New Zealand Railway Tours 1889, 83 × 56 cm Auckland Libraries, NZ Map 6573 New Zealand Tourist Excursion Tickets 1888, 85 × 55 cm NZRLS Collection These two designs, promoting ‘excursion tickets’, are the earliest pictorial posters by the Railways Department known to exist. Typical of their era, they included detailed information that made them suited to close viewing, rather than a simple striking message seen from afar. Around this time, poster work was gaining attention thanks to new developments in illustration. In 1890, for example, the Evening Star noted (2 December): ‘The great advance in coloured lithographic work in the colonies is strikingly illustrated by specimens of work now exhibited in the window of Messrs J. Wilkie and Co. . . . Another specimen is a one-sheet double demy poster for the New Zealand Railways Department, showing views of lakes and mountains.’ It is possible this description relates to the poster shown left, whose dimensions broadly match the double demy size (57 × 90 cm). One or both of these posters may also have appeared overseas. In 1894, the ‘Anglo-Australian’ writer in the Lyttelton Times (18 October) noted that ‘the New Zealand Government has for some time past exhibited a touristmap poster at quite one hundred of the principal railway stations in England, which poster, owing to its attractive design, cannot fail to command special notice’. The writer also noted – evidencing a wider poster drive from this period – that the New Zealand Shipping Company had issued ‘a large and artistic poster’, which alongside ‘widespread attention’ (including ‘exhibition at a thousand different railway stations’) had been requested by nearly a thousand overseas schoolmasters for teaching about New Zealand.
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