This paper explores the constitutive relations between settler place-making and Indigenous dispossession in late nineteenth-century New Zealand and Victoria. The social, economic and legal innovations of settler colonialism in this period have attracted substantial scholarly attention over the past two decades but its environmental dimensions remain insufficiently explored. Settler colonial studies might make more of its spatial turn. Through a close reading of the work of two contemporary photographers – Alfred Burton in New Zealand and Nicholas Caire in Victoria – I show that visions of nature played an important role in the consolidation of settler colonial political units. Burton and Caire are illustrative examples of a wider set of photographers who were all interested in landscape views and Indigenous subjects. A comparative analysis of their work indicates that both types of photography were equally implicated in settler colonial systems. Principally, they managed continuing Indigenous presence by developing new conventions of representation. These practices effectively divided Indigenous people from the landscapes that they inhabited, embellished settler environmental transformations, contrived new natures and created modern wilderness photography. This paper draws environmental history and settler colonial studies together to better understand the shared environmental foundations of Indigenous dispossession and settler place-making.