ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand
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ISSN: 1175-4222 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Volume 9, Number 1, February 2014 2 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 About us ENNZ provides a forum for debate on environmental topics through the acceptance of peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed articles, as well as book and exhibition reviews and postings on upcoming events, including conferences and seminars. Contact If you wish to contribute articles or reviews of exhibitions or books, please contact: Dr. Paul Star, 246 Harington Point Road, RD2 Dunedin 9077, New Zealand. Ph: 03 478 0315 [email protected] Chief editor Dr. Paul Star Founding editor Dr. James Beattie Associate editors Dr. Claire Brennan Dr. Charles Dawson Ondine Godtschalk Dr. Catherine Knight Dr. Julian Kuzma Dr. Matt Morris Dr. Jonathan West Dr. Joanne Whittle 3 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 ENNZ website http://environmentalhistory-au-nz.org/category/ennz Publisher History Programme, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand. Thanks Thanks to Libby Robin and Cameron Muir, both of the Australian National University, and the Fenner School of Environment and Society for hosting this site. ISSN: 1175-4222. 4 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 Contents 5 Editors’ introduction. 7 Neil Clayton, ‘Settlers, politicians and scientists: Environmental anxiety in a New Zealand colony’. 40 James Beattie, ‘Looking for Arcadia: European environmental perception in 1840-1860’. 79 Julian Kuzma, ‘The 1895 snowstorm’. 104 Rachael Egerton, ‘Unconquerable enemy or bountiful resource? A new perspective on the rabbit in Central Otago’. 132 Michael L.S. Bagge, ‘Valuable ally or invading army? The ambivalence of gorse in New Zealand, 1835-1900’. 160 Lee Davidson, ‘Mountain magic: Mountaineering in North- West Otago, 1882-1940’. 192 Matthew D. Polson, ‘Appreciating the indigenous: An examination of changing European perceptions of the environment and peoples of New Britain, 1930–1950’. 5 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 Editors’ introduction The seven articles in this special issue of Environment and Nature in New Zealand were all written between 1989 and 2000 by students at the University of Otago. Five of them are condensations of ‘long essays’ (that is, 20,000 word fourth year research essays) submitted in part fulfillment of the BA (honours) history programme. The remaining two articles (by Neil Clayton and Matthew Polson) are based on dissertations for Otago’s Postgraduate Diploma in Arts. All seven contributions have been selected by Professors Tom Brooking and Judy Bennett as essays from this period which deal with environmental history themes and which remain suitable for presentation to a wider audience. These essays also represent the most concentrated research effort in relation to environmental history of any history department in the country, subsequently extended by masters and PhD theses. The difficult task of rendering down the essays into articles (all about a third of the original length) was undertaken by Neil Clayton. Copies of the original long essays and dissertations are held in the Hocken Collections in Dunedin. Matthew Polson was supervised by Judy Bennett, while Tom Brooking supervised the other six researchers. The articles are arranged here in an order which, as nearly as possible, groups themes together and presents subject matter chronologically. Those by Neil Clayton (1998) and James Beattie (1999) refer to the so-called colonial period (from the 1840s to about the 1860s). They both consider New Zealand (particularly Otago) settlement in terms of nineteenth-century European (and especially Scottish) attitudes to the environment. Julian Kuzma (1999) describes the impact upon Canterbury and Otago settlers of extreme weather events in 1895 – in this case massive snow storms. The articles by Rachael Egerton (1993) and Michael Bagge (2000) are concerned with two ‘problem’ species introduced by European settlers into New Zealand in the nineteenth century – rabbits and gorse – and identify environmental, social and legislative repercussions through to the twentieth century. 6 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 Lee Davidson’s article (1989) describes settlers’ engagement, through mountaineering, with the mountain landscapes of inland Otago, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the article by Matthew Polson (1999) describes the interaction between New Britain’s environment and the successive foreign powers (German, Australian and Japanese) in that part of New Guinea, from 1930 through to 1950. These essays reflect the major concerns of environmental historians in the 1990s by concentrating on settler encounters with environments distinctly different from those of the source countries of European migrants - mainly Britain, but also Scandinavia and Germany. The experiences of Chinese migrants, along with the Irish and Scottish subsets amongst the majority British, have subsequently been investigated more systematically, but the environmental histories of both Dalmatian and Lebanese migrants remain largely unwritten. These essays also concentrate on land, land use, ‘pest’ control and farming. More recently there has been a swing away towards water and the sea, as well as to the harvesting activities of the indigenous Kai Tahu people (southern Maori) and the development and impact of tourism. Local studies continue to be the focus of research but more recent work reflects shifts in the broader concerns of the discipline, including interrogation of gender dynamics in relation to environmental attitudes, the effectiveness (or otherwise) of government attempts at regulation, and the quest for ‘sustainability’. Matthew Polson’s essay foreshadows Judy Bennett’s large-scale study of the environmental impact of the Second World War on the Pacific region, while the New Zealand focused articles influenced the first edition of Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking’s Environmental Histories of New Zealand in significant ways. We would like to express our appreciation of the pioneering, but still relevant and valuable, efforts by these students – several of whom went on to undertake masters and doctoral studies on environmental history topics. Paul Star and Tom Brooking Settlers, politicians and scientists: Environmental anxiety in a New Zealand colony Neil Clayton Anyone who made the decision to emigrate from Britain to New Zealand in the 1840s was, whether they thought about it or not, turning their personal clock back a century or more, to a time when ‘the greatest single flywheel of the economy was the land’. In another sense too, some were reaching back to an ever- receding past, to a time when, they imagined, paternalism was ‘a profoundly important component not only of ideology, but of the actual institutional mediation of social relations.’ And in leaving behind them the industrial environments of Britain, they were each in their various ways, searching for a Virgilian Arcadia, ‘of fields, of cattle and of trees’.1 The Wakefield system of colonisation, out of which grew the first five colonies in New Zealand (at Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, Otago and Canterbury), was grounded in a paternalism which had already ceased to exist in rural Britain.2 Those who wanted to ‘get on’ needed encouragement to ‘get out’, if they were to ensure progress for themselves and their families.3 Selection of emigrants by class provided a ‘proper balance’ between capital and labour. Above all, the allocation of land at a ‘sufficient price’, and George Rennie’s division of it into town, suburban and rural allotments, provided a mechanism for social control.4 In the largely Scottish colony of Otago, with its powerful overlay of religious and educational sentiment, the colony’s leaders intended to use the land as a tool for the maintenance of Free Church ideology. But, from the earliest days, a series of 1 P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1914, 2nd edition, Routledge, London, 1988, p 29; E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Merlin Press, London, 1991, p 24; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, A.A. Knopf, London, 1995, p 516. 2 Thompson, Customs in Common, p 24, Chapter 2, passim. 3 James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, Allen Lane, London, 1996, pp 292-3. 4 Tom Brooking, And Captain of their Souls, Otago Heritage Books, Dunedin, 1984, p 28. 8 ENNZ: Environment and Nature in New Zealand Vol 9, No 1, Feb 2014 tensions emerged between colonial theory and aspiration and the actualities of colonisation, which seems to have gone largely unanticipated by the promoters of the Otago colony.5 The Arcadian ideal, as James Belich has pointed out, ‘was the sturdy yeoman, living self-sufficiently and independently, with his family on his own farm.’6 Stresses were likely to be generated when that goal remained unrealised and land was apparently un- utilised. They were generated too by the land itself, or rather by individual perceptions of it. Landscape, as Simon Schama reminds us, ‘is the work of the mind … it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape.’ Every landscape also carries multiple symbolic meanings ‘which emanate from the values by which people define themselves … Every river is more than just one river. Every rock is more than just one rock.’7 And, as Richard White has noted, for most white migrants ‘nature’ was