Kate van der Drift

To see, know and picture the landscape.

This essay examines different ways of looking at land and waterscapes, and considers the ways New Zealand landscapes have been manipulated by colonisation and industrialisation. There are countless transformed landscapes to draw on as examples, but the focus of this paper is on land and water surfaces that can become one another.

Drainage schemes in Aotearoa New Zealand are responsible for the loss of 85 percent of its wetlands, making it one of the most dramatic cases of draining known anywhere in the world.[1]  The North Island area of Hauraki is one example where the watery fluidity of its natural state has been forced into straight arrangements - geometric fields of drains and ditches.  Floodplains replaced by solid ground. 

Writer and ecological historian Geoff Park describes the history and impact of coastal drainage in this area in Ngā Uruora (The Groves of Life). When James Cook and his Endeavor party arrived in Aotearoa, Hauraki caught their attention - a watery floodplain densely filled with Kahikatea forest - as suitable for transformation and subsequent colonization.[2] Cook, together with Joseph Banks knew the potential of manipulating such a fertile swampland area and transforming it into productive farmland after witnessing drainage of the English Fens in Lincolnshire.[3]  Some of the richest resources of New Zealand were located around the floodplains and estuaries and Māori settlement was often concentrated in those areas. Birds were attracted there for breeding, and native fish spawned in the fresh and seawater.

Many things can be lost in the process of colonization, with its ideology of ‘improvement’ of both land and people.[4] Park describes a condition of erasure and amnesia:

Nothing that meets the eye on a New Zealand coastal plain that has been the subject of a swamp-drainage scheme is yet a century old.  No plant or animal it sees, other than the odd raupō plant or eel in a farm drain, is indigenous. Yet the recognizable combination of trees, pasture, and human structures makes it seem as if perhaps that they are all that was ever there.[5] 

 Manipulated landscapes can be overlooked. It can be difficult to decipher how they were before. Environmental conditions (such as agriculture and infrastructure) become normalized because of this easy forgetting, this not knowing or blindness. In Postmodern Wetlands Rodney Giblett describes swamp drainage as a ‘colonial device for subduing an ostensibly recalcitrant, even rebellious, indigenous population and wetland environment.’[6]  Seen as a mark of civilization, draining swampland contributes to an imperialist sense of place and erasure of history.[7] 

The colonial project was only made possible by sending idealised manipulated depictions of land and waterscapes that were yet to be physically manipulated, back to Britain.[8]  Early paintings depicted lush fields, yet to be drained or cleared. Contemporary representations of the land for tourism and advertising are likewise heavily edited. Barely a leaf is left untouched.  Consumers are used to seeing hyper-real, perfected versions of the land. While we assume that the physical landscape is authentic, these assumptions aren’t so readily made about a photograph of that landscape. In our current era photographs cannot be assumed as the depiction of truth for it is common contemporary understanding that every image has some alteration performed. It is with this critical eye – a critical eye practiced at mistrusting photographs – that the landscape and its current manipulated functions can be questioned.

Wayne Barrar and Mark Adams are two New Zealand photographers that thoughtfully deal with the imprint of New Zealand colonial history on the landscape though image.  Wayne Barrar photographs landscapes that are disrupted and manipulated often by water or natural occurrences. His subjects depict our urge to master the earth and all life upon it.

Barrar describes his projects as considering ‘the contemporary landscape and its modification and the way in which people interact with and re-define nature.’[9] His photographic practice questions whether we can transform the urge to modify and change it, into an understanding and sensitivity to the fragilities of the land.  Mark Adams carefully portrays significant sites allowing the viewer to reexamine culturally loaded scenes. His work is concerned with 'layers of meaning inscribed into the landscape by our culture.’ He says he 'likes to invert the colonial gaze, highlighting the complications of representation’.[10]  A surface view of a landscape image, although never truthful, may be more believable when relationships and history are known.

Specific sites, histories and memories are studied under the broad term of geography.  ‘Experimental Geography’ is a term coined by Trevor Paglen to describe artistic practices related to the analysis of land use. In a 2008 exhibition titled Experimental Geography, curator Nato Thompson describes these investigative practices as ‘a new lens to interpret a growing body of culturally inspired work that deals with human interaction with the land.’[11]  Experimental Geography’s predecessors are artists of the 60’s and 70’s land art movement such as Smithson and Morris and their production of space through land transformation.   Artists within the exhibition explore the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface, creating work that spans a range of topics from everyday experiences through to man-made islands and submerged cities. The ‘production of space’ is integral to the practice of experimental geographies in its assumption that humans and culture produce and in turn are produced by the world around them.[12]  Landscapes are a point of reference in understanding who we are.  They are filled with personal and collective memories and histories. Those histories of specific sites become important to consider to deepen our understandings of the land.  This allows for an engagement with landscape that can conversely transform and construct us. 

*

A drained lake represents an inland landscape of solid ground made from water. Lake Ōmāpere in Northland was partly drained by the Crown to create farmland for servicemen returning from war in the 1920’s.  Now in a degraded state due to nutrient run off from agriculture, Ngāpuhi is requesting it be returned to their kaitiakitanga in order to restore its health and mauri.[13]  In the view of Tangata Whenua the solid ground remains thought of as water and in order to make the polluted lake healthy again, to return the lake to its truth – it needs to be returned to water.[14]

Stephen Turner discusses lake Ōmāpere among other indigenous water bodies in his essay The Truth of Waters, explaining how indigenous waterscapes suggest a different ground of the knowledge of history and place.[15]  ‘Beyond things and bodies, a body of water constitutes a body of truth that is both historicisable and subjectivisable, an object of commitment and faith for those who draw upon it in its more local world, and whose future depends upon it.’[16]  Turner ponders the concept of interior and exterior views of settlement, with the interior view as that of the indigenous.  He counterposes a different sense of place, one that is unknowable by Pākehā as colonialism has ensured a turn inward of indigenous truth.   The truth of a place encompasses that which we can see but also what we can’t know, that which lies below its surface (including its history, ancestry and relationships). Differences between Pākehā and Māori views of the landscape can be drawn through differences in values.

Pākehā have traditionally valued land insofar as its ability to generate material wealth, with a worldview that constructs nature as something external to the individual.[17] Maori value the land as whenua, not as a tradable commodity but more holistically, including its taonga (treasures), mauri (spirit and life force) as well as its interconnected ecology by which they belong and are connected to, rather than belonging to them.  Kaitiakitanga is an obligation to care for the environment for future generations.[18] Paul Moon describes the role:

The job of the kaitiaki (ecological guardian) is to keep the things of Creation safe...For us this does not mean being in charge...it is about knowing the place of the things in this world including your place in this world.[19]

Our awareness of the environment and its interpretation and representation reflects culture and desire. Eric Pawson, and Tom Brooking write in their introduction to Making a New Land: ‘Everything that surrounds us - rural and urban landscapes, coastlines, even the sea - is shaped, traversed and harvested in accordance with cultural imperatives and social needs.’ The inherited Pākehā way of viewing landscape is to look from a distance and to treat it as a separate entity according to its production or aesthetic value. An indigenous worldview sees people having an integrated relationship with nature that includes seas, lands, rivers, mountains, flora, and fauna.[20] A lens of Pākehā aestheticizing distance in seeing and occupying the landscape has proven vastly different to that of Māori and their understanding of belonging to the whenua.

To ‘belong’ to a place involves an intimate relationship to landscape. Jan Bryant’s essay Waterfall ponders themes of water, the image, colonisation and her detached feeling of belonging to a ‘home’. She describes forgotten rivers and waterways, trapped under gridded cities, retaining only eels as life forms from their previous existence, testifying ‘the failure of the early colony to live imaginatively, ecologically, with its new environment.’[21]  She describes water’s intricate, complicated constitution, its shifting courses and slow diversions and trajectories:

Water finds its own way through the mountain rock as a force of gravity (a forceful body), wearing channels and ridges that are memories of ancient and recent movements.  And yet, despite water’s pertinacity, human interference can throw it off its determined path, sending it astray and against its natural destiny, as instrument for “improvement”, farming industry, pleasure.[22]  

Just as water arrives it can also leave. My ancestry includes a history of grandparents arriving to New Zealand via boat, which I think contributes to a point of view as one still from the outside looking in.  This is in contrast to Tangata Whenua, who have an intrinsic feeling of belonging to the land.[23]  Perhaps that is part of the reason Pākehā and some other migratory cultures can associate more readily with a fluid or liquid mentality, one that is less land centered.  It is a contented placelessness, what Bryant describes as a fluid sentiment. 

Just as lake or wetland drainage characterises modernity, wetland restoration can perhaps characterise postmodernity[24] or a liquid modernity.[25]  Huhana Smith describes wetland restoration as a way of thinking ‘fluidly’ around waterways.  ‘The potential of fluid thinking re-imagines peoples belonging to place and reinstates their responsibilities to the land, waterways or wetlands for ecosystems both above and below the surface.’[26]  Fluid thinking can reconnect people to those former abundant resources, with more understanding of their interconnected ecology.

Pacific writer Epeli Hau’ofa introduced a decolonising vision of fluidity in 1994 with his article ‘A Sea of Islands.’ Hau’ofa criticized imperial cartographies that had mapped the pacific as a watery terra nullius with the view of them as ‘islands in a far sea,’ while the Oceanic people saw themselves as a connected ‘sea of islands.’[27]  The first outlook ‘emphasizes dry surfaces in a vast ocean’, while the second view is a ‘more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships.’[28]  By erasing the imaginary colonial mapping of the seascape, Hau’ofa constructs a decolonising discourse around the Oceanic (sea) body.[29] 

A ‘liquid view’ connects the near and far, inside and outside, human and non-human.[30]   This view understands things as inseparable from one another, in fluid contact, while constantly becoming; relationally ‘seeping into each other.’[31] Everything in nature is fluidly connected to everything else and change is constant.

Liquid’s inherent changeability and embodied ideas of transformation and destabilisation have been useful to me as a metaphor and tool.  Water can modify the real landscape or the view of it.  The ability to manipulate images allows the same possibility.  A liquid view or ‘wet ontology’ reflects different perspectives in seeing land and waterscapes. Wet ontology is termed by geographers Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters as encouraging ‘a political ontology that takes its starting point as flows, circulations, and the destabilising immanence of liquid.’[32] Further defining their terminology, Steinber and Peters write:

We propose a wet ontology not merely to endorse the perspective of a world of flows, connections, liquidities and becomings, but also to propose a means by which material and phenomenological distinctiveness can facilitate the reimagining and reenlivening of a world ever on the move.[33]

Land transformation happens through the action of man or naturally due to earth processes. The flow of the tide easily carves and shifts the land over time; it is in constant motion. Water is transformative and manipulative, temporal and mobile; it has the power to transform a place quickly at any moment.  Our ecosystems are also incredibly fragile and interventions into the surface of the earth need to be performed thoughtfully as every decision to manipulate one-thing effects something else.  All elements fluidly exist in relation to one another. 

The materiality of water, its multivalence, can work as metaphor, for it has the ability to transform, shape and cover the land.  It can also mask, erode and inundate, and its transformability into fog, cloud, rain and ice gives it an ability to naturally manipulate and obscure the view of a landscape. Its intrinsic transparency or opacity can both obstruct or let a viewer see through or behind, and allows for an elasticity of perspective. 

*

The default Pākehā way of viewing landscape is to look from a distance and to treat it as ‘picturesque.’  The history of learning to view landscape as picturesque has impacted New Zealand’s development of the 'scenic reserve.’

People have not always made nature into scenery.  During the late eighteenth century, people began to associate scenery with romantic painting and theatre and those arts with the natural landscape.[34]  The term ‘picturesque’, meaning ‘in manner of a picture’, was introduced as an aesthetic ideal to describe the leisurely English experience of ‘viewing’ landscapes.[35]   Travelling for pleasure and to see picturesque scenery was popularised by writer Williams Wordsworth in his books of poetry and guidebooks on the Lake District in England.[36] He wrote, ‘the perception of what has acquired the name of picturesque and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and gradual process of culture.’[37]  It was thought that only ‘refined’ people could appreciate the landscape scene. The appreciation of nature was thought to be a mark of culture not an innate quality but something to be learned. Ruins, forests and wide-open bodies of water such as lakes were appreciated rather than enclosed places such as wooded wetlands.  

Before the invention of photography, the Claude Glass[38] was used as a device for travellers and scenery appreciators, to translate a view of the environment into landscape. Nature would not have become ‘picturesque’ if we had not learned see it in pictorial terms.[39] For it to become scenery one had to believe that it was detached from us – as something separate – as something to be seen from the outside.  It has qualities one would go to the theatre for. Tourists equipped with Claude glasses could look at ‘pictures’ in the same way a modern tourist does with a camera. The landscape was mediated through a frame and the experience was pictorially observed.[40] 

In 1903 the New Zealand government began to recognize the material wealth that could be acquired through tourism and implemented legislation such as ‘The Scenery Preservation Act.’[41] The most beautiful scenes in New Zealand were chosen for their ability to be imagined as paintings and their likelihood to please a traveller’s eye. 1910, the Crown had passed an amendment that allowed them a new power to take any land held by Māori owners that they wanted for scenery-preservation purposes.[42] ‘Scenery’ excluded all human activity apart from tourism, reserving the land solely for visitors rather than their original inhabitants. Colonialism has generally been blind to the fact that those lands have been home for the indigenous and the ‘source of elements essential’ to their existence and wellbeing.[43]

Today’s conceptualisation of the ‘conservation’ estate is to maintain biodiversity by separating humans from indigenous ecology.  Preservation of wild untamed parts of the country are usually restricted to small islands – literally offshore - and a number of small fenced off ‘scenic’ reserves.[44] The colonial policy of creating reserves has left indications of how the country might have appeared naturally.[45] They are in fragments, isolated from one another, uunable to function fully within a wider ecosystem because they are missing some of their essential life sustaining properties.

Creating sublime scenes of‘nature’ rather than integrating living environments into a larger ecology, people haven’t learnt how to best care for indigenous nature. Ecosystems might better be conserved if humans learnt to live within nature, rather than appreciating landscapes from a distance. I suggest decolonisation involves transforming our observing tourist sensibility into one of knowing from the inside, the antithesis of a removed, distanced or outside perspective. 

I cannot claim in my work to be representing indigenous or more deeply historicised perspectives. My position behind the lens to some extent insists on distance. In some ways, this distance is aligned with Pākehā practices of not knowing. So much cannot be communicated through an image, and they cannot help but become romantic documents; framed, obscuring, leaving vistas beyond the edges to the imagination. A reflection on the historical roots of the ‘picturesque’ within New Zealand is useful when thinking about image-based representations of the landscape.

Land and water states are intertwined making up the earths surface. They transform, are manipulated, can be seen, viewed and pictured in different ways.  I cannot possibly see the landscape in the same way as Māori, but I can look at it in a different way to someone passing by.  With acknowledgement of my ancestors and their ways of looking, by asking for justice and restoration in ownership, and in the hope that the lands and their severely degraded native ecosystems be cared for, by foregrounded inclusion of their original kaitiaki, I can view and not know but I can think about ways I would like to see and know and care for these lands and waterscapes in the future.  An image is never truly representative of a place and asks to be questioned.  The surface is always only surface. 

Landscapes reveal how the past produces the present. They nourish us and show us who we are, and who, culturally we have been.  Landscapes live – are in constant flux, like all life systems.  They disappear.  They can be created, but only with great difficulty can they be recreated.[46]

Pākehā imperialist culture has proven itself to have a short sighted and distanced view with little ability to think holistically in regard to the impact of its actions on indigeneity and environmental conditions.  Aotearoa is now in a situation where it needs to spend an excess on conservation.  I wonder how people will look at their land and waterscapes in a century’s time and what they will show future cultures of our present environmental concerns, demands and aspirations.

Endnotes: 

[1] Christine Dann “Losing Ground? Environmental Problems and Prospects at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century” Environmental Histories of New Zealand. ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, (Auckland, N.Z.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 280.

[2] In 1769.  Oliver, Walter Reginald Brook, and New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. Botanical Discovery in New Zealand the Visiting Botanists. Post-primary School Bulletin; 5/2. Wellington, N.Z.: New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, 2007, accessed October 10, 2015, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-OliVisi-t1-body-d1-d1-d2.html

[3] Bruce F Sampson. Early New Zealand Botanical Art. Auckland N.Z.: Reed Methuen, 1985, accessed October 10, 2015, http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-SamEarl-t1-body1-d1-d2.html

[4] Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Dunedin New Zealand: University of Otago Press, New ed. 2013, 20.

[5] Geoff Park, "Swamps Which Might Doubtless Easily be Drained: Swamp Drainage and its Impact on the Indigenous." Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Ed. Eric Pawson, and Tom Brooking, University of Otago Press, New ed. 2013, 177.

[6] Rodney James Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology. Edinburgh University Press, 1996, 114-15.

[7] WJ Thomas Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape” Landscape and Power. University of Chicago Press, 2002, 5-30.

[8] Peter Alsop, Gary Stewart, and Kevin Roberts, Promoting Prosperity: The Art of Early New Zealand Advertising. Craig Potton Publishing, 2013.

[9] Wayne Barrar, “Home” Wayne Barrar Photography. Accessed October 10, 2015, http://waynebarrar.com

[10] “Mark Adams Biography” Two Rooms. Accessed October 10, 2015, http://tworooms.co.nz/artists/mark-adams/biography/

[11] Nato Thompson, "Two Directions: Geography as Art, Art As Geography” Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches To Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. Melville House, 2015,13.

[12] Trevor Paglan, "Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production To The Production of Space." Experimental Geography Radical Approaches To Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism.  New York: Melville House, 2008, 29.

[13] Cyril Chapman, et al. Restoring the Mauri of Lake Ōmāpere. Film. Directed by Marler, Simon. New Zealand: Maringi Noa O Te Manawa Trust, 2007.

[14] Stephen Turner, "The Truth of Waters.” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture Liquid State, Issue 4, 2010, 116.

[15] Ibid. 

[16] Stephen Turner, "The Truth of Waters.” Reading Room : A Journal of Art and Culture Liquid State, Issue 4, 2010, 115.

[17] Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Dunedin New Zealand: University of Otago Press, New ed. 2013, 20.

[18] Rachael Selby,  Pātaka Moore, and Malcolm Mulholland, eds. Māori and the Environment: Kaitiaki. Wellington, Huia, 2010, 1.

[19] Paul Moon, Tohunga : Hohepa Kereopa. Auckland, N.Z: David Ling Pub, 2003, 131.

[20]  Te Ahukaramu Charles Royal cited by Chris Cunningham and Fiona Stanley, “Indigenous by Definition, Experience, or World View: Links between People, Their Land, and Culture Need to Be Acknowledged.” BMJ : British Medical Journal Accessed October 10, 2015. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC188479/

[21] Jan Bryant, "Waterfall.” Reading Room : A Journal of Art and Culture Liquid State, Issue 4, 2010, 133.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Concepts that Stephen Turner also talks about in "The Truth of Waters.” Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture Liquid State, Issue 4, 2010, 113.

[24] Geoff Park, "Swamps Which Might Doubtless Easily be Drained: Swamp Drainage and its Impact on the Indigenous." Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Ed. Eric Pawson, and Tom Brooking, University of Otago Press, New ed. 2013, 187.

[25] Termed by Zygmunt Bauman in his book Liquid Modernity.  

Bauman felt that the term “postmodern” was problematic and started using the term liquid modernity to better describe the condition of constant mobility and change he sees in relationships, identities, and global economics within contemporary society. Instead of referring to modernity and postmodernity, Bauman writes of a transition from solid modernity to a more liquid form of social life.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity. John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

[26] Huhana Smith, “Kaitiaki/Ecological Guardianship” New Nature Govett Brewster 2008, 12. 

[27] Epeli Hau’ofa, "Our Sea of Islands." The Contemporary Pacific. 1994, 148-161.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Hsinya Huang, "Representing Indigenous Bodies in Epeli Hau'ofa and Syaman Rapongan." Tamkang Review 40, no. 2, 2010: 3-19, 171.

[30] Ibid 169.

[31] Ross Gibson Aqueous Aesthetics: An Art History of Change. Victoria University of Wellington: Art History, Issuing Body. 2013, 36.

[32] Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters. "Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume Through Oceanic Thinking." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33, 2015, 256.

[33] Ibid, 248.

[34] Keith Waddington. Word Painting, Picture Writing:Wordsworth and the Picturesque, accessed October 2015, http://www.waddo.net/Academic/wordsworth.html

[35]  Rhana Devenport, New Nature Govett Brewster, 2008, 5. 

[36]  Keith Waddington. Word Painting, Picture Writing:Wordsworth and the Picturesque, accessed October 2015, http://www.waddo.net/Academic/wordsworth.html

[37] Williams Wordsworth quoted by Donna Landry, “Ruined Cottages: The Contradictory Legacy of the Picturesque for England’s Green and Pleasant Land” Green and Pleasant Land English Culture and the Romantic Countryside. Edited by Amanda Gilroy, 2004, 17.

[38] A Claude glass is a ‘convex dark or coloured glass that reflects a small image in subdued colours, used by landscape painters to show the tonal values of a scene.’

Arnaud, Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art. New York: Zone Books, 2004.

[39] Ernst Hans Gombrich. Art and Illusion: A Study in The Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Vol. 5. London: Phaidon, 1977.

[40] Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art. Vol. 10. Oxford University Press, 1999, 116.

[41] “The Scenery Preservation Act” New Zealand History. Accessed October 10, 2015, http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/scenery-preservation/the-scenery-preservation-act

[42] Geoff Park, “The Ecology of the Visit” Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. Victoria University Press, 2006, 134.

[43] Ibid,100.

[44] Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, Making a New Land: Environmental Histories of New Zealand. Dunedin New Zealand: University of Otago Press, New ed. 2013, 26.

[45] Geoff Park, “The Ecology of the Visit” Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. Victoria University Press, 2006, 141.

[46] Geoff Park, “A Moment for Landscape” Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. Victoria University Press, 2006, 197.

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