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Ian Macdonald has led a life riding on the crest of change. After growing up in an isolated Maori village, he established the country’s first photography gallery, successfully campaigned against logging in native forests, created some of the earliest Kiwi computer programmes, and is now pioneering aerial surveys for conservation. At his hilltop studio in Big Omaha, Ian reminisced with Mahurangi Matters editor George Driver…
I spent my formative years in the Kaipara and Mahurangi area – my family moved from Birkenhead to Arapaoa on the Tinopai Peninsula in the Kaipara Harbour when I was about five years old. My father had a job as a teacher at a Maori Department School with about 15 pupils and I was the only pakeha boy in the area. It was very isolated then – there was no power and we had the only telephone and car in town. My parents were both Open Brethren and were a bit like missionaries – they had the idea they were saving the Maori from themselves. At the time, speaking Te Reo was discouraged in schools and, from what I could tell, the students were essentially discouraged from being Maori. But my parents soaked up the culture and Maori spirituality, and in the end I think the locals had more of an impression on them than the other way round.
One of my most vivid memories of the time was when the heir to the chief was suffering from appendicitis. He was just a boy and as we had the only car, a 39 Desoto, my family tried to rush him to Te Kopuru Hospital, south of Dargaville. It took so long because the roads were so bad that he died on the trip. A tapu was put on the road as we brought his body back and we had to be the last vehicle to head back to Arapaoa. When we arrived it seemed like all of Ngati Whatua was there for the tangi. The whole village shutdown for seven days – no school or anything. It was an incredible, overwhelming experience.
We returned to Auckland and I went to school at Westlake. I was in the top class, but when I was 16 my parents sent me to sea. My father’s brother was in the Merchant Navy and had been killed in WWII. I was named after him and my father wanted me to follow in his footsteps. It seemed like an exciting adventure, so I was quite keen. For four years I was an officer cadet on ships that ran between New Zealand and Britain – each trip lasted about six months. I later became a deck officer on British ships and was responsible for navigation, loading and unloading the ship, and running the crew. I enjoyed being at sea, but I didn’t like the company – it was like a floating prison. It seemed that the justice system in Britain sent everyone to sea they didn’t want on land and a lot of them were psychopaths and alcoholics. But the cadets were always looked after, and as an officer I was never in trouble. I met my wife, Elise, in the UK when I was 21. She was a passenger on a small ship and I was second officer. When I left the Merchant Navy and returned to New Zealand, she followed and we married in 1973.
Back home, I went to Elam School of Fine Art to study photography. I got a job as exhibition officer at Auckland Art Gallery and then worked as photo editor at Peter Webb magazines, including The New Zealander. When the magazines failed, I started my own gallery and photo lab, Real Pictures, in 1979, using Peter’s lab equipment. It was the first gallery in the country that focused on photography and it’s considered one of the most important galleries of the time – Nina Seja is researching and writing a book about it at the moment. Pretty much all of the contemporary photographers of the time exhibited there and we created a market for photographs that never existed before. We had about 300 exhibitions at the gallery over 10 years. One of the most important was our series on the 1981 Springbok Tour. We had a running show of the protests and thousands of people visited it each day. We invited people to pin up their own photos of the tour and actively encouraged photographers to cover it. We published a book on the exhibition and most of the images you see of the tour came out of that exercise.
My photography centres on my work as a conservationist. In the 1980s I played a leading part in the campaign to end Government logging in native forest. We formed a trust with the conservationist Professor John Morton and Tony Hughes, and got a lot of high profile people on board, including Sir Edmund Hillary. We arranged to bring the environmental campaigner David Bellamy over from England. We were taking the campaign to Wellington when Prime Minister Robert Muldoon called the 1984 snap election – a Labour Government was in power within a month. By the time we made it to the Beehive, the Government had been ensconced for just a few days. Labour hadn’t been that supportive of the campaign – they were concerned about the job losses it would cause, so we weren’t very optimistic. But we were the first lobby group they had dealt with and they were in a daze and said they would ban the logging immediately. We were stunned. The Forest Service was then turned into the Department of Conservation – overnight the state loggers became DOC rangers. As a result of that campaign I got a call from the BBC and became a photographer for their projects and travelled the world. I photographed for the Walking with Dinosaurs series and shot in some incredible locations, trekking up volcanoes in Chile, forest in Brazil, jungles of Indonesia and the mountain ranges of North America. It was very cool.
In the 1970s I worked on a project with Kiwi composer Jack Body to design a computer system that would make sound in response to people’s movements. I’ve been fascinated by computers ever since. I got my first computer after starting Real Pictures – a DEC Rainbow for $15,000. There weren’t any computer programmes around at the time, so I started writing my own for my business and I soon started helping other businesses get set up. When I sold Real Pictures in 1990, I began working as a computer programmer full-time, working for an Auckland IT company that designed software to analyse market research data for companies like Microsoft and Coca Cola. There’s a huge amount of data that companies collect about our lives. I was never very comfortable about it, but I don’t think there’s a big concern about companies spying on people. To get the information down to a personal level requires too much effort and computer power.
I’ve always believed in protecting public land from being sold – that’s what got me involved in protecting paper roads. These roads are public assets and no-one can foresee how they may be used in the future. I started the Big Omaha Trail Trust as a way of protecting them. I discovered that a series of paper roads and small roads could be linked and you can walk from Pakiri to Matakana and the idea for the trail was formed. I’m pushing for that trail to be established as fast as I can. The artist Billy Apple is involved and he wants to design components of the trail – we discuss it every week.
I retired from my computer programming job last year, but I’ve already started a new business with my son. He is experienced in GIS mapping, and using my skills in photography and computers, we are creating information for science and conservation work. Our first project involved doing aerial surveys to identify areas infected with kauri dieback. We recently mapped all of Western Waikato, from Port Waikato to Kawhia Harbour, flying a small fixed wing plane over and photographing basically every square metre. We took about 60,000 photos and have found areas that appear to be infected – previously they thought the area had escaped the disease. We now have a contract to map to Waipoua Forest, the Bay of Islands and Auckland. I also recently mapped Motuihe Island, in the Hauraki Gulf, with a drone. The images are being used to identify individual pampas plants which they are mapping to feed into the GPS navigation of a helicopter so it can locate and spray it all. It’s pioneering stuff.
