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Review: Māori and the Environment

Monday, January 9th, 2012

REVIEW: Māori and the Environment: Kaitiaki. Edited by Rachael Selby, Pātaka Moore and Malcolm Mulholland, Huia Publishers, 2010, 372 pp., ISBN: 978-1-86969-402-9.[1]

Charles Dawson[2]

The nineteen essays in this book are a compelling combination of outrage, inspiration, and positive action. While the authors attend to resource management policy and practice, the book goes to the heart of Māori culture and tradition: as many of the authors note, without contact with the remnant bush and birds, and the transmission of knowledge, Māori risk losing connection with the places that foster tribal identity. Dozens of books and reports (most recently the Waitangi Tribunal´s Wai 262 report) have warned of the effects of biodiversity loss on culture. This book gives the nation no room for complacency in this regard, reiterating Darrell Posey´s explication of the inextricably linked worlds of indigenous knowledge and biodiversity.

The book contains three sections: the concept and practice of kaitiaki, freshwater issues, and the heritage and the protection context. The introduction describes kaitiakitanga as ‘an inherent obligation we have to our tūpuna and to our mokopuna; an obligation to safeguard and care for our environment for future generations. It is a link between the past and the future, the old and the new, between the taonga of the natural environment and tangata whenua.’

Each essay consolidates this link between past and future. Judging from the calibre of the essays  and the authors’ sound grasp of their iwi concerns and traditions and the world of policy-making and resource management, the bicultural reality of local environments will endure. The writers represent the new generation and are impressive, articulate and determined to remain vigilant. And the book is generous in calling for vigilance from the wider community. As the back cover notes:

No one can read this book without feeling incensed that we have allowed the New Zealand environment to deteriorate to the extent that is revealed here. It is not too late to undo the damage. We must all adapt to the kaupapa of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) to preserve what we have…. New Zealand’s reputation as a clean green environment is under threat. We ignore the messages in this book at our peril. This is a book for all New Zealanders.

Seen in the context of the emergence of resource management policy and the Māori  ‘cultural renaissance’ of recent decades, Kaitiaki demonstrates the hard-won multi-skill set of Māori tradition, resource management policy, and bicultural practice; it’s this sort of  weave that makes New Zealand such an important place for the world to learn from. Many New Zealanders will also learn from this book.

Many of the authors record their dissatisfaction with the state of freshwater quality, the actions of local government (rubbish dumps and untreated effluent come in for special mention), or regard the incessant spread of urbanisation as forces that eroded tribal landscapes, tribal memories and tribal mana. So in Malcolm Mulholland’s piece,  ‘The Death of the Manawatū River’ you know he will pull no punches, but his research into the municipal activities of the 1950 to 1990s details the consistent, polite petitions of local Māori pitted against a local government apparatus that was not, for the authors, geared or designed to take their concerns into account.

The book’s section on freshwater should be widely consulted, for as Gail Tipa observes, ‘Landscapes and societies are shaped, in part, by the quality, quantity and form of water movement.’ Tipa continues her role as a key developer of bicultural models for freshwater assessment that stand up to scrutiny in both Māori and non-Māori worlds. One of the volume’s appealing features is its insistence on the local, and the writers´ generous sharing of their experience of restoration projects. Huhana Smith’s account of wetland restoration near Kuku Beach, Margaret Forster’s essay on wetland restoration near Wairoa, and Te Rina Warren’s description of a possible model for hapū and iwi engagement and restoration in Rangitīkei, serve as beacons of possibility in other regions. In each of those cases the local Māori communities have stepped up to propose and foster restoration projects, collaborating with a wide range of experts, stakeholders and funding sources to overcome perceived limitations at the local government level.

The authors do not demonstrate a great deal of support from local government. It seems the positive stories are few and far between. According to Smith, ‘Kaitiaki navigate considerable complexity in the resource management process to maintain and restore cultural and spiritual values in landscape, but only when these attributes are recognized, reconciled with, and respected can they be protected.’ Yet it is also evident that central government has provided some suport. Lisa Kanawa places these questions in a wide strategic context by bringing climate change impacts for iwi into view, while a subtle essay on 1080 poison-control of possums aims to move through and beyond polarised positions to promote dialogue.

Tūhoe scholars Rangi Mataamua and Pou Temara acknowledge the winds of change that have separated all but five per cent of Tūhoe from the tribal forests; their honest questions for Tūhoe as to what this separation means show the work required for Māori as well as non-Māori. Their questions have national relevance. Veronica Tawhai’s essay on consultation with the many who live outside their tribal rohe speaks to the nature and effect of dislocation on consultation processes.

In an essay on global heritage management criteria, Sir Mason Durie proffers the five indigenous-derived principles of connectedness, mauri, continuity, contextual significance and reciprocity as crucial elements for ICOMOS[3] heritage management policy at the local and international level.  As this book (and the Wai 262 report) makes clear, a concerted effort is needed.

Māori and the Environment: Kaitiaki  is a powerful reminder of kaitiakitanga as a guiding force for Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand today. It is an engaging handbook for students of resource management, history, Māori studies, local government and voluntary community conservation groups. But perhaps more crucially, it is a handbook for aspiring kaitiaki, because it shares positive accounts of iwi-led restoration projects. This book could have been a welter of anger, or despair. But often the communities (clearly led in some cases by the authors themselves) have worked to design—and carry out—projects that restore both mana and manu, for the good of all.

In their cycles of return, restoration and renewal, these projects inspire communities, Māori and non-Māori, to explore the potential of collaboration and self-determination. Given the leadership evident in this volume, I expect a second edition will feature even more accounts of positive projects for iwi, and I hope that wider communities will be involved in ways that honour the spirit demonstrated in this book.

[1] RRP $55 (in November 2011 this was on sale direct from www.huia.co.nz for $45).

[2] Charles, a co-editor of ENNZ, has trained in literature, cultural geography, te reo Māori and the martial arts. His recent work included facilitation in the Waitangi Tribunal´s Wai 262 inquiry, and he is currently abroad with his family.

[3] International Council on Monuments and Sites.

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Review: The Settler’s Plot

Monday, January 9th, 2012

REVIEW: Alex Calder, The Settler’s Plot: How Stories Take Place In New Zealand,  Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2011, 299 pp., ISBN 978 1 86940 488 8. 

Julian Kuzma[1]

Books on the roots of New Zealand literature and literary culture appear relatively far and few between. Alex Calder’s ‘study of the relationship between literature, place and the history of Pākehā settlement in New Zealand’ comes then as a welcome addition.

Calder writes in a refreshingly straightforward and personable manner, free from the alienating terminology and continental theories of post-modern scholars (who have often influenced writing on New Zealand literature and literary culture, but whose approaches are often simply not applicable to the New Zealand historical and social context, landscape or literature).  His style may be accessible but the ideas Calder conveys on authorial perception of place and representation of that place in literature are far from simple. The Settler’s Plot is neither introductory study nor textbook, and readers with some prior knowledge of the texts and authors discussed will gain the most from this book.

A number of landmark New Zealand texts are examined from fresh angles at the same time as which prevalent discourses are challenged. Calder has no pretensions to represent the entire body of New Zealand literature, rather to ‘read a relatively small number of classic New Zealand texts closely and well.’ Therefore, instead of a general discussion of literature and place in New Zealand, the book is a series of free-standing essays about place, loosely grouped in topical bodies in roughly chronological order. These are ‘Belonging’ (the question of Pākehā turangawawae), ‘Landing’ (cross cultural encounters in the nineteenth century), ‘Settlement’ (appropriating land, transforming the landscape, life in the suburbs) and ‘Looming’ (different kinds of New Zealanders and the awareness of a distant place in the world).

Certain works and authors merit Calder’s attention for entire sections and these often contain the book’s most interesting parts. Rather than random selections, Calder’s choices of text, as well as his additional references to other authors, sources and literature, show that his understanding of his theme is comprehensive – his arguments are grounded, convincing and applicable far beyond his subject texts. Furthermore, Calder writes with an insightful enthusiasm for his subjects that is infectious.

The choices of text contain both the expected and the surprising. It is on works that have been well-trodden by previous literary critics that Calder displays his ability to engage afresh with his subjects. Katherine Mansfield (whose works have provided literary scholars with what approaches an international publishing industry) tempts jaded palates for a fresh taste of suburban Karori, served alongside accounts of Frank Sargeson’s Takapuna and Maurice Gee’s ‘Loomis’. Even Alan Mulgan’s Man Alone – that most dismal of New Zealand classics – is completely revived through a discussion of the influence of the Western genre.

In Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914 (2006), Stafford and Williams read eight authors and used that as the basis of some assumptions on an entire era of literature, disappointingly failing to come to terms with the importance, necessary awkwardness and contradictions of that most interesting period of emergent literary nationhood. In The Settler’s Plot Calder crosses over similar early authorial territory, but comes to some new conclusions.

His first and most important realisation is that New Zealand environment and literature, from any era, are inseparable. It’s an obvious point perhaps, but one that literary analysts have often skirted around. Calder’s second important point is that non-fiction writing is as relevant a form of literature as poetry, fiction and drama: Failure to recognise this has been ‘the main reason why our nineteenth century literature has sometimes seemed so impoverished.’ To this end Calder includes a chapter on Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira; a transitional record of breaking in the land both as an improvement and as a desecration – a contradiction that lies at the heart of understanding early New Zealand culture and literature. Other non-fiction works on the theme of landscape discussed include Blanche Baughan’s 1900s tourist travelogues, alongside an appraisal of a tourism documentary hosted by Helen Clark. This leads to Calder’s third realisation – that individual authors will find individual meanings in alien or familiar landscapes. Their interpretations are not expected to be coherent or cohesive and are often even self-contradictory. This strange diversity is what makes up the rich history of New Zealand’s Pākehā settlement and its literature.

The Settler’s Plot might be described as a gallery of landscape paintings and portraits, displayed in a seemingly haphazard manner ranging from historic curios to contemporary works and of various sizes and grandeur. Browsing among the works viewers will find much to interest, suggestive connections and insights, ideas that appeal and things to take away, inviting return visits.


[1] Julian is a co-editor and book reviewer for ENNZ.

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REVIEW: Seeds of Empire, The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Tom Brooking & Eric Pawson, Seeds of Empire, The Environmental Transformation of New Zealand, L.B. Tauris, London, New York, 2010, 256 pp., ISBN 978-1845 117979. 

David Young 

This is a bold venture with a bold title and an even bolder subtitle, one in a series of such books examining “how and why our environment changes”. Supported by a Marsden Grant, its editors have commissioned a strong group of contributors from the three South Island universities to develop this enterprise, including besides themselves: Paul Star, Vaughan Wood, Peter Holland, Jim McAloon, Robert Peden and Jim Williams.

Written with an international academic teaching audience in mind, each essay sets out its intentions in an introduction and then follows its analysis with a formal conclusion. While essays are pithy and spare, together a wide range of topics is covered, so that the overall effect is of discursiveness, but with a relentlessly sharp, schematic focus chapter by chapter. Seeds of Empire begins with the naturalization of grasses in a land previously of wetlands, forests and tussocks that had evolved largely for anything but what was to come – ruminants and large mammals. The book then seeks to explain how through experiment and trial and error, settlers began to develop grass seed that suited a range of the soils and conditions that New Zealand experiences, as well as the animals that they introduced.

Settlers’ first discovery was that once forests had been felled and fired, the flush in the nutrient-rich ashes lasted no more than a few seasons. Then came the quest for permanent pasture, and hence the nation’s Faustian bargain with guano began. This was imported first from Peru, we learn, as early as 1854. It rapidly became an addiction from which few farmers even nearly 160 years later – and to the ruin of Nauru – have yet recovered. (The book provides a graph of the rising demand for artificial fertilizers from 1890 to 2000. Our productivity from it is described in a fleeting reference from Samoan historian, Damon Salesa  as yet another iteration of colonization.)

For those of us accustomed to what are now almost monthly pleas from the environmental lobby for the dairying industry to internalize its costs it may be of interest to learn that nutrient accounting was espoused – in another on the hoof reference – by the versatile German chemist Justus von Leibig in a publication in 1845. “Nevertheless, imported guano and rock phosphate came at a cost to producer and consumer alike, and it was several decades before the true cost to the New Zealand environment was recognized.” This dates from 1891, from the polymath Sir James Hector.

In some ways little has changed. Some farmers welcomed the addition of science, others pooh-poohed it. Getting the balance right between practicality and where the data led was the trick, as was noted by visiting writer Andre Seigfried, a geographer and political commentator, who visited New Zealand in the early 1900s

Seeds of Empire recounts the nation’s never-ending quest to perfect a product that will satisfy a market; what the sadly now disbanded Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Quality Management organisation used to call “plough to plate” marketing and later ‘plate-to-plough.’  It is a quest that is, of course, eternal. The surprise is that the systematics of improvement began so long ago. The model employed in this book’s research inevitably uses the popular core-periphery paradigm, but it refines this in adopting a model of mobility, network and web which implies feedback loops, with consequential and continuing refinements and contributions from both core and periphery.

The interactive, on-going reciprocal nature of the relationship has been closely drawn by Jim McAloon in his chapter on mobilizing capital and trade. Wool from Australasia got on the international map by 1876, at the Philadelphia Exhibition; by the 1890s the intensification of “the refrigerated economy” saw a shift from private to state provision of advice on grassland development.

Once the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was established in 1926 there was an overemphasis on what was termed the ‘grasslands revolution’ led by the indomitable Bruce Levy, and one driven by plant genetics more than plant ecology. Influenced by British ideas, this approach took no account of native vegetation. It spanned the country in ways that may have restricted a more diverse and heterodox agriculture. It has taken most of us a long time to make an indigenous response to that.

Since the arguments are spare and evidence is necessarily highly selective, one reads this book wanting more. It is a book more fully understood by a reading of its complement from the same editors, Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Where might future lines of enquiry fall? Contributor Vaughan Wood is working on a book on Akaroa cockfoot grass. One could imagine, using this model, a Ph.D. or two more falling out of the multiple interests of the grasslands experimenters of the past 100 years. Potential revised biographies also include those of: James Wilson (forestry), Herbert Guthrie-Smith (conservation), Frederick Hilgendorf and James Grigg.

This is proudly a South Island enterprise, and just occasionally, this emphasis shows through as a mild limitation. For instance, James Wilson (one of the most innovative and energetic of all the late Victorian, early 20th century farmers, who rose to Cabinet, and as a ‘wise use’ farm forester was influential in the formation of  the Forest Service) is described as living ‘in the Manawatu’. Now, for all those who live south of the Waitaki River, it is worth remembering that the Rangitikei River is just as important a divide in the North Island, separating the Manawatu and the Rangitikei – but the still significantly Scots community who live to the north of that river just don’t make the same kind of fuss about it as do their southern cousins. A small matter, I know, but not the only loose caption.

My only other concern is that the title’s tag-line, ‘the environmental transformation of NZ’ is not entirely accurate. Pawson and Brooking’s previous collaboration, Environmental Histories of New Zealand might more easily have carried such a catchline. Arable farming, forestry, even wine and orcharding, are not the focus of this book, although it does show for some decades into colonisation that a future rooted in grasslands was by no means a certainty. So ‘The grasslands transformation of New Zealand’ I feel might have served this book better, because it is more concerned with grasses and the science of what varieties best grew and provided most feed. It’s what the authors like to refer to as addressing “the silences of grass” (a slightly odd reference to its long unfurrowed academic history).

Nor is this a narrative history – geographers and economists play too big a part in it for that! But what those contributors bring is something else. For example, the chapter on “Learning about the environment”, by Peter Holland, with its discussions on how Pākehā learnt from Māori, contains a marvellous diagram displaying how the vocabulary of Joseph Greenwood, a Banks Peninsular settler, changed in his diary between 1844 and 1847 as he became more familiar with the weather. This chapter, too, is tantalizing in its brevity, and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. Indeed, Environmental Histories’ first chapter by Atholl Anderson on the Māori colonisation of New Zealand, would greatly amplify a reading of this chapter, as would Geoff’s Park’s chapter on swamps in that same volume in regard to some later chapters in Seeds of Empire.

While attractively produced, with a clever cover image and excellent tables and graphs, drawings of seeds, this book is selling online for $151.95 (AUS), $174.95 (NZ). A useful, impressively researched text, it seems a great pity therefore that it is unlikely to reach anyone other than an academic audience.

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REVIEW: Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Gavin McLean & Tim Shoebridge, Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2010, 192pp., ISBN 978 1 877372 82 7. 

Ondine Godtschalk

In recent years, New Zealand has dealt with a number of highly publicised biosecurity breaches, perhaps none capturing the public imagination more than didymo, with its evocative moniker rock snot. But, as Gavin McLean and Tim Shoebridge’s Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border demonstrates, New Zealand has a long history of battling to keep pests and pestilences from plaguing its shores. Commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Biosecurity New Zealand (MAFBNZ), and produced by the History Group of the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, Quarantine! offers a detailed account of New Zealand’s regulatory and administrative approach to biosecurity since 1840, tracing the development of one of the world’s most stringent and highly-regarded biosecurity control systems.

Quarantine! is mostly concerned with New Zealand’s external borders, and the measures adopted to patrol the country’s sea and air ports. As the authors’ acknowledge, ‘internal borders’ also play a role in biosecurity management, but all topics need to be confined to be manageable. The bulk of the book focuses on plant and animal quarantine, after an initial chapter on human quarantine. In this first chapter, McLean and Shoebridge provide an informative overview of pre-1939 quarantine practices, adopted to manage the flurry of potentially disease-carrying humans arriving on passenger ships. They canvas attempts to ‘pre-screen’ immigrants before they boarded ships in England, and the establishment—and subsequent disestablishment—of quarantine islands near New Zealand’s main ports, enlivening their narrative with particular accounts of ‘diseased’ ships, and tales of occasional passenger rebellion in the face of detention in quarantine.

The book’s emphasis on New Zealand’s response to various threats at its border means the more complicated aspects of quarantine history—quarantine as a means to control or exclude sections of society considered undesirable for reasons beyond risk to public health—are underexplored: less desirable classes and races wishing to immigrate to New Zealand were subject to greater scrutiny, while debates around quarantine legislation inevitably evoked racist tones in attempts to ‘protect’ New Zealand from the ‘yellow peril’. Also missing are references to promotional literature which flew in the face of quarantine and contagionist concerns by advertising New Zealand’s benevolent climate as an immigration attractor and potential palliative for those looking to recover their health.[1] Finally, given the book’s all-encompassing title, I would have liked the authors to revisit the subject of human quarantine in a later chapter, to touch on contemporary challenges – especially in the wake of SARS and swine flu –  although I accept this may have taken the book a little beyond its history of MAFBNZ ambit.

The remaining chapters, divided chronologically, trace the changing dynamics of animal and plant quarantine in New Zealand. While environmental historians have paid plenty of attention to the plants and animals that have crossed our borders, less attention has been given to the role of biosecurity in helping New Zealand protect its environment and the industries that depend on it – both the agrarian sector and, more recently, the tourist benefit derived from the country’s indigenous flora and fauna. Biosecurity therefore has long been an essential plank in helping the country maintain its viability and identity, although it has not always been an easy task as Quarantine! makes apparent. As the authors note, Department of Agriculture biologist Thomas Kirk thundered in 1895 that ‘at the present time our ports are open for the introduction of every abomination’ and he charged as unpatriotic colonists who took biosecurity risks and therefore put personal profit ahead of the interests of the wider community.[2] With the establishment of fumigation sheds around the country by 1899, quarantine efforts received a significant boost from whence, as suggested by the main thrust of the book’s narrative, the quest to police our borders has been a continuous but mostly successful struggle in the face of ever changing challenges.

McLean and Shoebridge point to the rise in aviation as one of the biggest challenges for border control. While shipping improvements reduced travel times and therefore increased some pests’ chances of surviving the journey (containerization in the 1970s provided a particularly hospitable environment), the start of trans-Tasman and trans-Pacific air flights in 1940 posed a new raft of challenges. Insects, most worryingly the malaria-carrying anopheline mosquito, could survive air flight, and from 1951, aircraft spraying was introduced. Such fears prompted the Department of Health to issue a poster targeting tourists, rather unfortunately headed “Not Welcome in New Zealand”. While the poster went on to explain that malaria and mosquitoes were the unwanted visitors, the Tourist and Publicity Department ensured the poster was modified before too many tourists took offence. Anecdotes such as this scattered throughout the book enliven what could otherwise be a rather dry account of regulatory and administrative change.

Through the lens of plant and animal quarantine we glimpse parallel histories of transportation, technology, science, gendered labour relations and professionalization in New Zealand. For example, McLean and Shoebridge draw on oral histories to profile the work of quarantine officers themselves, highlighting the shift from a male-dominated workplace comprising men from farming backgrounds to an environment requiring tertiary training in sciences, bolstered by internal training and examination. In an all too familiar theme, as women began to join the service from the late 1960s, the authors show how they had to prove themselves in ways that men did not and, while supported by senior staff, they faced resistance in the field from men unable to accept that women could work in challenging quarantine environments such as on ships.

Elsewhere, the authors highlight how the massive increase in traffic and cargo across our border has demanded the development and use of new technologies and processes. As the feasibility of comprehensive hands-on ‘shake and sniff’ inspection diminished, profiling and risk-analysis methods became the main quarantine management tools. Following a series of biosecurity breaches in the 1990s, including the arrival of the white-spotted tussock moth, an injection of funding enabled the introduction of the detector dog programme—leading to the now common sight of dogs inspecting passenger luggage at airports—and the widespread introduction of x-ray machines.

While mostly national in focus, Quarantine! also highlights the way international frameworks increasingly define national responses to issues and problems, particularly when they might impinge upon trade. Increased global management of quarantine/biosecurity requires New Zealand to abide by a number of international regulations, including the 1994 Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures Agreement which lays out conditions for countries to negotiate quarantine measures whilst minimising trade restrictions. As McLean and Shoebridge note, such requirements place added pressure on quarantine administration by essentially removing the option of a “zero-risk” approach. The fine line between necessary biosecurity control and the use of such measures for trade protection is an on-going debate, evidenced by New Zealand’s long-running battle with Australia over its ban on New Zealand pip fruit because of fireblight.

The friction between environmental, scientific, policy and trade imperatives is also evident in the final chapter’s discussion of quarantine after deregulation, tariff removal and the public-sector reforms of the 1980s. More open market access prompted an increase in fruit and vegetable imports, along with other high-risk biosecurity items such as cars, while the shift to a user pays model and the introduction of instant fines for passengers carrying biosecurity risk items changed the nature of quarantine administration. Not all the changes have been welcomed: tighter controls at airports prompted a backlash from those who felt harassed compared to the treatment they received in other countries, while the inspection of VIPs’ baggage caused the odd diplomatic stoush. And in a back-to-the-future moment, McLean and Shoebridge detail how pre-screening in country of origin has been reintroduced, but this time for produce and products rather than people.

Quarantine! is a nicely presented and colourful book, and the care and attention over its appearance enhances its accessibility. Generously illustrated, the text makes good use of cutaway boxes to provide informative asides or biographies of key figures in a way that does not interrupt the main narrative. However, the insertion of a two-page profile of ex-quarantine officer Jenny Lynch at the conclusion of the final chapter does make for a slightly unusual end point. Although well-footnoted, the omission of a bibliography/reference list, or at least a further reading list, is perhaps unfortunate, given the book’s likely appeal to school students. Unfortunately the endnotes for the Prologue appear to have been unintentionally omitted: hopefully this oversight can be corrected in any subsequent reprintings.

All up, Quarantine! provides an informative and accessible account of quarantine administration in New Zealand and would make a good reference text for anyone embarking on research that touches on biosecurity in New Zealand. And as a record of public history, Quarantine! would provide an excellent resource, and enriching context, for anyone working in this area of government.


[1] Linda Bryder, ‘“A Health Resort for Consumptives”: Tuberculosis and Immigration to New Zealand, 1880 – 1914, Medical History, 1996, 40, pp. 453-471. Significant work has been undertaken in Australia on the ways quarantine was used to bolster a ‘white Australia’, see for example Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

[2] Department of Agriculture Annual Report, 1895, p. 105, quoted in Gavin McLean and Tim Shoebridge, Quarantine! Protecting New Zealand at the Border (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2010), p. 48.

 

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REVIEW: Inspirational Gardens of New Zealand

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Kristin Lammerting, photography by Ferdinand Graf von Luckner, Inspirational Gardens of New Zealand, Penguin Books: Auckland, 2010, 228pp. ISBN 9780670074785. 

Stuart Read 

This book looks great on first glance. If you picked it up off a bookshop shelf and flicked through, von Luckner’s photography alone would start you thinking, “I should buy this”.

Perhaps that’s symptomatic of what in recent decades garden books have become. Cook books of my mother’s era were workaday things, with colour photographs. They were mostly small format and had pages heavy with text. Cookbooks, like garden books, have become a phenomenon, with rising standards of photography, typesetting, books-as-seductive ‘must-haves’, often regardless of whether they have any meaningful content. Quite collectable for those who never cook: are there similarly garden books for lounge-chair non-gardeners?

I suppose garden selections depend a great deal on the author’s contacts and extent of travel: how well do they know a country?; can they convince owners to ‘share’? Some gardeners are proud to show off, others shrink and value privacy above all else.

It’s interesting to flick through Lammerting’s book and to contrast it with Derek Fell’s Great Gardens of New Zealand (2003), Mary Burnard’s The New Garden Heritage of New Zealand (1990) or Barbara Matthews’ Gardens of New Zealand (1983/8). Contrast helps to flesh out the trend: and that trend is less and less text (and history), and larger and larger images – even when a selection of the same gardens bobs up in each survey. Perhaps the differences in selections say more. Will a long-resident Kiwi make a clearer or muddier survey of what makes Kiwi gardens ‘tick’, to convey their essence? Will a newcomer/outsider have a clearer view unclouded by local loyalties, small-town and bloodline ties? There are merits either way. It’s not easy to pinpoint what makes a New Zealand garden unique. It may be easier to say what makes it inspirational. Inspiration in the owners or creators of course can differ from inspiration given to a visitor – and varies with their familiarity and frequency.

I wanted to like this book more than I ended up doing. Dipping in and out of it (another modern trend with book production, targeting and time-poor buyers/owners) is fine, a brush over each garden gives an idea of its character, place and the intent of the creator(s). A lingering leaves one aware of the ‘glissando’ approach that seems the book’s strength and its failing. Not much depth is given, or can be, in such a format and product.

In Inspirational Gardens, twenty-seven gardens are featured from north to south. Some are old but most quite young – 10 to 30 years seems the more common time span covered. Statistically, we buy and sell homes every 4-6 years so perhaps this is a long time span? But as someone who often finds gardens the more inspiring the older (and less titivated) they are, I beg to differ.

The book leads you to conclude that New Zealand gardeners are still taking inspiration from European gardens, albeit transplanted into and onto Antipodean landscapes. A good acid test for any purportedly ‘national’ garden survey is how many of them have native plants in them and how are these treated. This is very telling of ‘bedding down’ in a landscape; putting down roots beyond the first few generations of migration, ‘camping’ and ‘settling’, the process of mental and physical embedding, belonging. By this I don’t mean ‘native-only’: but it is instructive to focus on the few such shown.

The text is ‘coffee table’ and saccharine in tone – laced with adjectives like ‘stunning’, ‘breathtaking’ – not that New Zealand landscapes aren’t, but over-use can quickly diminish their power or credibility. Lammerting describes the landscapes as ‘endless’, something risible to a Kiwi long-residing in Australia. New Zealand’s landscapes might be big and seemingly ‘empty’ to a European used to paucity of scale and density of settlement, but hardly ‘endless’. What about Africa’s, America’s or Russia’s plains?

Sloppy botanical naming and captioning let this book down. It’s hard to get right every time but for the book’s price it should be better. Butler Point’s ‘manuka’ trunks shown on p.9 are clearly kanuka to be that tall! It’s a garden book but barely two images show anything of Butler Point’s historic buildings – a great pity. Captions such as those on pp.10-11 point up imported ornaments yet omit to ‘locate’ them in the South Pacific. The New Zealand cabbage tree (p.10) and New Zealand kawakawa (p.11) go unmentioned. If I were a foreigner buying this it’s exactly such plants I’d want identified. English buyers gaga over New Zealand flax cultivars might be delighted to learn more of our plants. Captions like that on p.12 mentions daisies where none are anywhere in view, whereas the ‘lichen’ shot on p.15 makes no mention of the New Zealand tui perched mid-shot: why?

Escapism and conjuring up ‘somewhere else’ (from New Zealand!) seem common here. Lammerting’s PalmCo garden in Kerikeri is described as “South Sea/Pacific”, yet the plants shown are mostly Californian desert fan palms, Canary Island dragon trees, South African birds of paradise flowers, Central/South American in origin. Does ‘look’ or ‘theatre’ over-ride accuracy: who cares where the effect comes from? Many a Hollywood Tarzan movie shot inside a warehouse in California never got any closer to an African jungle than the local pot plant shop – does it matter in a garden book? On p.23 is the first of several mentions of Gardens of (Inter/)National Significance, and the New Zealand Gardens Trust. I am suspicious of the vaunted claims of this system. It seems heavily weighted towards ‘feature’ gardens open to visit, often ‘commercial’ in focus and presentation. Of course visiting gardens is a major popular pastime and pleasure. This phenomenon is nothing new: Vauxhall Gardens in London’s suburbs or Caserta’s palace grounds near Naples offer 17th and 18th century equivalents: what bothers me are the criteria – judged by whom for whom. And the youth of the chosen gardens. Most date from the early 1990s, some after 2005, and surely all of which are too young to be nationally significant. And their quantity?  I wonder how many can be of ‘national significance’ before the term becomes a cliché. Would ‘regional’ be more honest /less marketable? Is the focus more on ‘show’, ‘surface appeal’ or ‘makeover’ than sustainability, endurance and soul? Should it be?

‘Chinaberry’ on p.29 might be more widely known here as white cedar or Persian lilac or Indian bead tree. ‘Ixia viridiflora’ on p.30 is lime green: the lilac/pink one shown is I. flexuosa. Its home, Woodbridge, is claimed to be a New Zealand garden, large and with a ‘free spirit’, yet noting its owners annually travel overseas and bring ideas home with them, it seems derivative, with few New Zealand plants bar tree ferns and renga renga lilies. It could be anywhere, in England’s south, South Africa, south-eastern Australia?

Ted Smyth’s name changes from the title on p.36 to column two: now he’s Tom! He of course deserves inclusion here as a notable modernist and minimalist, much copied. Perhaps these are less gardens than wealthy stage sets but they are no less marvellous for that. He seems also genuinely curious about and reflective on the landscapes he works in: with Auckland’s volcanic scoria, boulders and plants always featured or somewhere in view, along with a few favoured exotics: aloes, bromeliads, aeoniums. Note that spelling, the italicised “Bromelia” (p.38) doesn’t exist: these are Alcantarea or Vriesia sp. I wonder if the kaitaki stones on p.38 should be ‘kaitiaki stones’ – i.e. guardians, or is their origin Kaitaki? I love the irrelevant p.39 mention of stones worn smooth by the sea, “like those found in the Seychelles”. Perhaps the author’s a regular there – stones on any sea coast are sea-worn! I think it open to challenge that Smyth is the ‘founder’ of modern garden design in New Zealand: he perhaps founded minimalist garden design, quite a different thing. What about modernists such as Alfred Tschopp, Odo Strewe (publishing in magazines) and Anna Plischke producing modern gardens in the 1950s? All were influential two decades before Smyth. Poor history perhaps, but good myth-making!

Ayrlies always shows up in such surveys. What a pity that one of its highlighted plants is the Cocos Island/Queen palms over the pool (p.43). This species is a serious environmental weed in Sydney and I wager is getting into South and West Auckland bush as easily. There are far better palms to feature in such a prominent, visited and over-published, location. The yellow candelabra primulas above are in fact P.heladoxa: the caption’s P.bulleyana is apricot. The ‘lime green cypresses’ (p.47) seem far more like golden honey locust (Gleditsia) or black locust (Robinia) in form and colour than any cypress. The ‘Bush Noon’ (p.48) would be a more helpful caption if it added ‘kangaroo paw’.

Trudy Crerar’s formal row of titoki trees in giant planter pots are the best thing in her garden (pp.52-3), yet their name is New Zealand ash, not ‘NZ oak’: the leaves are pinnate like an ash. And Lomandra x ‘Tanika’ is a matt rush, not a grass. Again sloppy captioning won’t help keen gardeners find the right plant if they want to emulate some of these ideas. This garden is of interest, being basically urban and formal but making use of native plants. Perhaps there should be more of this in New Zealand’s gardens as a whole?

Mark Read’s prize-winning Takapuna garden (p.57) is intriguing yet poorly described. If its planting at the front and lining the drive ‘incorporates it into the surrounding environment’, this is not borne out by the photographs, which show a high grey cement wall that obscures the house/surrounding environment. Text and images seem at odds here, which is unfortunate.

New Zealand is one of the great rhododendron-growing climates in the world and Hollard Gardens (established, 1927) and Pukeiti (established, 1951) feature this genus, in two of the book’s oldest gardens. Sadly no image actually shows Hollard Gardens, an inexplicable omission. Couldn’t one of the loving close-ups of “rhodos” been substituted for a landscape shot of Hollard’s?

One of the best gardens in the book for me is Te Kainga Marire in New Plymouth: all native, rich in ‘bush feel’, texture and layering – beckoning exploration. Yet again poor botany lets down its captions: ‘ponga’ trunks (p.74) are in fact wheki ponga (Dicksonia spp. not Cyathea) with quite distinct ‘bark’ effects. This may not matter to a European but to an Antipodean or someone trying to grow wheki ponga, the former is far hardier than the latter. Southern English gardens such as Heligan can keep dicksonias alive. Accuracy matters. Cyathea medullaris (mamaku) is shown with its larger fronds (top right p.74 and ditto p.75) yet the distinction is not made – again, a pity. The standout plant Xeronema’s home on the Poor Knights Islands (p.76) is to, not ‘in’, the north of New Zealand – bad grammar.

I think it sad that the Richmond Garden in Carterton is vaunted as being internationally significant – it’s hardly Versailles, Schönbrunn, Studley Royal or Aranjuez, all formal gardens listed on the World Heritage List. Perhaps the New Zealand Gardens Trust thinks it needn’t convince anyone but itself of such stature? The garden seems wholly derivative – a kind of ‘House & Garden’ lift – the oeuvre of undoubtedly lucrative and successful garden ‘designers’ such as Paul Bangay (Australia), Russel Page (UK/Europe), but ‘New Zealand’? More like a stage set from France or Italy dropped in and around a New Zealand house. I can’t make out a single native plant – the water at least is local. Odd but undoubtedly the garden of an architect’s daughter and a mathematician: and good on them, having fun! How much more exciting would this be if the pleached hedges were Nothofagus sp. and the box balls and cubes were made of Gaultheria, Coprosma, Lophomyrtus – move over, France! Of course even the captions get it wrong – fanned hedges are of beech, not ‘beach’!

Assisi Gardens, near Masterton, is full of Echium pininniana, (not ‘pinnifolium’ – p.90) and Viper’s bugloss is actually Echium vulgare, a lower weedy species, quite different. At least they’re playing with native hedges (Corokia sp., p.93) – bravo! Spiky combinations of flax, grasses and echiums work very well here. And animate in the constant winds no doubt.

Woollaston Estates’ winery with its green rooves (not as stated ‘roofs’) of tussock seems eminently well-grounded in a sea of grasses, though contrasting with bright green paddocks beyond! It’s good to see an industrial building trying to fit into its landscape and using all-native plants to do so. More of these would be inspirational indeed. No doubt the insulation value of an earth roof on a winery building makes good economic and thermal sense too.

Lammerting’s lack of research again shows on p.100’s claim that wine has only been grown and pressed professionally for a few decades in New Zealand – rot: perhaps ‘on an industrial scale’ might be true. James Busby’s vineyards in Waitangi and Northland in the 1830s; the Reverend Samuel Marsden’s in Kerikeri from 1819 and the French (Lavaud), Monte in Otago from the 1860s offer mockery of this ‘fact’ – the second wave of wineries and perhaps widespread export date from the ‘Dalmatians’ and 1970s on, but not the first.

Hortensia, Blenheim’s gazebo, is claimed to be French (like its owners), yet isn’t. ‘Gazebo’ isn’t the French word for ‘beautiful view’ – that is ‘belle vue’. Gazebo, the word, has disputed origins (likely Middle-English/Latin, corrupted) though these structures are built for views. My French dictionary says gaze means ‘gauze’, actually! P.114-5’s captioned ‘Acacia podalyriifolia’ is in fact Podalyria calyptrata, a pea bush from South Africa, not wattle.  Last time I knew the plural of chateau was chateaux (cf ‘chateaus’, p.123) – Madame’s French seems lacking for someone German!

A highlight for me is Jimma’s garden by the sea at Seddon (Marlborough). To my expatriate eyes, this is ‘stunning’. Striking in its sensitivity to the wind-blown, salty yet beautiful coastal views and its all-native (bar the golden lupins redolent of coastal dunes) plants and rolling drifts of planting seem well-adapted and settled: yet it only dates from 2000. The house has a green roof and nestles into its surrounds. Only a folly skylight pokes up above the green and gold waves. Restraint and ‘fit’ seem well-thought through and likely to survive, far more so than some ‘transplanted Sissinghurst/Versailles’. I found his grove of upright lollipop ngaios amazingly formal. Either he’s pruning them up on straight trunks or they’re something else, like a Pseudopanax: the crowns are so marvellously tight they seem far from ‘shaggy/irregular’ ngaios. Again why can’t natives be pruned, like a marvellous parallel ‘sand dune’ garden on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula, Fiona Brockhoff’s Karkalla is pruning local she oak (Casuarina glauca) into lollipops on poles/half spheres on ground. She clearly has had great fun and in its way, exactly what the wind does to them in such situations: why ever not!?

Similarly Ralf Kruger’s Queenstown gardens seem well-adapted to their adopted landscape. He’s clearly been growing and studying NZ plants for decades in Germany before migrating. Perhaps, too, Otago’s dramatic montane landscapes are not such a change of ‘scenery’ for high-altitude Germans, Austrians, French or Swiss? His work deserves wider coverage. He appears to have a real feel (like Jimma) for the landscapes and plants he has adopted. A certain boldness and largeness of scale fits such large scale settings very well, in my view.

Ohinetahi (1970+) bobs up time and again in such books, deservedly so. Gardening on a volcanic rim and not far from fault lines brings rather more chaos to the evident order here than perhaps has been its experience to date. Sissinghurst-transplanted the garden plane may be, but Kent has nothing like a caldera as backdrop, nor the limpid mud-silt-blue of Lyttelton Harbour as backdrop. Such advantages! Again an architect’s garden and it shows. Great to see Miles Warren reworking it into bolder reds: way too much cream in such situations! Nice too to see plain concrete block used so elegantly (he has for decades), an overlooked very ‘kiwi’ everyday material worth elevation. But England holds swain: a kowhai, single cabbage tree (and some wonderful ‘lines’ of Hebe topiara) seem the only natives to have ‘jumped the fence’. Bit more reworking would make it sing stronger. Libocedrus, Plagianthus,  Hoheria, totara and Coprosma could replace yew, hornbeam, beech and box – surely?

Sloppy history again appears in Lammerting’s discussion of Akaroa’s Tree Crop Farm. It wasn’t Capability Brown who ‘jumped the fence and saw all nature as a garden’. It was William Kent, his competitor. Brown demolished the fences altogether and brought grass and sheep up to the house’s windows.

Hamilton Gardens’ history guidebook claims that New Zealand gardens are getting more conservative with time. This seems borne out by many of the selections in this book, such as the Trott’s garden in Ashburton (p.172). Isn’t a knot garden being ‘a natural work of art’ a tautology? A ‘work of art’ is by definition ‘art-ificial – something made cf. ‘natural’ – even if the ingredients themselves are living, natural plants. And I think it fairer to say knot gardens were not ‘rediscovered’ in the 20th century. They’d been lovingly replanted in some instances in each century since the middle ages, but were popularly revived in the 20th.

The other highlight for me is Broadfields near Christchurch – reinvented European formality but using New Zealand plants instead – boldly and well: with totara hedges, native shrubs replacing herbaceous border plants… Makes others trying to ‘do formal’ look very formulaic. Not to knock them: they’re done beautifully – but less ‘inspirational’ than this is. Pity p.194’s formal vista isn’t centred on the power pole over the fence and hedge (can’t hide it. Perhaps in time those kauri trees will!) Wonderful that this is an ‘allotment’ garden with no house either. It is intriguingly silent on what David Hobbs’ wife thinks of it all. Does she want flowers? Or does she enjoy having time free to herself!?

Larnach’s Castle garden also is a regular flag-bearer for New Zealand gardens (and buildings), and with ample justification. This is gardening (heritage ‘rescue’ and business-running) with verve and aplomb. And great to see it under snow. But here small things let the text down: ‘Neo-Gothic’ is less accurate than Italianate-Gothic for the house. European trees and shrubs are not the only things planted near the castle. Two cabbage trees flank its front steps, a rimu grows close to its northern side and several large native beech are to its south (shown on p.212 and labelled ‘cedars’!) and a large northern rata is on its northern lawn not far from the house. Are these not all native trees? I’d question whether the glass-topped cupola, box parterre (a very French word/concept) and border are in fact ‘British’ style par excellence. Far more continental (Franco/Italo/Indian) in effect and eclecticism, I would say. If that’s British, so be it. Interesting that Margaret Barker is growing totara-clipped hedges and planting a great number of native plants in the gardens now – in its own ‘transplanted exotic’ way, the castle is innovating. Its south-Pacific garden full of Gondwanaland-shared plants between fragmented continents is one of the absolute highlights of this place. It’s worth a visit alone.

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Conference Review: ‘Nature, Empire and Power’

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

Conference Review: ‘Nature, Empire and Power’, University of Waikato, Hamilton, 9-10 December

Ruth Morgan

In December 2010, scholars of environmental history, history of science, geography, and literature convened at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand, to explore the themes of nature, science, and power in the British Empire. The papers and conversations held during the two-day symposium revealed myriad of ways in which people have historically made sense of place and the impact of place on people in settler societies.

The enormous area that the Australasian and Pacific regions cover was highlighted through a study of the island groups of Hawai’i and Aoetearoa’, in which David Young explored the role of the natural environment in shaping cultural practices. He suggested that the migration of peoples from eastern Polynesia to the two archipelagos, where the climate and resource abundance significantly diverged, might account for some of the subsequent differences in their mythology and language, customs, and use of water.  These relationships with water, he argued, were disrupted and irrevocably altered with the European colonisation of these islands.

It is difficult to overstate the scale of the transformations that colonisation, mass migration and the spread of Western ideas wrought upon other cultures and ‘natural’ environments, particularly from the eighteenth century. As Joseph Lawson explained, the influence of Western agronomy extended even to the newly conquered territories of northern and western China during the Qing dynasty. Symposium convenor James Beattie related how, in the nineteenth century, Chinese from Guangdong moved moved backwards and forwards from their home to New Zealand, establishing networks of environmental exchange and imposing their belief-systems on New Zealand’s environment. Whether they were of Chinese or European-descent, the colonists of New Zealand brought with them a host of beliefs that informed their perceptions of the Antipodean environment and the ways their presence shaped it. In her study of colonial literature, Kirstine Moffatt unravelled the range of different responses of Europeans to the New Zealand environment and its Māori inhabitants. For the Māori of the South Island, European contact led to intermarriage and the advent of missionary activity. Although colonisation brought an end to many traditional practices, Michael Stevens explained that it sustained and strengthened the tītī (muttonbird)harvest, which continues to this day. These findings, which offer similarities with the Australian experience, provide insights into the ways that colonists attempted to make sense of their surrounds and indigenous peoples, and the ways that indigenous peoples responded to colonisation.

Colonial efforts to understand Australasian climates were important in making sense of place and vital to the success of the agrarian enterprise. But the unfamiliar seasons of the colonies stalled the application of agricultural and pastoral practices based on British experiences. The development of an understanding of the New South Wales (NSW) climate at the turn of the nineteenth century was shaped, Claire Fenby argued, by the tension between the colonists’ hopes and the realities they faced. The extremes of drought and floods, the hallmarks of Australia’s extremely variable climate, pushed the settlers to establish reliable water supplies and to explore the plains beyond the Blue Mountains. The capricious climate and its effects on river systems, water supplies and settlements continued to drive colonial efforts to understand the weather. Scientists also had to contend with growing demands to predict the weather and to determine the extent to which colonisation had affected the climate. Emily O’Gorman and Stephen Legg examined the complicated nature of these inquiries in colonial NSW, Victoria, and South Australia as early meteorologists and other ‘experts’ jostled in the press for the authority to dominate scientific discourses on the climate, river flows, and forestry.

These colonial climate knowledges became increasingly professionalised in the twentieth century through the institutionalisation of the meteorological and climatological sciences. Settler understandings of weather and climate were transformed by the creation of extensive networks of observation and data collection, and the use of scientific interpretation and standardised training. Nevertheless, it retained this Western lens of inquiry at the expense of indigenous knowledges. Furthermore, as Chris O’Brien argued, this ongoing application of European meteorological science to the study of Antipodean climates might be inappropriate for depicting the physical realities in question. In tropical Australia at least, western calendrical time imposes a sense of order that misrepresents and impedes understandings of the climatic conditions of the top end. Elsewhere, such as in southwestern Australia, changes in the climate sciences since European colonisation have led to the re-interpretation of regional climatic characteristics and, as a result, to the sustainable limits of land-use and settlement.

Changes to the climate sciences have also been shaped by wider political and economic contexts. Matt Henry provided an insight into the implications of the geopolitical rivalries between the United States and the United Kingdom for the development of meteorological networks in the South Pacific on the eve of the Second World War.  Cooperation between states has also played a significant role in enabling better understanding of regional climates and in developing common approaches to sustainability problems, such as energy use and anthropogenic climate change. Such a regional approach, as Tai Wei Lim and Stephen Nagy explained, is particularly important for areas like the South Pacific. Here, the vast differences of wealth and scientific expertise between countries demand the sharing of resources and knowledge to adapt to, and possibly mitigate, the challenges of environmental change. Perhaps, as David Young suggested, countries in Australasia and the Pacific regions could learn lessons from their first peoples about adaptation to a changing world.

But instead, many scientists, military officials, and ‘visionaries’ have long advocated technological interventions to change the atmosphere and climate for the supposed benefit of humankind. The most recent incarnation of such interventions is the idea of geoengineering. Keynote speaker James R. Fleming (Colby College, USA) outlined just some of these schemes in an overview of his recently published monograph, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (Columbia University Press, 2010). Fleming’s research has uncovered numerous episodes in American history of the desire to change weather conditions, for purposes such as agricultural benefit or military control. But Fleming also found that there were concerned observers who counselled caution. In his paper, he argued that historians have an important role in the current debates about environmental change, by providing a humanities perspective on the issues that continue to challenge policymakers and scientists.

Given the echoes of place-making, science and imperialism throughout the symposium papers, it was fitting that participants enjoyed a tour of the Hamilton Gardens. The Gardens’ Director Dr Peter Sergel revealed the maze-like grounds of the unique botanic gardens and lovingly explained the stories behind some of the showcased landscapes. These gardens were remarkable recreations of far-flung places, from Muromachi Japan to 1950s California, and from the Indian Char Bagh garden to nineteenth century England. Dr Sergel also showed the participants the foundations of the Fantasy Collection and the recently completed Te Parapara Garden.

As the sun dipped below the horizon on the last day of the symposium, the participants unwound over fish and chips, and a friendly match of cross-Tasman backyard cricket. And enthusiasm for future research collaborations continued long after the symposium’s First XI had retired.

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