strange (Senior Conservator Photographs) received several cardboard boxes and a filing cabinet containing negatives and prints.
Mark recollects that when it was all securely packed into the Library station wagon, they had a cup of tea in a nearby café, where John took care of the paperwork and he copied the digital images from Damer’s laptop onto a portable hard drive, which they brought back with the physical items. The photos were his most recent images, made after he’d stopped using film.
Those born-digital images were among the first described and uploaded into the National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA) by Kirsty Cox in her role as Arrangement and Description digital specialist. She spoke about this work in an NDF presentation on digital processing.
The majority of the collection is yet to be arranged, described and rehoused.
Greymouth Star
Synder Browne hand-set the first edition of the Greymouth Evening Star on St Patrick’s Day 1866 and today the Greymouth Evening Star Company is the principal media publisher on the West Coast, printing the Greymouth Star and the West Coast Times.
Greymouth also had a morning paper, The Grey River Argus, published between 1865 and 1966, which proudly proclaimed itself ‘New Zealand’s pioneer Labour daily’.
Historical editions of both papers can be read on Paper’s Past, the National Library’s digital repository of many of New Zealand’s newspapers. This popular website presently covers the period 1866–1935 for the ‘Argus’, and 1901–1920 for the ‘Star’, and the Library has plans to add more of both papers.
More Damer Farrell photographs
Have a look on the website for all the items, held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, in the Damer Farrell collection.