Kōrero: Railways

Railway labourers, or navvies, excavate a cutting through typical New Zealand hill country, around the start of the 20th century. They did it the hard way – tools and methods had developed little since the first railways were built in New Zealand, some 40 years previously. Workers still used dynamite, pickaxes, wide-mouth shovels, horse-drawn tipcarts, and the gravity-fed timber chute popularly known as a ‘Chinaman’. The surplus earth would probably be tipped into a nearby gully.