Story and photos Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

Welcome to Emily Cumming Harris in New Zealand and Australia.

2025 is a big year for us and for Emily as Te Papa Press publishes our book Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris. Please keep an eye on the blog for updates about publication and launch 10 April in Wellington.

A retrospect

We would like to acknowledge here the support and encouragement we have received since the Emily Harris project lifted off in 2016 with the discovery of paintings and family papers at Puke Ariki Museum in New Plymouth.

To begin with we were searching for Emily’s poems, hoping that the handful we had found would prefigure the discovery of a larger cache. Family letters and Emily’s diaries gave us plenty to work with, but no more poems appeared. When we met the Harris descendants for the first time in Special Collections at the University of Auckland, they brought with them a trove of new materials and a photo album with contents dating back to the 1860s.

We did a lot of transcribing and editing, and when the files were ready Makyla Curtis designed and built a research website with a blog to pique interest in an almost-forgotten artist and writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of the year there were 51 posts and several online features on the website. We celebrated Emily’s move into the digital realm with an end-of year lunch at a downtown cafe in Auckland.

We were still looking for poems but by this time Emily’s beautiful botanical watercolours had our attention too. Visits to public collections in Nelson, Wellington, Hobart, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, London and Plymouth focused on the hand-coloured sets of New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns that Emily produced with painstaking care from the 1890s until the 1910s.

In Whanganui we met more members of the Briant family who descend from Emily’s married sister Mary Weyergang. In Sydney we met Sue Needham and her brother Peter Tregeagle, re-establishing a connection between the New Zealand and Australian branches of the family. Sue and Peter descend from Emily’s other married sister Catherine Moore. In England we missed seeing Harris descendants Roger Middleton and Owen Jones, both of whom had given us valuable help with the family’s British antecedents.

Fast-forward to late 2021. Michele, recently retired from the University of Auckland, has begun drafting a book that will draw on the web research to tell the story of Emily and her family of artists and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand. When Catherine agrees to come on board the book project, its scope is extended to include the paintings that are beginning to divulge stories of their own. Michele and Catherine talk up Emily’s dual production at events in Nelson (2023) and Christchurch (2024) as the book goes through more drafts.

Enter Nicola Legat, Te Papa Press publisher and impresario of the possible. When has a publisher ever allowed more chapters in a draft because late discoveries are popping up like overnight mushrooms? Suddenly the book encompasses caves, eclipses and comets. Suddenly its botany maps directly onto herbarium collections at Te Papa. And suddenly digital enhancement produces images on walls from long-ago exhibitions.

And now

The book is technically in press. Actually stock is in transit from China, where it has been printed and its many illustrations colour-matched to the nth degree: thank you Nicola, designer Kate Barraclough, project editor Jo Elliott, imaging technician Yoan Jolly and the rest of the team at Te Papa Press. Nicola has capped the book’s content at 384 pages. It is enough.

During the run-up to publication and launch we will post items of interest about the book and the stories it has generated. First up is a recap of our recent experiences in Christchurch talking to a full suite of archivists from Aotearoa, the Pacific and Australia.

Then comes an important addition to our Art and Writing section: ‘This Fair Work: Emma Jane Hill Scrapbook 1826-1880.’ You can preview the feature here.