The ecologist and the journalist: Imaginings of place in the New Zealand nonfiction of Geoff Park and Steve Braunias

Abstract

Using an Aotearoa New Zealand case study and a contemporary settler-colonial context, this article brings together two traditions of writing about place: that associated with the “New Nature Writing” and that stemming from a sociological or journalistic approach. Place writing shifts location from the background or setting, to being an explicit topic of investigation, and as such bears a relationship to a long history of nature writing and environmental thought. However, it is not given that when we think about “place” we turn to ecology and history. This article activates the potential openness of the idea of “place writing” to develop a model for considerations of different kinds of engagements with place alongside one another. It compares the textual literary geographies created by ecologist Geoff Park in Ngā Uruora /The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape (1995) and journalist Steve Braunias in Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012), paying attention to the role played in these imaginaries by the form of the nonfiction first-person essay. While Park’s book is representative of a path of settler-colonial writing that evokes place through an engagement with Nature, history and Indigenous experience, Braunias’s is representative of a quite different path, one predominantly focused on the various people who live in a place now. In both cases, the writers’ settler-colonial situation complicates the claims they make, while their Pākehā identities unsettle identification of what or who is “native” to either land or society in any location. This article argues that each path provides a potential corrective to the oversights and sentimentality of the other. Treating them together reveals much about Pākehā stories of place and the questions that arise from them, and adds new complexity and nuance to our understandings of place and environmental writing generally.

Representations of places have material consequences in so far as fantasies, desire, fears and longings are expressed in actual behaviour.

David Harvey (1993: 22)

Ecologist and environmentalist, Geoff Park, who died in 2009, is Aotearoa New Zealand’s most iconic and recognizable “place writer” within a tradition concerned with ecologies and the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. His was the only name that came to mind when Radio New Zealand interviewer Kim Hill was asked by prominent British nonfiction writer Robert Macfarlane in 2016 whether anyone was doing the kind of “place writing” in New Zealand that has seen a “golden age” in Britain and the United States over the past two decades (Macfarlane, 2015b, 2016). In this article I examine Park’s classic book Ngā Uruora /The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape (1995) as a contribution to international efforts to produced nuanced nonfiction writing about the environment in a time of ecological crisis. Ngā Uruora is made up of six main chapters, each structured around the ecological history of a different lowland area. These chapters function as standalone essays which together work to develop a literary imaginary of the kind of place Aotearoa New Zealand once was, as well as what it has become and could be. Park’s work, which is being reissued in 2018, has not only made influential contributions to how locations within Aotearoa New Zealand have been understood and to the possibilities for writing about them; his work also illuminates the particular pressures put on imagining — and therefore on writing about — “place” in a settler-colonial context.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s nonhuman environment has been one of the most rapidly, and violently, transformed in the world, being radically altered in the colonial nineteenth century and into the twentieth century by the impact of forestry and land clearances for pastoral agriculture, followed in the late twentieth century and into the present by the intensification of industrial agriculture, in particular dairying (Knight, 2016: 214–34; Pawson and Brooking, 2013: 17; Star, 2009; Steer, 2016: 85). The relative recentness of this transformation, coupled with the ecological uniqueness of an isolated island ecology, makes the loss of “wilderness” areas in New Zealand particularly alive and present as a topic. This is complicated by the way in which the easily commodifiable beauty of New Zealand as scenery, exemplified by the National Tourism Board sponsored “100% Pure” campaign, is linked to a national mythos of a uniquely preserved natural environment strongly connected to national identity formation (Calder, 2011; Horrocks and Lacey, 2016; Turner, 2011). Additional important complexities are presented by a violent history of land seizures and Māori dispossession, and by the presence of Indigenous Māori understandings of place and human relationships to the land such as kaitiakitanga (guardianship or stewardship). This very specific context creates a particular set of tensions for the writer aiming, as Park and many of his counterparts elsewhere do, to address issues of environmental degradation and to imbue in readers an understanding of the places they inhabit.

However, the category of “place writing” is not limited to works that have a genealogical relationship to environmentally engaged nature writing. It is not a given that when people think about “place” they automatically turn to ecology, even in relation to a location like Aotearoa New Zealand, so frequently (and often shallowly) defined by its natural landscapes. Here I want to activate the potential openness of the term “place writing” to develop a model for considerations of writing that fit within a long history of environmental writing alongside texts that come from quite different traditions. My second case study is journalist, satirist, and political commentator Steve Braunias’s more recent Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012). Braunias is an ubiquitous and influential commentator on national culture and this book earned him the New Zealand Book Award for nonfiction and a subsequent description as “approaching the status of nonfiction national treasure” (Gracewood and Andrew, 2016: 2). Like Park’s Ngā Uruora, Braunias’s book is structured by visits to a number of locations in New Zealand. However, Braunias’s locations are predominantly urban, suburban, or small town, and his stance and focus make him unlikely to be conceived of as a nature or an environmental writer. If Park’s book is representative of a path of settler-colonial writing that evokes place through an engagement with nonhuman nature, history, and Indigenous experience, Braunias’s is representative of a quite different path of Pākehā (European New Zealand) writing, one predominantly concerned with the various people who live in this location now. While the ecologist tells of kayaking alone up deserted rivers, his head filled with early accounts of birds and trees and early Māori inhabitations, the journalist speaks of heading down to the pub or the gas station or the airport to chat with the locals or to a group of new immigrants. Entirely different imaginings of what constitutes a place, as well as of New Zealand as place (or New Zealand places), emerge from these very different experiments in “place writing”. Treating them together helps us continue the important task of rethinking the highly contested notion of place — a source of tension both in the abstract and on the ground.

Locating place writing

Place writing is most broadly conceived of here as first-person nonfiction prose texts that put descriptions and evocations of particular places at their centre. As Alex Calder has commented of the long history of New Zealander literature, literary history looks rather different when we take nonfiction writing seriously (2011: ix–x, 35). ¹ Evidence of a recent “golden age” of such nonfiction place writing can be found in Britain in the deep topographies of Iain Sinclair’s writings about London, or in the work of those loosely grouped as the “New Nature Writers” which includes Robert Macfarlane himself (and at times Sinclair), as well as Kathleen Jamie, Roger Deakin, and others. ² Across the Atlantic, prominent nonfiction practitioners ranging from Annie Dilliard, to Joan Didion, to Rebecca Solnit can also be understood as writers of place, while in New Zealand a collection was recently published entitled, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand (Horrocks and Lacey, 2016). This invites us to ask what cultural work such writing is doing in a moment in which the digital revolution, global capitalism, mass transport, and global threats such as climate change, are sometimes seen as transcending the particularities of physical location (Cresswell, 2015: 75–81). In sociology and human geography “place” itself is often seen as an ambivalent and potentially dangerous concept, with place identity appealing to the exclusionary forces of nationalism and parochialism, invoking us/them distinctions (Cresswell, 2015; Harvey, 1993). In the field of ecocriticism Timothy Morton has called for an ecology that is “not embodied but displaced”: “Our slogan should be dislocation, dislocation, dislocation” (2010: 38).

Yet, in the face of potential for economic and ecological crisis on a global scale, this disparate group of writers shares a commitment to the particularities of location, and to evoking the locatedness of human experience. The use of an individualized first-person authorial voice that characterizes so much of this writing — as it does also in Park and Braunias — makes a focus on the specific case constitutive of these writings’ form as well as their content. The first-person essay is itself an exploratory mode which, as Theodor Adorno reminds us, accentuates “the partial against the total” (1991: 9); Macfarlane characterizes the writers he admires in this genre as “particularizers”, who write with “committing intensity about their chosen territories” demonstrating a “species of attention” that he sees as enabling vision (2015a: 11). For many, a focus on place is seen positively as an act of resistance to globalization, while place itself is not understood as necessarily exclusionary, something human geographer Doreen Massey (1994), in particular, has argued. Prominent New Zealand historian, Tony Ballantyne, influenced by Massey, maintains that in the case of New Zealand a focus on specific locations and regions and their global connections is essential for enabling a shift beyond a tradition of “inward-looking national and nationalistic narratives” (2016, 58; see also Ballantyne, 2012). Such arguments call for place to be understood by “routes rather than roots”, in an “outward-looking” “extroverted notion of place” (Cresswell, 2015: 71, 88; Deloughrey, 2010; Massey, 1994: 147). In these accounts, as Tim Cresswell summarizes, place ideally “becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence” (2015: 39).

In shifting location from the background of setting to being an explicit topic of investigation, place writing bears a genealogical relationship to a long history of nature writing and environmental thought. However, those loosely grouped as the “New Nature Writers” have set themselves in opposition to what they figure as an older emphasis on and idealization of pristine wilderness areas (often in need of “saving”), as well as away from a static view of the natural world as “landscape” (Cowley, 2008: 10; Smith, 2017: 9–10; Solnit, 2016: 61–62). Instead, a common thread in this new approach especially in Britain, which as critics such as Jos Smith have shown can be traced back at least to such founding texts as natural historian Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973), is a commitment to ordinary, and often unpromising, locations and to exploring quotidian, everyday encounters between human and nonhuman worlds, both rural and urban (Smith, 2017: 3–4; Moran, 2014: 5; Macfarlane, 2015a: 231–32). Writing within this tradition tends to focus on ecosystems that include humans, and might as easily take as its subject a roadside or the “bastard countryside” or “edgelands” around a city, or a recently closed mine, as a mountain or a woodland (Macfarlane, 2015a: 231–48; Smith, 2017: 103–26). The emphasis in the New Nature Writing on eschewing the human–nonhuman divide further intensifies the centrality the personal voice assumes, where it is used to foreground a dynamic interchange between a human subject and a particular locale. This desire contributes, in turn, to an ambivalence about the term “Nature” itself (Smith, 2017: 14–15), and it lies behind Macfarlane and others’ insistence that what this group is engaged in is not in fact Nature Writing (if such a thing, indeed, ever quite exists) but the more neutrally-termed “literature of locality” or “place writing” (Macfarlane, 2016; 2015a: 11). An investigation of the nonhuman world nonetheless remains central to this strand (or subset) of place writing, to which Park’s work bears a close relationship.

These writers’ commitment to re-imagining the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds runs in parallel with that of academic ecocriticism, which emerged in the same historical moment and from a similar sense of environmental crisis, but with which the New Nature Writing has had surprisingly little direct cross-reference (Moran, 2014: 59). Both foreground the constructedness of the natural world as well as its entanglement with human history, both seek to historicize human conceptions of “Nature”, and both situate human relationships with the nonhuman world as necessarily (and problematically) language-filled and anthropocentric. Both are also associated with an activist politics based on the hope that a shift in attention will ultimately lead to a shift in action. In ecocriticism, as in the New Nature Writing itself, there is also a spectrum along which authors are more or less sceptical of the use of the personal voice — and of a specific kind of personal voice. Jamie’s direct criticism of Macfarlane as “A Lone Enraptured Male” writing within a solipsistic Romantic “tradition in literature of lone men engaging with birds” (Jamie, 2008, 2005: 38–39), for example, finds a parallel in ecocritic Morton’s critique of what he calls “beautiful soul syndrome” in a long history of nature writing, in much of which, he suggests, the point is “to impart a heavy dose of a certain subject position to the reader” (Morton, 2007: 121, 130).

The most direct critique of the residue in some of this writing of the kind of First World, Romantic universalism pointed up by Jamie and Morton, has been developed in the relatively new fields of settler-colonial studies and postcolonial ecocriticism. Critical writing in these areas functions as a corrective to first wave ecocritical writing and thought focused on Britain and North America. It has worked to bring the “analytics of place, power, knowledge, and representation” vital to a field such as postcolonial studies into dialogue with ecocritical thought and environmental literary studies, in the process troubling still persistent “assumptions of a universal subject and an essentialized nature” (DeLoughrey, 2014: 321; Deloughrey et al., 2015; Turner, 2011). Particularly pertinent for the readings that follow in this article, especially those of Ngā Uruora, is the way in which this new body of critical work has highlighted the tension between a first wave ecocritical focus on nonhuman environments and a poetics of place, and a necessary (and urgent) preoccupation with the politics of human displacement and injustice that comes from a history of colonialism (Nixon, 2005: 235, 247).

In setting the more obvious — although still little discussed — example of Park’s ecological writing alongside that of Braunias, I aim in part to respond to Rob Nixon’s call for us not only to diversify the canon, but to “diversify our thinking” and “reimagine the prevailing paradigms” (Nixon, 2005: 246). In the case of both Park and Braunias, their settler-colonial situation radically complicates the claims they seek to make in their place-based imaginaries, while their Pākehā identities unsettle — at times in unacknowledged ways — easy identification not just of belonging in Aotearoa New Zealand, but in any place, land or society. Park provides us with a nuanced and eloquently problematic contribution to the developing canon of settler-colonial and postcolonial ecocritical writing and thought. The comparison with Braunias’s text, which is a more broadly conceived work of “place writing”, then adds a vital additional layer of understanding, providing a unique opportunity to consider the relative strengths of an ecological approach such as Park’s, as well as what can get overlooked — including rhetorical effectiveness — in such a vision. In each case, the particular first-person voice as well as narrative structure the writer adopts proves to be the central locus of tension, underscoring the vital connection between aesthetics and the politics of place. The relationship between ideology, representation, and genre, and in particular the different ways in which the ubiquitous first person operates in place and environmental writing, has, I believe, not yet been given sufficient critical attention. ³ Throughout this article I pay attention to the formal question of what work the first person does in such writings and what we can learn by noticing how it is informed by and informs nonfiction writers’ politics and representations of place. Park’s and Braunias’s very different objects of focus are matched by utterly different first-person speakers — and utterly different understandings of what constitutes a place and what is involved in the act of place making. Each emphasis both offers something, and comes at a cost which reading them together helps to illuminate.

“Understanding of place is a crucial task in our times” ⁴ : Geoff Park’s Ngā Uruora

In Ngā Uruora/The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand Landscape (1995), Geoff Park presents an overt understanding and argument about place and its centrality to New Zealand experience. In the first two of the six essays in the book we are presented with a farmed place and a suburban place: the “monotonous geometry” of the “improved” landscape of dairy-farmed Hauraki Plains in the upper North Island, with its “long straights, stopbanks and shelterbelts” (Park, 1995: 73) first person, ⁵ and the suburban sprawl of the Hutt Valley near Wellington, with its river “suppressed beneath the tarseal of its temporary, suburban skin” (110). These are put forward as landscapes of “warning” “for a culture faced with living sustainably in a finite world” (74). In the following four essay-chapters, in what is clearly a deliberate rationale, Park then takes his reader to four places of hope, where there are remnants of the lowland forests that once covered all of New Zealand’s coastal floodplains: Tauwhare on the Mōkau River, Papaitonga in Horowhenua, and Whanganui Inlet in north-west Nelson and Punakaiki on the South Island’s West Coast. These ecological “survivors” (15), as Park terms them, are presented as offering two lessons central to Park’s representations of place and nature.

Firstly, Park personifies “Nature”, suggesting that these forest “survivors” are to be valued for allowing glimpses of a pre-human ecology, of “what nature intended”, and as “example[s] of nature’s design for the land” (71, 223). Ultimately, he connects a “sense of place” with a notion of a place’s original or “elemental” natural environment (320, 14), which as in much nature writing takes on quasi-religious qualities (see Alexander, 2015). In a slightly earlier essay, Park acknowledges that the concept of original nature is often treated with scepticism in New Zealand and Australia in particular, and associated with a kind of sentimentalism or nostalgia for “‘lost innocence’”; however, he ultimately sides with North American environmental writers such as Wendell Berry, whom he paraphrases: “You cannot act well in a place, [Berry] says, until you have understood what nature intended for it” (Park, 2006/1992: 52). Specifically, for Park this means having knowledge of things like rocks and soils; of common trees and plants in a particular area; of the sources of our water, which may now only flow in underground drains; and of other such environmental factors that for him determine the “uniqueness” of each place (2006/1992: 47; emphasis in original). Such a connection between people and a land’s non human life is for Park “a fundamental human need”, the loss of which is a form of deprivation as dangerous to the human world as it is to the non human one (320).

At the same time, and at times in unacknowledged tension with what I will call Park’s “first lesson”, the combination of ecology and history that Park brings to bear on these ecological “remnants” reveals that they are not, as he had himself once thought, fragments of a once “pristine and unpeopled” landscape preserved by accident (330). On the contrary, in each essay Park shows that each particular site was once an inhabited Māori ancestral place around which enough mana (prestige or respect) accrued to protect it from the colonial land laws and land clearances of the nineteenth century (123, 145, 161, 323, summarized on 330). For Park, this is a lesson for the central need for Māori knowledge and for understandings such as kaitiakitanga (guardianship or stewardship) in modern conservation efforts (222, 317). It also supports his argument for the need for a research and writing practice that lies between history — with its focus on people — and environment literature, which in the mid-1990s he saw as having marginalized people as automatically being “wreckers of a mythical, ancient world that had no need of them” (15). Such a performed learning curve, leading to a greater appreciation of the interconnections between the human and the natural world, has since become a standard move of the New Nature Writing, for instance structuring Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (Macfarlane, 2007: 316; Moran, 2014: 53). Park’s emphasis is, though, specifically founded on examining the complex interrelations between colonial history and Indigenous knowledge, which it nonetheless requires the embodied activities of the modern ecologist to recover. The unresolvable tension lies between the nostalgic lament for and desire to save or recover “original”, unpeopled nature — and there is much about Park’s approach and tone that is elegiac — and a search for models of successful co-existence between different peoples and between the human and nonhuman worlds.

If Park’s argument is that reviving this very particular “sense of place” might be a “weapon” against an approach to life and the natural world which may be not just undesirable but potentially environmentally catastrophic, a formal question then follows (2006/1992: 47). What role does the use of the essay form, and of a personal narrative point of view, play in this enabling weaponry? Park’s very use of the term “weapon” suggests a kind of crusade, raising the question: against whom? Specifically, how does Park’s particular use of form participate in the particular argument about place he aims to make, and what might we learn from observing this?

Park presents himself as an exemplar of someone striving to transcend a “Western isolation from nature” (21), and instead to live within the natural world and within knowledge of the land’s peopled history. This extends beyond ecological and historical knowledge. Park seeks to evoke what it means to, as he puts it, “become involved with the landscape” (16). As Joe Moran writes of the British New Nature Writers, Park has “a sense that the complexities of the ecological crisis need to be met by open-ended and polymorphic forms of writing which combine ecopolitical engagement with a personal voice”. It is as though the very urgency of the situation demands a direct address through a form of “personal witness” (Moran: 2014: 59). The central way in which Park approaches this is by structuring his essays by personal encounters with and journeys through places. In the three of the six essay-chapters in Ngā Uruora arranged around accounts of paddling up creeks, rivers, and swamps, Park explicitly presents these journeys as providing access to a kind of third order of affective or experiental knowledge as “the land works on us” (15–16).

Park’s speaker’s boarding of his canoe is repeatedly figured metaphorically, as well as literally, as a kind of descent into the land and the past (23, 119). In the first description of stepping into his canoe in the Hikutaia Creek near the spot where Captain James Cook first encountered what has become the Hauraki Plains, Park writes: “From the minute I am down in the creek and out of sight of cows and paddocks, I sense my plastic vessel’s connection to the generations of crafts that have known this stretch of water” (23). The paragraph that follows compacts a thousand years of human history on the river and works as a list of accumulating sentence fragments whose mounting up, sentence by sentence, have the cumulative effect of making the subjugation of nature feel inevitable: “The long kahikatea waka of Ngāti Maru and their predecessors …”; “Long-boats nosing their uncertain way up the tide, 200 years ago …”; “The calls of men from a distant war, arriving to balloted blocks of wilderness and mud …”, leading to the muddy residual waters Park paddles in the present of his text (23). In the later essay-chapter about the preserved forests of the Mōkau River, the lowering of the canoe acts as a portal into a kind of idyll on how the place might have been before human encounter (119).

Metaphors of the “voice” of place also recur in Park’s writing and he repeatedly figures himself as a uniquely attuned “listener” to this voice. In the Hikutaia Creek passage quoted above, Park seems to present himself as hearing and speaking for the memory of the floodplain itself. Elsewhere in Ngā Ururoa he writes, “Out of dead leaves of deeds and proclamations, voices began to confide in me” (129). At points this becomes injunctions to the reader, too, to

[g]o into a lowland kahikatea forest in autumn when its koroī are ripening, lie under the towering trees listening to the cacophony of birds and the constant patter of the inedible bits hitting the leaves around you, and you’ll know what “the groves of life mean”. (15)

What Park models and wants from his reader, he writes, is “an emotional response, a deeper, even moral reaction to the land” (160). He figures this as something that particular landscapes “demand” (160), making his particular understanding of place just a matter of paying the proper kind of attention. Park’s emphasis on modelling and producing this experience is as though, as Timothy Morton puts it (with considerable scepticism), “[i]f we could not merely figure out but actually experience the fact that we are embedded in our world, then we would be less likely to destroy it” (2007: 64).

Park’s self-positioning and performance of descent into the land shifts his stance away from the visual focus of the Enlightenment traveller to the position of an involved Romantic subject within a frequently spiritualized natural world. The aim is similar to that of British nature writer Roger Deakin’s (highly gendered) descriptions of his immersions in water: “You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land” (1999: 3; emphasis in original). Park’s self-presentation, like Deakin’s, is underwritten by a claim to attunement or responsiveness, invoking a relationship of special access that Morton (2007) in particular argues is a central, and problematic, trope of nature writing. In Park this acquires an additional layer from his settler-colonial context: it involves a claim to a kind of Indigenous knowledge or subject position neither necessary nor available in Deakin’s British context. This is especially evident in passages such as the Mōkau River one, as Park strives to evoke how this landscape looks and sounds through reiterations of the Māori names for flora and fauna. In lines such as “the kahikatea forest is a kaleidoscope of colours and textures. Each huge native pine teems with kahakaha and kōwharawhara” (119), it is as though the alliterative incantation of these Indigenous names will in itself help to bridge the distance between human and nonhuman worlds, and so work to transcend “Western isolation”. Such emphasis on Māori names is partly business as usual for Pākehā writing in New Zealand, having been a standard move since the “Maoriland” writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for, as Allen Curnow most critically put it, “striving after indigenous effect, words like kowhai and rata and tui being new toys” (Curnow, 1945: 23; Hessell, 2016: 117–18; Stafford and Williams, 2006). In Park, however, this specialized vocabulary is at once simply necessary as ecological naming and acquires a specific intensity: words such as kahakaha and kōwharawhara (both forms of epiphytic plant) seem meant in part to work as what Macfarlane calls “place-words”, that is as the kind of localized language that possesses “a kind of word magic” with the power to “enchant our relations with nature and place” (2015a: 4). At the same time, the fact that Park is writing from a settler-colonial position unsettles the writer’s cultural authority over this place language, as Park’s very vocabulary registers that not only is his experience of “nature” language-filled, but is experienced at one further remove, filtered through the language of an Indigenous, and now partially-displaced people.

The most obvious collateral damage of Park’s efforts, to use Morton’s (2007: 130) phrase, to impart a “dose of a certain subject position to the reader”, is to those whom the canoeing, partially-indigenized ecologist does not see as appropriately engaged in looking and listening. In the opening essay-chapter of Ngā Uruora Park introduces contemporary dwellers on the dairy-farmed grids of the Hauraki Plains as “plains people” deliberately ignorant of the colonial-era draining of what had once been floodplains (22). In short anecdotes that recur throughout the book, Park uses ordinary people as foil (and antagonist) to his observant ecological narrator. A “row of plains women” sit under hair dryers (32). A man on a digger in industrial Petone eyes Park up, and when Park tells him it is “historic ground” he is digging, the digger-driver shouts back, “What the hell are you on about?” (84). In another chapter, Park describes whitebaiters watching him as he paddles up the Mōkau river, and how he signalled that he was there for the kahikatea, and then told them this is a Māori place. The men are described “roar[ing] with laughter at the very idea”. As Park paddles on the men shout after him, “It’s only history” (156). Ultimately, in Park’s work, such people seem to fail to qualify as what he calls “ordinary citizens and members of an ecosystem” (221).

In part, this narrative is the inevitable result of Park’s invocation of what Calder calls the “ruination plot”, a plot particularly prevalent in environmental writing and which Calder argues much of New Zealand literature follows. This plot follows the downward path of tragedy:

It is a story of hubris and comeuppance, of ignorance leading to painful knowledge. The optimism characteristic of the improvement plot now becomes a tragic flaw: our blind faith in progress ends in environmental degradation — not paradise made, but paradise lost. (2011: 135)

Calder’s most challenging observation is that “works lamenting environmental degradation belong rather more to a dominant than to an oppositional ideology […] it is much rarer to find writing that illuminates tensions between progress and despoliation in order to look past them” (2011: 138). In Park’s version, the ruination plot leaves protagonists (in this case pretty much all of us) in some way terribly damaged by errors against Nature.

Park’s invocation of the ruination plot is coupled, in what is also a familiar move in settler-colonial literature in New Zealand and elsewhere, with a gothic haunting, the “unsettling” shadows of the violence against people and nature of the colonial past that Park sees lying across Pākehā culture (311, 322; see Huggan and Tiffin [2010: 86–92] on the Australian context). Park’s basic structuring metaphor in Ngā Uruora is of the land as a dead or sick body. He uses the language of “extermination”, “tragedy”, “absence”, and “silence” (13, 73), and figures our “extinguished” rainforests as slaughtered bodies, writing that “[o]nce you have skinned and gutted them, it is very hard to get them back” (112). If the “remnants” of forest still left are cast as “survivors”, they are sick and isolated ones. This bleak imagining is then turned back onto contemporary human inhabitants who cannot now easily encounter places of original nature, so that, as Park sees it, these places’ “precariousness extends beyond the survival of wild species and ecosystems — it touches the survival of our own sense of the life of the world” (160). This becomes a circular argument (and narrative): in order to show how sick (ruined) the natural world is, and the sickness (ruination) of humans cut off from it (the vast majority of people in Park’s account), these humans must be shown as so deaf to Nature as to be incapable of hearing and thus saving it. Or to put it another way, in Park, “plains dwellers” are just feeding on the corpse.

No matter how true one thinks this picture of the environmental situation either in the 1990s or now (or of race-relations in New Zealand), it is not necessarily a persuasive approach to making people seek to live differently in a place. This circularity contributes to the uneasy oscillation between pessimism and efforts toward optimism in Park’s work. Not only is it hard to bring “slaughtered” forests back, it is hard to reanimate zombies feeding on the skin of the dead. Park’s approach demonstrates the pitfalls of assuming that humanity acquires what he might call “moral” value and worth in place in only one way. The main thing that strongly contradicts the tendency in Park toward the invocation of an inevitable downward spiral is the structure of Ngā Uruora itself. The true ruination plot would place the remnant landscapes first, following them with the images of desecrated landscapes of drained farmland and suburbs. Park, instead, starts with the landscapes that reveal the limits of “improvement” of the land to the “obliteration of their natural ecosystems” and then turns to places that he positions as providing the information we need for efforts toward conservation and restoration ecology (71). This moves beyond the ruination plot written in situ on the settler-colonial landscape, replacing it with what Raymond Williams argues was a Romantic period invention of Nature as the “thing” that would heal what modern society has damaged (Morton, 2007: 22). In this Romantic narrative, as Morton summarizes, building on Adorno as well as Williams, damage to Nature is seen as leaving humans “forlornly alienated from their world” (Morton, 2007: 22), and at the same time conjures the desire for “reconciliation” (Morton, 2007: 22; emphasis in original; Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 203–4). The idealized imagining involved is that, if only the right circumstances could be generated, human (imagined here as the subject) and the world (imagined here as the object or other) could be rejoined (remarried). Art and Nature together become the special environments (what Morton calls the “new secular churches”; 2007: 22) from which this reunion can be imagined. Park’s writing fits well within this Romantic model, even directly referencing Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sense that the “preservation of the world lay in wilderness” (159–61). But again, in Park’s self-aware settler-colonial writing the model acquires an additional layer, as Park assumes the position of the Pākehā writer not only seeking reconciliation with Nature, but seeking to evoke a kind of (re)marriage of biculturalism, sometimes overridden by a more problematic claim to actual Indigeneity. In Ngā Uruora, taking on an Indigenous Māori subject position is imagined not only as having the potential to heal “Western isolation from nature”, but as having the potential to heal the alienation brought about by colonial history.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the reservations I have raised here about Park’s approach, I believe he deserves to be part of a new, diversified global canon of key environmental or nature writers, and in particular as an important early practitioner of a form of settler-colonial ecological writing for which Aotearoa New Zealand provides an especially potent context. In Ngā Uruora, Park develops persuasive arguments about the ways in which the human and non human world are vitally interrelated, and through his first-person essayistic approach works to develop ways to evoke this. But his work also demonstrates the pitfalls of taking on elegiac and moralizing postures in environmental literature, particularly in settler-colonial or postcolonial contexts, and of evoking narrative tropes such as the ruination and reconciliation plots. The example of Park, then, supports arguments for the need, at least at times, for a less direct political approach in the creation of nonfiction literary geographies (Macfarlane, 2015a: 302; 2015b); reading work such as Park’s with the kind of new attention invited by approaches such as postcolonial ecocriticism provides new ways of appreciating “the enduring non-instrumentality of environmental writing, as well as gauging its continuing usefulness in mobilising individual and collection support” (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 33; emphasis in original). In much the same way that Kathleen Jamie’s and Rebecca Solnit’s explicitly gendered subject-positions do, the complexities that arise from Park’s self-conscious settler-colonial identity, with its unsettled relation to land, Indigeneity, language, and narrative, also invite continued attention to schisms in the universal “we” of humanity evoked in much nature and place writing produced both in Aotearoa New Zealand and in other parts of the world today, and which can seem to be called up again in critical injunctions to “dislocate”.

“Learning by osmosis”: Steve Braunias’s Civilisation

The understanding of place and the imagining of New Zealand that emerges from Steve Braunias’s Civilisation: Twenty Places on the Edge of the World (2012) diverges radically from Park’s Ngā Uruora. Precisely because of this, the contrast between these two writers’ approaches helps to illuminate the assumptions about place at play in each, as well as differing understandings of how best to tell stories about place, in particular New World, late twentieth-, and early twenty-first century places. While Park foregrounds the Indigenous–settler relationship, and the centrality of history and the natural environment to place formation, Braunias’s cultural imaginary formed from the same location two decades later is resolutely multicultural and urban, with a contemporary and social rather than an historical and ecological focus. Braunias’s claim to inclusivity, in which all voices and all ways of living in a place are to be equally valued, comes partially unstuck upon closer analysis, most notably because of the way in which his first-person persona works within the text to occlude real difference between experiences.

Like Ngā Uruora, Braunias’s Civilisation works as a series of standalone essay-chapters, each about a visit to a particular location. It is hard to work out a rhetorical or narrative rationale, however, equivalent to Park’s, of despoiled lowland places followed by preserved ones, for the ordering of the individual essay-chapters within Braunias’s book. ⁶ Braunias’s refusal of obvious geographical or narrative imperatives has the curious effect of seeming to isolate each location he writes about as an individualized setting, neither explicitly connected to other places geographically nor connected by comparison or contrast (as in Park). Each is a floating atom of “New Zealand” as visited by the wandering writer.

Braunias, like Park, asks questions about what he calls the “the life force” (2012: 23) ⁷ of the particular locations he visits and a sense of the natural environment of particular places is certainly present in his writing. In the Central Otago St Bathans essay-chapter, Braunias quotes poet and environmental activist, Brian Turner, in what could be a vernacular summary of Park’s argument in Ngā Uruora, saying: “‘Until we agree that the natural world is a community to which we belong, and stop seeing everything as a commodity for us to use and exploit as we see fit […] we’re fucked’” (38). However, even the structure of Braunias’s book, with Turner just appearing in one essay-chapter in his own particular location and with his particular world view, demonstrates that for Braunias this is only one of many competing understandings of community and place. There is little sentimentalism about the benevolence of nature in Civilisation, nor about its desecration. In another essay-chapter, this one on Antarctica, rather than seeing, as Park might, a remnant of the natural world on which humans have as yet had little impact, Braunias sees “a stupid, merciless place”, “a vacant lot” (80). Of Antarctica, he writes, “awe is compulsory, but I opted out” (79). He pointedly finds joy and insight instead in the sociability of morning tea at Scott Base, and as if to poke savage fun at Park’s idea of “what nature intended” for a place, glories in the bloody spectacle of masses of skua eating penguin chicks alive (88–89). This is a crucial moment of distinction in Braunias’s textual positioning because “awe” is precisely what nature writing in its most Romantic-inflected forms demands. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, also precisely what commodified touristic culture scripts as an appropriate response to places like New Zealand and Antarctica. But Braunias refuses to perform interest in such “natural beauty”, and, correspondingly, in displaying a “beautiful soul” (Morton, 2007: 121), instead declaring the used-by date of this model. With his defiantly anti-Romantic gestures, Braunias positions his work at the “anti-travel” (Kalder, 2006) end of place writing, along with writing that seeks value and understanding in the obscure, the ordinary, and the ugly. As a reader, it is hard not to feel some relief and pleasure on reading Braunias after spending time in the company of the ever-sensitive, ever-elegiac, ever-ecologically-minded Park.

One of the things that makes it hard to get a firm handle on Braunias’s stance in relation to his material is that he often writes as a satirist pushing things to their most extreme point for effect. In the Antarctica chapter his posture of virtual hatred of nature, and his celebration of it at its most brutal, seems to be partly just this, a pushing against what he calls the “standard line” (79). However, it also resonates with the wider focus of his book, where people are what most interest him and what he values. In a similar way his glances at colonial history are also in most cases just that — glances from which he moves on quickly and without generating much interest. Encountering “amazing white Waikato fog” in Mercer, for instance, he writes,

Strange to think of it descending through the ages, before the Māori and then after Mercer was settled, the town named after Captain Henry Mercer, shot through the head and killed at the battle of Rangiriri in 1863, descending when the railway line from Auckland reached Mercer in 1875, and in the winter of 1970, when Harvey and Jeanette Crewe were murdered. (128)

There is a seemingly unconscious elision here of the period of Māori inhabitation between “before the Māori” and “after Mercer was settled”, while it is not the battle of Rangiriri, one of the most decisive and brutal in the colonial invasion of the Waikato, that attracts further attention, but the 1970s murder which is vitally, for Braunias as journalist, within living memory. As traveller and writer Braunias pointedly focuses on how places are made and experienced by a particular set of people living in them now.

As if in explicit defence of Park’s shallow “plains people”, Braunias has a loving essay-chapter about the same location called, “Hauraki Plains: Country Roads”. This essay-chapter tells stories of people involved in the country music scene, which he describes as “an expression of good times and struggle on the back roads” (70). It is glancingly noted, without comment, that one of the most likeable characters in this essay works for Fonterra, the high profile dairy cooperative largely responsible for the farming intensification in the upper North Island in the past two decades (Knight 2016: 228–30). Of Pegasus, New Zealand’s newest town, Braunias writes, “I tried to hate Pegasus but failed: people got in the way”. In another chapter, “Wanaka: The Stories of Others”, Braunias gives over whole pages to people’s moving accounts of their own lives in Wanaka written during a creative writing class he ran, including the story of Beth McArthur, whom he evocatively describes as “lonely and sighing in the front of the class, daring to write about becoming a widow” (195). Park’s digger-wielding oafs, descendants of colonists and loggers, are Braunias’s drinking companions and storytellers, possessors of their own particular financial struggles, tragedies, and dreams. In Braunias places accumulate from a kind of “place-ballet” of ceaselessly mobile people’s everyday activities (David Seamon, qtd. in Cresswell, 2015: 64). This is place as sociology of the everyday.

The apparently “random” organization of Braunias’s book is intimately connected to this valorization of people’s everyday lives. “For three years”, he writes, “whenever I could, I went to places no one went to, drawn to their averageness, their nothingness, their banal and exhilarating New Zealandness” (2–3). He names his subject as “Ordinary people living in ordinary homes, bringing up the kids and bringing in the washing, getting on with the uncelebrated business of being New Zealanders in an economic slump” (3). As if to highlight his focus on small-scale mobility, “getting on” is one of Braunias’s favourite phrases. Rather sinisterly, he also uses the phrase for the activity of the skuas in Antarctica who are just “getting on with the ‘frantic business’ of eating [baby] penguins” (89). It is worth observing, too, that the “economistic desire-drive” of “getting on” is precisely what Stephen Turner singles out as the imperative by which settler New Zealand avoids the act of pausing or stopping to think that might lead to generalized anxiety about how they came to inhabit this place, and continue to dominate it (2011: 119). Indeed, the literal action of “getting on” is a profoundly untethered gesture, in some way the antithesis of engaging with a place. If we are to believe Braunias, “getting on” is basically twenty-first century New Zealand’s national song.

If the ultimate object of Park’s search is nature as it once was, Braunias’s is the “ordinary” New Zealander. Braunias’s claim to be simply presenting the “ordinary” or “average” is, of course, as fictive as the idea of untouched nature and no less politicized. It is striking, though, to observe that Park’s and Braunias’s very different Xanadus are equally dependent on ideas of the authentic or unspoiled, as well as on claims that this particular narrator has special access to hearing and therefore communicating the thing itself. Both writers, also, fuse their Xanadu with what they regard as quintessential New Zealand. In Braunias, “ordinary”, “average”, and “New Zealand”, or “New Zealander” are virtually interchangeable, just as in Park there is never a question that the natural environment is ultimately the source of New Zealand’s particularity.

Again, as in Park, Braunias’s particular understanding of place is intimately connected with the form he gives his text and to his particular authorial persona. His pose is of not making an argument, and essentially of not having a politics. The subtitle of a later essay about Auckland (Braunias, 2013), “Learning by Osmosis”, encapsulates this claim to be simply describing what is there. However, the effect of the series of encounters with place staged in Civilisation is of a kind of straining to present equivalence between all experiences — and between all places. Everywhere Braunias ends up, whether it is St Bathans in the deep south or the immigrant suburb of Mt Roskill in Auckland, he finds something like the same “New Zealandness”. Moreover, what he explicitly claims he finds, reinforced at both the start and end of Civilisation, is “an explicit New Zealand contentment, at lakeside and riverside, in the middle of arid plains, in the middle of polluted suburbs, in an ingeniously converted slaughterhouse loft” (5; emphasis added). Where Park sees a dying land, Braunias seems determined to forge an image of contentment and cohesion, essentially common to all New Zealanders and the places within New Zealand that he visits.

Braunias’s vision of place as made of people whose experiences are all equivalent is supported by his trademark no-bullshit journalist persona. He presents himself as being as interested in talking with the people who work at the Service Centre on the highway that has led to the collapse of a town centre as he is in talking to the long-term inhabitants of that town. In his city chapters such as “Mt Roskill: Welcome Home” and his later Auckland essay (Braunias, 2013) he takes on the role of a modern inner-city flâneur, moving through the streets meeting the various inhabitants of the twenty-first century global city, talking with recent Chinese, Fijian, Korean, Nigerian, and Iraqi immigrants as well as more long-term inhabitants. Whereas Park self-consciously speaks from a very particular socio-historic and gendered position as a Pākehā man living in a bicultural society, Braunias’s first-person implicitly claims to be able to speak with, and so in a sense for, everyone. In his later The Man Who Ate Lincoln Road he explicitly refers to his writerly practice of collecting people and experiences, in which what one collects is always oneself — or into oneself: “I was the sum of that collection” (Braunias, 2017: 12). In Civilisation there is little acknowledgement that Braunias is in fact a particular white, male, middle-class Aucklander dropping in and out of places. Instead, we get scenes where he appears to become “part of the furniture” (194) and to seamlessly become just one of the locals (usually one of the local men): “I got drinking with a bunch of unemployed men who drove in from nearby Meremere” (127). The paradoxical claim here is that the speaker is located outside the specifics of any particular ordinary experience of his own. In order to fulfil this role, his claim to the shared “ordinariness” he so prizes implied in statements such as, “We’re Aucklanders, and we’re stuck in traffic”, must be repeatedly set aside. While everyone else is preoccupied with “getting on”, the location-hopping writer, who parachutes into one place after another, moves about assembling his collective view: “But I was free to walk” (Braunias, 2013: 17; emphasis in original). In taking on the role of Everyman, his claim to ordinariness becomes annexed to a privileged claim to being able to access all ordinariness, whatever social or cultural form this takes. It can seem to collapse, in other words, into a claim to a kind of “unmarked individualism” of the universal “normative masculine human subject” that postcolonialism, feminism, and Indigenous studies have worked so hard to deconstruct (DeLoughrey, 2014: 325).

Meanwhile, the ceaseless work of “getting on” would seem to impede “ordinary” people’s own ability to themselves fully grasp the cross-section of experiences that make up their place and their experience. Braunias’s ordinary New Zealanders become like Michel de Certeau’s “ordinary practitioners of the city”, their bodies following “the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read” it (1984: 98). The effect is to make Braunias’s text curiously dependent on an emptied out idea of contented “New Zealandness”, which is basically everything, connected by the fact that the essayist himself encounters and comprehends them all.

The fact that things are not as cohesive and contented as the authorial stance and narrative structure of Braunias’s text implies emerges in a number of ways. His vision of easy contentment becomes particularly strained when he writes about multicultural Auckland. In Mt Roskill, which has the biggest Muslim population in New Zealand, Braunias visits the mosque on Stoddard Road and talks with Hanif Patel, the owner of the local dairy, who says, “‘I tell you what sort of bird the kiwi is. It’s a bullshit bird. Can’t bloody fly, sleeps all through the bloody day. Kiwi way is bullshit way!’” (111). Despite the fact that this would seem to contradict the general tenor of Braunias’s book in which everyone is a New Zealander, all New Zealanders are content, and there appears to be little conflict between world views, in this essay-chapter he blithely declares the “end of an era” (presumably of some fantasy of pre-multicultural New Zealand) and structures his narrative of street-hopping in a way that suggests he has no more kinship with the last white working-class inhabitants of the suburb than with the new immigrants (114). In the book as a whole, the strain of this stance becomes concentrated around an uneasy dichotomy between the “old New Zealand” and the “new”. In some of his Auckland writing Braunias casts Māori and Pākehā as equal members of a moribund and “impotent” “old New Zealand”, skewering them as “kiwi fatties” whose “New Zealand way of life” consists of “belligerence and complaint, […] aggression and claustrophobia, and […] large stupid children with wizened, bitter faces” (2013: 18, 26). At other points, though, as at the end of Civilisation, it is Braunias’s pose of ease about multicultural New Zealand that comes unstuck, as he couples his closing picture of New Zealanders as all round good sorts, echoing popular historian Michael King in his praise of New Zealanders as “good-hearted, practical, commonsensical and tolerant”, with evident anxiety:

So long as New Zealand actually had New Zealanders in it, but about a thousand were jumping across the Tasman every week. The great migration to Australia sometimes made it feel you belonged to a minority — the people left behind, the last remaining Māori and Pākehā, hemmed in by tides of Pacific Islanders and Asians and refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Hollywood. (239–40)

Suddenly, the new immigrants, including now even the very old immigrant groups of Pacific Islanders and Chinese, are no longer “New Zealanders”. They are imagined as coming from elsewhere in a frightening “tide”. Here a bicultural understanding of place also becomes subsumed into a vague and ultimately exclusionary version of “New Zealandness” in which Māori and Pākeha occupy a single position as those who came before. The crucial issue here is that there is little room in this narrative mode to acknowledge tension, either of individual response, or of an actual situation that involves a complicated mix of people who co-habit a place (and who might also be having a harmful effect on that place’s ecological balance). While Braunias’s text works as an evocative staging of diversity, its narrative mode and universalizing first-person speaker are unsuited to illuminating tension, and so to quite answering a need to find “new modes of cooperation and affiliation that confront, without necessarily resolving, the formidable difficulties that accompany the awareness of living among unshared values in a shared space” (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 129). There is little room for mixed feelings on Braunias’s twenty-first century island-nation, nor, perhaps, need for political action. In answer to his daughter’s question about what each place is like, Braunias’s response is, “You’d love it” (240).

The ecologist and the journalist

At times it can be hard to remember that ecological nature writers such as Geoff Park and cultural commentators such as Steve Braunias are involved in the act of imagining and constructing the same location. They can seem to be describing different planets. Yet both the ecological nature writer, and the journalist who serves up a version of the twenty-first century multicultural nation, play a role in how people understand the sites in which they live and so determine how they will act in them — whether that is in relation to the nonhuman environment and natural resources, in relation to (or through the actions of) a country’s Indigenous peoples, or toward new immigrants. A key effect of reading such texts alongside one another is that it illuminates how much a particular emphasis can obscure other aspects of a place, and how difficult it can be to hold multiple competing narratives simultaneously in mind. The exceptionally present settler-colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand, with its high profile, ongoing land negotiations based on Treaty of Waitangi land claims and public discourse of biculturalism, accompanied by the fact of increasingly culturally diverse immigrant cities, adds a particular kind of urgency to imaginings of place. For these reasons, Aotearoa New Zealand provides an especially useful lens for teasing out the persistence of competing claims on any place, on levels ranging from the most material claims of ownership and long and short term resources, to those of culture, language, and imagination. If Park errs on the side of sentimentalizing what is “unique” and important to a particular locale, and basing that on its nonhuman features coupled with an intertwined, and potentially exclusionary, effort toward human Indigeneity based on historical inhabitation, Braunias errs on the side of a continuous, undifferentiated present, with an accompanying erasure of difference that might lead to conflict. Park’s use of a specific, embodied, Pākehā persona enables the voicing of a complex relationship to the land, but also to an extent locks him into a backward-facing, elegiac stance of lament for the damage to the Indigenous environment and people wrought by colonialism. Braunias’s path, by contrast, denies him some of the explanatory power of history or of deep immersion in one place, and as a result to an extent limits the writer’s ability to represent aspects of the present.

Once brought into dialogue the two approaches to place-writing developed by Park and Braunias, perhaps, rather than being incommensurate as they would seem in these two particular instances, can instead offer up the possibility of richer and more integrated forms of nonfiction writing. Park’s work, for instance, has provided formal and conceptual models for such writing as Sally Blundell’s essays on Christchurch after the devastating 2011 earthquake, including “Amending the Map: A City of Becoming”. This essay begins with the literal eruption of a previous landscape of “wetlands […] grassland and swamp forest” through the “neat grid of streets” and the English gardens of the city (2013: 237). “We almost forgot”, Blundell begins (2013: 237). What can at times seem like environmental sentimentalism in a Wendell Berry or a Park, and exist as a somewhat abstract call to memory and homage of a prior nature, becomes brutal material fact in the context of a Christchurch. The same could be said of locations such as a flooded New Orleans or Houston or Florida, or a Californian city or Australian town threatened by wild fires. In these cases “natural disasters” enforce memories of the natural environments upon which layers of human community have been built, often with little attention to the environmental and human specificity of particular locales (or Indigenous knowledge of those locales acquired over centuries), whether they be drained swamp lands now subject to flooding, or deserts now heated ever further by climate change. Perhaps because of the particular circumstances and urgent demands of the Christchurch rebuild, Blundell to an extent also manages to reach beyond the tragedy of the ruination plot evident in Park to create that rarer work which, to use Calder’s words, “illuminates tensions between progress and despoliation in order to look past them” (2011: 138). This comes in part from the attention Blundell plays to the competing claims, still in process, of those continuing to live in Christchurch after the earthquake. In keeping with this, Blundell finds ways to extend more compassion to ordinary dwellers in place than Park does, taking a journalistic approach reminiscent of Braunias’s but with a more foregrounded sense of the competing demands on place and of the potential need for political struggle. Finding ways to pay attention to the “particular” natural environment of a place is still presented as a critical necessity in Blundell, in fact the term “parochial” is used as positive and essential by one of the people Blundell talks to, a Māori Ngāi Tahu architect involved in the rebuild (2013: 246). However, in Blundell’s essay this has evolved into something like what David Harvey, in his more favourable assessment of place (following Raymond Williams), calls “militant particularism” in explicit resistance to the notion of the global city and the forces of global capitalism (Blundell, 2013: 244–46; Cresswell, 2015: 96; Harvey, 1993). Here, understanding emerges from the intensely local, but not in ways that foreclose it from being globally open and connected (Smith, 2017: 16–17, 43–44). Finding subtle, rich, and open ways of imagining and telling stories about particular places is perhaps more urgent than it has ever been. These nonfiction texts that make place their explicit subject demonstrate that where we position ourselves within stories of place, and which narratives we privilege, will make all the difference to what kind of place we conceive the world to be.