Herbert Guthrie-Smith and the Vision of Tutira
My talk this afternoon comes in three parts. I’d like to set the scene by
considering some ideas about nature and environmental change that have come down
to us from our pioneering past. Next, I’ll turn to the work of someone who helps us
see further thanour everyday default ideas—Herbert Guthrie-Smith—and explain why
I think the vision behind his great book, Tutira, is of continuing importance. Finally, I
want to end with a bit of a close-up. I want to look at what he had to say about a
section of native bush that is now part of the arboretum whose opening we are
celebrating.
***
Two great story arcs shape our understanding of the conversion of unsettled
land into rural countryside. One is a triumphant narrative of progress: SLIDE The
poet Walt Whitman writes exultingly of the westward march of young Americans:
‘We primeval forests felling, We the rivers stemming, We the surface broad
surveying, We the virgin soil upheaving, Pioneers! O pioneers!’ Another writer might
vary the cadence and tell a rueful headshaking story of how pioneers brought ruin to
indigenous peoples and degradation to the natural environment: SLIDE ‘oh,
pioneers’. And while the earliest settlers of a new world often looked at a raw
wilderness and pictured the farms and towns that would one day be established there,
those born into that civilised prospect would often find their imagination drawn the
other way, towards a landscape that is pristine and primeval.
The New Zealand poet Ursula Bethell, for example, pausing from ‘earnestly
digging’ her suburban garden in the hills above the city of Christchurch, looks across
the settled patchwork of the Canterbury plains to the snow peaks of the vast alpine
ranges: SLIDE
When I am very earnestly digging
I lift my head sometimes, and look at the mountains,
And muse upon them, muscles relaxing.
I think how freely the wild grasses flower there,
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How grandly the storm-shaped tress are massed in their gorges,
And the rain-worn rocks strewn in magnificent heaps . . .
It is only a little while since this hillside
Lay untrammelled likewise,
Unceasingly swept by transmarine winds.
In a very little while, it may be,
When our impulsive limbs and our superior skulls
Have to the soil restored several ounces of fertilizer,
The Mother of all will take charge again
And soon wipe away with her elements
Our small fond human enclosures.
The imaginative journey of her poem, from garden out to wild nature, from wild
nature back to the small enclosures of garden and grave, anticipates a future that
really belongs to the past, to the natural environment as it was before any pioneer
fenced off a paddock or put in a garden. Bethell’s fondness for perspectives that erase
the footprint of development is characteristic of settler societies everywhere. It is an
expression of misgivings about rapid and massive environmental change, of
reservations that have as their literal monument those islands out of time we call
national parks. SLIDE
From an international standpoint, national parks are a feature of the recent
past. Most countries now have them, and the 1960s is the decade that dominates lists
of their formation. Prior to 1910, though, the only countries with national parks were
the United States with eight, Australia and Canada both with five, and New Zealand
with two. The origins of National Parks, if I might generalise about them for a
moment, are with those regions of the new world where settlers outnumber
indigenous peoples, where photography promotes an embryonic tourist industry, and
where modes of belonging beginning to be expressed through a love for the natural
environment. Every national park has a distinct and particular history: The origins of
National Parks, if I might generalise about them for a moment, are with those regions
of the new world where settlers outnumber indigenous peoples, where photography
promotes a nascent tourist industry, and where modes of belonging are expressed
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through a love for the natural environment. Every national park has a distinct and
particular history: SLIDE Tongariro, New Zealand’s first—and the national park I
visit most often—was gifted by the Maori chief Te Heu Heu in order to preserve the
mana and tapu of the mountain and to forestall subdivision and sale of the
surrounding land to Pakeha farmers. Yet whenever I go there, any sense I have of the
park as a place of history is vastly overshadowed by the inevitable showcasing of
Nature in this landscape.
SLIDE I had a quintessential experience of moving out of history into Nature
one Easter, on a hike to the Waitonga Falls following an unseasonal fall of snow.
Above the bush-line, a long boardwalk crosses a fragile alpine bog that has several
small tarns reflecting the mighty volcano above. On this particular morning, the snow
had completely whitened the boardwalk; ahead of me, on a popular walking trail, not
a boot-print was to be seen—I felt like Balboa gazing upon the Pacific! It was a
curious, and rather magical, encounter with an authentic yet wholly spurious
‘untouched’ world.
Even without the snow, the Waitonga Falls track offers the same mix of
historically situated and apparently ‘100% Pure’ experience of the natural world. On
the bushy part of the walk, it is common to see aprons of smooth tin nailed to a treetrunk— SLIDE they are a bar to the appetites of climbing possums and guard a rare
and beautiful native mistletoe; on the Waitonga falls track, those cylinders of blank tin
are among the very few things that would help me connect this landscape to its
history. SLIDE
The boardwalk soon takes me to the mineral orange slicks of an alpine swamp.
I enjoy the springy sensation of walking across any boardwalk, but it is easy to forget
the support of this man-made thing as I gaze with wonder at what looks like a
miniaturized forest from a lost primeval world, or raise my eyes to the sublime
mountain itself. Further on, the track descends steeply and I hear the roar of the falls.
Even before the white skeins of rushing water are glimpsed, I sense that that my
nature walk has been following a storyline of its own. The waterfall is its climax:
SLIDE in a moment, round this next bend, or better yet, astride the top of that
boulder, I see at last the fully framed view of the mind’s camera-eye: I am rewarded
with the spectacle of what my culture tells me Nature should look like.
Most parks and reserves aim, on the whole, to present a wild or pristine natural
environment that restores the visitor to a time before human habitation took place.
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Tutira is an important exception. Mostly, parks and reserves offer a carefully stagemanaged terra nullius, where the impact of humans appears to be slight but has more
accurately been erased through a plot-shift that is at once rhetorical and literal. On the
ground, a reserved area is fenced off; in our heads, as in Ursula Bethell’s poem, a
reverse flash-forward winds the clock of settlement back to zero. In this respect,
National Parks illustrate a compromise crossing of those two great story arcs
mentioned earlier: those upward-rising ever-improving plots of progress on the one
hand, and those downward-moving stories of loss and damage, of things getting
worse, on the other.
It goes without saying that narratives of progressive improvement in New
Zealand discourse are legion, so why have we had almost no literary or high cultural
celebrations of progress? Perhaps this is only because we got the dreadful Thomas
Bracken as our national bard, SLIDE while the Americans got Walt Whitman. But
there is more to it than that. We certainly have people writing family sagas and
historical romances—genres that ought to be especially hospitable to this patterning
of events—but our books about pioneers generally refuse this plotline altogether. By
and large, it takes a distinct drop in literary value, SLIDE to the level of Essie
Summers’ sheep station romances, say, before one comes across handsome farmers
musing positively about changes wrought and benefits to come. Instead, in New
Zealand, cultural value is overwhelmingly associated with plots in which
development takes place on a downward moving path typical of tragedy. SLIDE
These are stories of pioneering hubris and comeuppance, of ignorance leading to
painful knowledge. The optimism characteristic of the improvement storyline now
becomes a tragic flaw: the pioneer’s blind faith in progress ends in environmental
degradation—not paradise made, but paradise lost.
As I said, almost all the New Zealand literature and art that we value follows
or assumes the ruination plot line in one or another of its many variations. And yet a
long and unbroken disquiet over the values of progress, expressed in all our major art
forms, for almost all our settlement history, and which has long since won the hearts
and minds of a nature-loving majority, has had surprisingly little impact on actual
states of affairs. SLIDE One of the more brazen ironies of our ‘100% Pure’ slogan is
that New Zealand is not only one of the most altered environments in the world: we
also have ‘one of the worst records of native biodiversity loss’—nearly a third of all
land and freshwater birds and a fifth of all seabirds are now extinct, and about 1000
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plant, animal and fungi species are currently considered threatened. Historians of this
familiar story invariably mention the role of acclimatization societies in the latter part
of the nineteenth century, and point to the kind of whimsical folly that resulted in, say,
the introduction of the possum and gorse with catastrophic results. (At its peak, in the
mid 1980s, the possum population was estimated to be about 70 million). But in
thinking about how the land was shaped, we need to be careful of backshadowing:
when everyone is very familiar with the outcome of events, it is hard not to project
aspects of that knowledge back onto people from the past, as if they too should have
known what was to come. It is scarcely possible, for instance, to learn that Maori were
once regarded as a dying race without hearing an accompanying snicker at the folly of
so rash a prediction. This is the complacency of hindsight, and a sideways glance at
what was happening to indigenous people in Tasmania or California in the mid-to-late
nineteenth century should correct it. Because backshadowing thrives in scenarios of
catastrophe, it is particularly pervasive in environmental studies—one of the most
respected titles in the field is The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and
Animals, a book which is given to imagining ‘armies’ of ‘invading’ animals, as if
possums by the million were already massed in their landing craft.
It is misleading to think of early settlers as environmental vandals. Much like
ourselves, they tended to be conservationists and developers both, and their legacy is
not so much an awareness that the contradictions between those roles are so difficult
to resolve in practice, but that we continue to act as if those contradictions had little
real grip on us. It seems to me that the discourses of improvement and ruination, with
all their potential for friction, are much too easily compartmentalised in the mind,
exactly as nature reserves are compartmentalised in the workaday landscape. There
may be many reasons why we so easily tolerate a division of sympathies, but I suspect
we do so at least partly because the idealisation of nature associated with the ruination
plot is in deep and fundamental accord with fatalistic assumptions about historical
change in the plot of improvement. From this angle, works lamenting environmental
degradation belong rather more to a dominant than to an oppositional ideology.
Narratives of ruination are a dime a dozen: it is much rarer to find writing that
illuminates tensions between ideas of settlement as progress or ruin in order to look
past them.
Part: II SLIDE
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Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira: the Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station is
seldom commended for the magnetic interest of its plot. This very lengthy work,
written over several decades and appearing in the successively revised and expanded
editions, is ‘a record of minute alterations noted on one patch of land’. How minute?
Perhaps I might best convey the scale of this work by noting that the introduction of
weeds on the sheep station is discussed across eight chapters, loosely organised by
their probable method of arrival: Stowaways, Garden Escapes, Children of the
Church, Burdens of Sin, Fire and Flood Weeds, Pedestrians, the New Jerusalem, and
Latecomers—the chapter titles signalling a wry note of comparison with patterns of
human settlement and displacement. In the following passage, Guthrie-Smith, a
Scotsman, expects us to recall the fate of the highland clans … SLIDE
To my backwoodsman’s heart, there is . . . something austere, distinguished
even, in the brotherhood of weeds. They are the MacGregors of our artificial
highlands seizing as of right—these hard faced children of the wilderness—
conditions they must yet despise—leaf-mould, sieved peats, sharp sands,
and shredded sods . . . . Centuries of condemnation and oppression have
made them what they are . . . . Theirs has been that sad sharpening of
perception that comes to dwellers beyond the pale, to creatures proscribed, to
whom discovery is death. Who can doubt but that in the process of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest, . . . that garden cress however
circumspectly gripped has added a new fury to its seed ejaculation, that petty
spurge beneath its decapitated head has developed a more sure and certain
stem reduplication, that mouse-ear carast has evolved a more profoundly
furtive concealment in the heart of his host? Such are the lowly ways
whereby humble folk may face adversity and perpetuate themselves.
These exuberant anthropomorphisms are in the service of an historical vision
in which the distribution of humans and weeds are of equal interest, complexly
interrelated, and that require alternatives to the usual compromises by which we
reconcile the scenarios of improvement and ruination. Guthrie-Smith came to these
alternatives in the course of writing Tutira. They are the result of a prolonged
adventure in writing as well as in the discovery that there was indeed something to
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write about in the interaction of humans, animals, and plants, in the one place, over
half a century. It is a book one needs to read with an eye to how it, as well as the land
it describes, is a record of changes, and changes of mind about the nature of change.
The final chapter of the original 1921 text, ‘Vicissitudes’, reads as follows.
SLIDE
One last word: he hopes that his readers have played the game, that they have
not indulged the practice of skipping. If this has not been done, if every
chapter has been read, they can rest assured that in examination, as it were
under the microscope, of one sheep station, they have discovered what there
is to be found in all . . . . Every station in Hawkes Bay has been moulded by
a great rainfall; possesses legends and relics of a splendid aboriginal race;
has been clothed with forest, flax, and fern; has been subdued by pioneers in
desperate straits for cash and its equilibrium; has had its surface mapped by
stock, its rivers affected by scour, and, lastly, has been or is in the process of
being subdivided into smaller holdings.
The reader who has not skipped, who has read ‘unflinchingly’, as a word
inserted in the third edition has it, will not only see how the local example tells a
larger story of human settlement and environmental transformation in New Zealand,
but will have encountered various judgements and assumptions about that process.
These are ‘the melancholy musings of a sheep farmer in concern of his soul’, GuthrieSmith writes at one point, looking back on a life’s work with the discomforting
question, ‘have I for fifty years desecrated god’s earth and dubbed it improvement?’
And Guthrie-Smith, like us all, is in two minds about this. Insofar as he is
conservationist, he deplores the loss of the natural environment; insofar as he is a
pragmatic and resourceful farmer, he sees development as desirable. The linear plots
of improvement and ruination, which are locked in debate for much of the 1921
Tutira, by and large settle into a compromise vision of linear and irreversible,
necessary but regrettable, change.
One indication that his thinking has moved on in the 1953 edition is the
inclusion of new chapters dealing with earthquakes and the regeneration of native
bush. I’ll talk about the significance of earthquakes first, and come back to the
regeneration of bush towards the end of my talk. In the first edition of Tutira, chapters
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on the geology of the station reveal steady and incremental processes shaping the
contours of the land. Although evidence of seismic upheavals were everywhere
apparent in the fault lines and seaward tilt of the hills, Guthrie-Smith always reckoned
it poor form in a geologist to conjure up an earthquake when accounting for puzzling
features in the landscape. Explaining everything, earthquakes explained nothing. In
1931, however, SLIDE there occurred ‘a brief wrinkling of the epidermis of the earth,
as evanescent as the shrug and stamp of a fly-pestered ox’— SLIDE and the city of
Napier was in ruins. Forty or so miles away, out in the paddock, Guthrie-Smith was
himself momentarily ‘shaken like a pebble in a box’, but remained unaware of the
magnitude of what was taking place around him. Returning home to scenes of
devastation, the fact that the whole countryside had been uplifted several feet was not
observable, but it was the micro-patterns of disturbance that most challenged his sense
of the possible. SLIDE Embedded in the front lawn was a 50 kilo hunk of masonry. It
had clearly fallen from the chimney. Yet, in the course of its journey, this block had
somehow smashed a hole in the veranda floorboards and ejected itself, over and onto
the lawn without damaging either the veranda roof, posts or railings. SLIDE It
requires several dumbfounded re-iterations of these facts until Guthrie-Smith’s gift for
analogy un-boggles the mind: the forces involved must be like juggling a pole in the
palm of one’s hand, and the astounding flight of the block is simply that of a girl
catching and tossing an apple in the lap of her dress.
But the earthquake also made it possible to read the landscape differently. He
had often wondered why, after heavy rain, the eels of Lake Tutira congregated en
masse at a particular end of the lake, as if ‘eagerly scrutinising’ the shore. Two
hundred yards away, an elongated depression preserved the outline of a shallow creek.
To one not versed in earthquakes, there could be no connection between the imprint
of a distant dry watercourse and the congregation of eels; post 1931, ‘what had been
inexplicable, in a flash became crystal clear’ : an intervening hummock of land had
been uplifted, stranding the eels that in times of flood would once have been flushed
out to sea. As Maori had no memory of any creek in that spot, Guthrie-Smith
concluded that the eels’ thwarted migratory instinct had endured for at least a
thousand years. Earthquakes, then, were important because they enlarged his
historian’s sense of the room needed for unlikely and singular events.
This was not altogether a new discovery. Major sections from the earliest
edition of the book, to do with the settlement of the land first by Maori and then by
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European settlers and their sheep, are sceptical about the rationale of the whole
colonial enterprise. Looking back, Guthrie-Smith wonders what on earth induced a
young farmer like himself to attempt running a sheep station. SLIDE
The tenure of these runs was leasehold, and native leasehold at that; without
exception the titles were flawed; the land was devoid of grass, the climate
was wet, the access bad, the soil ungrateful and poor. There was no
compensation for improvements. It seems impossible now that any
reasonable soul could have believed there was either money or reputation to
be made out of them. The truth is that [we] were not reasonable, that [we] did
not think at all. … To this day I am unsure whether we were splendid young
Britons, empire builders and so forth, or asses of the purest water.
The labour of hacking a sheep station out of this ‘third class country’ proceeded,
Guthrie-Smith assures us, under a golden haze of single-minded devotion to the farm
that was to be. SLIDE ‘In those times, to think of an improvement was to be in love’,
he writes. ‘A thousand anticipations of happiness rushed upon the mind – the emerald
sward that was to paint the alluvial flats, … the spurs over which the fencing was to
run, its shining wire, its mighty strainers; … the glory of the grass that was to be . . . .
Oh, those were happy days, … when every thought was for the run, when every penny
that could be scraped together was to be spent on the adornment of that heavenly
mistress’.
And to what end? The original developers of the station went bust and after
years of work received from its new purchasers, H. Guthrie-Smith and partner, the
exact sum owed to the mortgage company. The cycle began over, money and labour
were again invested, and improvements lovingly made, but the finances of the run
quickly became impossible. Guthrie-Smith eventually took over his partner’s halfshare in the debt-laden property for the sum of five shillings. He stood, he writes,
‘with head barely above water’ on the ‘carcasses’ of those who had ‘spent all and
gone under’. The point Guthrie-Smith is making is ostensibly an economic one:
improvements do not bring an immediate return; and the future development of the
property would involve a delicate balance between adding value and sitting tight. But
the word carcasses is one of many terms in an extended comparison between humans
and those other unmindful pioneers of the wilderness: sheep.
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The first priority of a pioneering sheep farmer was pasture. In the 1880s, the
once-forested hills of Tutira were a tangle of fern and bracken. SLIDE On a hot day
in late summer, the hillsides were set ablaze and grass subsequently sown in the black
and fertile clearings. Come spring, the fern would shoot away again, but the tender
fronds, if not exactly palatable to sheep, were at least edible.
By crowding sheep onto a portion of newly cleared land, a battalion of mowing
jaws would keep the fern closely nibbled and allow the new grasses to come on. It
sounds simple in theory, but was murderously difficult in practice. Fern-grinding, as
the process was known, not only meant over-stocking the land and wearing the sheep
into ‘greyhound lankness’, it also broke another fundamental rule of stock
management: never to move sheep from good country to bad, from dry land to wet—
and from a sheep’s point of view, no previous home could be worse than Tutira.
SLIDE ‘All sheep suffer from nostalgia’, writes Guthrie-Smith, ‘but the merino is
perhaps the most miserably homesick beast on earth’.
Liberated in strange country, a mob of merinos will lie against the barrier—
cliff, river, fence, whatever it may be—blocking their homeward route. Night
after night, day after day, week after week, there they will camp, resigned to
starvation. They will hug the fence-line that debars them from returning to
their old haunts till their droppings are inches deep, until their lank frames
reveal every bone.
But the rugged high country of Tutira offered many opportunities for sheep
to escape: they drowned fording swift rivers, fell into crevasses, were snared
in thickets of prickly scrub and bogged in muddy quagmires. And not
singly, for sheep are followers; a dart by one sparked ten in its train, each
misjudged leap had an imitator. In an early unfortunate leap of their own,
Guthrie-Smith and his partner chose to invest in well-bred rams from South
Canterbury in the hope of improving the flock; they lost three-quarters of
these newcomers in a year. Indeed, in the early years of the run, annual
losses of 30% or more were common.
Just as sheep, when introduced into new territory, map it out through trails
leading to bogs and crevices as well as green pastures, so too with the farmer:
inexperience leads to failure, loss and wastage promote adaptation as conditions
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change. What might, in retrospect, look like a narrative of steadily rising
improvement, of mistakes corrected and right paths eventually found, turns out to
have been the by-product of repetition and chance. This is not adaptation in a strict
evolutionary sense, for the farmer’s plans are deliberately made, but the role of
intention in the historical patterning of events is much reduced in Tutira.
Unremarkable routines and unplanned outcomes play a much greater role in
accounting for the shaping of rural New Zealand.
In Guthrie-Smith’s anti-teleological view of history, there is a sense in which
humans transform the land in much the same way that sheep do. SLIDE A sheep,
retiring for the night, turns round three or four times before finally settling, with
hooves dug in downwards to take pressure. Through the repetition of insignificant
action, they build little platforms jutting like a pouting lower lip from the side of the
hill. SLIDE In a similar manner, Guthrie Smith shows how their trails over the
property evolve like a river into rapid and pool formations; their current of movement
is diverted by larger obstacles, braids into ribbons at open ground or forms a single
stream where a pocket of bush funnels the animals into close file. A sheep track might
even meander into a long bend for no apparent reason – unless, like Guthrie-Smith,
you happen to remember the rotting corpse of a horse that long ago forced a diversion
to windward. Tutira gets the bulk of its rain all at once, in late summer downpours. In
a storm, the reticulated paths and hollows made by the sheep act as open drains,
rushing off topsoil with the rainwater, and contributing to the transformation of the
countryside from a soft resilient sponge into SLIDE a hard slate prone to landslips.
From the sleeping preferences of sheep to landslides is only one thread in an
interlocking web of cause and effect it amuses the author to stretch outwards. Those
hard clay hillsides led to the introduction of a new breed of sheep, Romney Marsh,
with its different grade of wool. While Romney sheep trample the hardened
countryside of Tutira, it pleases Guthrie-Smith to know that in in the drawing rooms
of London, carpets at least will softer to the tread.
‘Every man has his idiosyncrasy’, says Guthrie Smith, ‘it has been that of the
writer for half a lifetime to note small things.’ The obstacle his writing everywhere
confronts is that those small things – weeds, sheep, sparrows, woolsacks – are always
so familiar to us. He had the imagination not only to free them from the blanket of
habitual perception, but to find in their interaction, a new and subtle understanding of
environmental change.
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Part 3: The Hanger.
SLIDE In accordance with Guthrie-Smith’s wishes, Tutira is now a living
museum—an arboretum, a bird sanctuary, a wildlife preserve—with a place for
people. The foreshore is a public domain, open for camping and fishing, and there are
facilities for outdoor education. Behind the homestead, a trail zigzags up through the
hanger—a term for a steep wooded hillside—which is now part of the larger
arboretum which surrounds it. SLIDE In the 1880s, the hanger, like much of the
station in pre-European times, was covered in the dense bracken that burgeoned in
the wake of forest fires many centuries ago. Several attempts were made to burn off
the fern but the newly sown grasses were crowded out in the spring rush. The third
time this happened, a small and somewhat spindly tree, manuka, competed with the
bracken for light and space, and within a decade, had largely displaced its forebear.
Guthrie-Smith saw the potential for an experiment and let the land alone. For
twenty or so years, the hillside was covered in dense manuka: ‘a grove of sombre
green during the eleven months of the year, a sheet of hawthorn white during the
twelfth’. But conditions were subtly changing beneath the canopy. Millions of tiny
spores and seeds responded to small chinks of light; then, as insects and wind took
their toll on weakening top branches of manuka, small light wells nursed ‘an incipient
forest’ of tree seedlings, creepers, and ferns. In a word, the primeval forest was
awakening, and would in turn over-shade and destroy the manuka, creating a block of
regenerated native forest that is the hanger today.
Earlier, Guthrie-Smith had seen environmental change as irreversible: ‘A
virgin countryside cannot be restocked; … its ancient vegetation cannot be
resuscitated’. But he subsequently formulated a new rule: ‘primordial conditions
reassert themselves if given a chance’. And far from viewing natives or native species
as doomed, he came to entertain an opposite theory: given time, the native will always
reassert itself. He was talking about people as well as birds, trees and grasses.
One might argue that there is an anticipation in his experiment of a kind of
puritanical nativism often expressed in our literature—‘Bloody pines’, snarls Kerewin
in the bone people—as well as in the Department of Conservation’s policy emphasis
on recreating ecosystems found in pre-human times; a portion of the old Tutira
station, for example, is now designated a Mainland Island—that is to say, a reserve in
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which scientists aim to restore primordial conditions by reproducing the ecological
security characteristic of an offshore island.
I don’t object to a preference for native trees, or to setting ambitious
conservation goals, but I would wish to disconnect my liking for such things from ahistorical myths of a pristine environment, as well as from plotlines that can only
conceive of change in terms of improvement or ruin. What I admire most about Tutira
is its sense of the interconnectedness of all living things, and of humans as organisms
whose migrations from one landmass to another are only to be expected, but who
settle the land in much the same way as sheep explore a hillside run, in strings and
stragglings that are both unpredictable and highly patterned, and whose actions shape
and are shaped by the land in a dynamic that poses a fundamental problem of
perspective. In the last paragraph of ‘The Hanger’, one of the last chapters composed
for Tutira, Guthrie-Smith writes: SLIDE
When a block of land passes, as it may do through the hands of ten holders in
half a century, how can long views be taken of its rights? Who under these
conditions can give his acres their due?
Aue, taukari e, ano te kuware o te Pakeha kahoro nei i whakaaro ki to
mauri o te whenua. Alas! Alas! That the Pakeha should so neglect the rights
of the land, so forget the traditions of the Maori race, a people who
recognised in it something more than the ability to grow meat and wool.
What makes his lament different from the usual compromise whereby we
accept the benefits of land development while mourning its results, is the historical
vision which emerges from taking a long view of the little events on this sheep
station. Looking back, nothing has turned out quite as expected, unintended results
have been at least as important as planned actions, the future has never been
inevitable, but nor have individuals, whether sheep, sparrows or humans, been able to
‘withstand the stream of tendency’. The individual is ‘drawn like water into the
whirlpool, like dust into the draught’. But this stream of tendency is not a
juggernaught of progress or ruination moving irresistibly, like a locomotive, along its
iron rungs; a tendency is irresistible not because it is massive, but precisely because it
is an aggregation of very small and insignificant pieces of behaviour. SLIDE ‘If this
volume has a value,’ Guthrie-Smith writes, ‘it is because of [its] insistence on the
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cumulative effects of trivialities’. It is a profound view that allows us to see the
settlement of NZ by Maori and Pakeha on the same stage as its settlement by rabbits
and weasels, bumble bees and trout, and in terms of processes and tendencies that
resist reduction to the cartoon binaries of colonist or invader, improvement or
ruination.
Alex Calder
Head of English, Drama and Writing Studies
University of Auckland.
This talk may be reproduced freely for its own purposes by the Guthrie-Smith Trust.
Otherwise, please contact the author for permission to quote or distribute.