Alexander McKay

Alexander McKay

After an 1888 earthquake in north Canterbury, F. W. Hutton (then Professor of Geology at Canterbury University College) had reported that fence-lines on a sheep-run at Glynn Wye had been pushed several metres out of line, but considered this to be a result of land-slides from the shaking. McKay saw something quite different: the break in the fence-line was not due to land-slide, but to a previously unrecognised form of faulting, by horizontal or lateral displacement rather than vertical. The concept of lateral fault movement was almost entirely new, and again the New Zealand example helped to gain acceptance for the idea …

From Ross Galbreath, DSIR: making science work for New Zealand, Victoria University Press, 1998, pp202-3

Cow-herding in a small Scottish village stimulated the young Alexander McKay’s interest in geology – an interest he retained throughout his travels and career in New Zealand.

McKay emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 22, arriving in Bluff in 1863. He worked as a goldminer in New Zealand and Australia and then spent four years travelling alone, exploring, prospecting and collecting fossils in South  Canterbury. On his travels he met Julius Haast, provincial geologist for the Canterbury region. Recognising McKay’s talent and experience, Haast engaged the young man as an assistant on geological surveys and fossil excavations, and in 1872 directed McKay on the excavation of the Moa-bone Point Cave at Sumner.

James Hector, director of the Colonial Museum and Geological Survey, admired McKay’s work and, when McKay moved to Wellington, Hector employed him in the Geological Survey where he remained for nearly 20 years. He subsequently worked for the Mines Department and eventually gained the title of ‘government geologist’.

McKay was originally employed by Hector as a fossil collector but his astute field observations and conclusions saw him expand into other areas of geology in which he covered almost all of New Zealand. A self-taught geologist, he carried a copy of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in the field, where he would read to his companions, who often included the geologists James Park and Frederick Hutton.

A fiercely independent man, McKay was not afraid to challenge the views of his more educated colleagues, even though his views often led to controversy. McKay was the first scientist in New Zealand – and possibly the world – to document transcurrent, or sideways, fault movement. (The only previously recognised fault movement was vertical.) He also correctly deduced that New Zealand’s mountain ranges were very young. His most bitter and publicisied conflict was with Julius Haast. McKay rubbished Haast’s hypothesis of a pre-Māori palaeolithic moa-hunter culture, saying instead that moa hunters were ancestral Māori. Once again, McKay was right and Haast’s theory was soon rejected.

In his 40s, McKay took up photography as a new hobby. He experimented with different camera configurations and even ground his own lenses from bottle ends. He has been credited with developing the first telephoto lens.

While McKay’s radical new ideas of faulting and mountain uplift took time to be accepted, they laid the groundwork for the later work of Charles Cotton and Harold Wellman.  

By Rebecca Priestley

Further reading

Alexander McKay biography – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography website

15 articles written by McKay and three abstracts, published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, are available online:

Articles by Alexander McKay – Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand website

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga O Aotearoa, must be obtained before any reuse of this image

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