The Reverend Doctor John Kinder was one of New Zealand's most influentual 19th century Anglican ministers and teachers. At the same time he was also one of its most committed and peripatetic amateur artists. From his arrival in Auckland in 1855 until his death in 1903 he travelled the breadth of the country, incessantly making drawings, watercolours and photographs of his experiences. He saw this place as singularly different from others he had come to know and he wanted to record what was, for him, its peculiar and particular reality. Although his genre may have been the topographical landscape, his principal legacy is a marvellous portrait of New Zealand in its early colonial years...