Abstract
The Pākehā (settler) writing that flourished in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century is often seen as an attempt to ground settler culture in the precolonial earth. Produced at a time when erosion was seen as a pressing national and global environmental crisis, however, this essay argues New Zealand literary culture in fact was suffused with awareness of settlement’s profoundly damaged landscape. Returning to prominent critical statements, prose, and poetry from this period — notably by Allen Curnow, Charles Brasch, Monte Holcroft, and Frank Sargeson — reveals that imagery of erosion was central to imagining the nature and impact of settlement in geological terms. In contrast to the antagonistic relationship with nature plotted in these texts, writers such as Ursula Bethell and Herbert Guthrie-Smith offered alternative possibilities for environmental thought through models of geological understanding that drew on religious vocabularies and Māori thought. At the broadest level, focusing on settler literature produced in a moment of environmental crisis framed in geological terms has the potential to illuminate critical responses to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.
Keywords
“This new element of the New Zealand landscape”
One of the most familiar critical narratives of the flourishing of Pākehā (settler) writing in New Zealand in the middle decades of the twentieth century — a period described variously as “cultural nationalism”, “literary nationalism”, or “critical nationalism” — is that it was a quest for an aesthetic register capable of representing the land on its own terms, a more authentic vision of place to overcome an alienated settler condition. Writers were motivated by the “anti-myth”, Lawrence Jones argues, of a flawed relationship between settler culture and the land it inhabited:
The anti-myth thus defines the New Zealand land as harsh, lonely, isolated, and the people’s relationship to it as unseeing, alienated, exploitative. Yet the anti-myth seems to hold hope. A deep, organic relationship with the land is possible with a change of heart, a change in attitude. (Jones, 2003: 194)
Writing about the “New Zealand land” encompassed the entirety of its environment — forests, rivers, and mountains, in both South and North Islands — but at its rhetorical centre was the earth itself. Francis Pound (2009: 51) describes a “soil mysticism” that infused the literature and art of cultural nationalism with a desire to worship at the “ancient temple of the New Zealand earth”. “This much is certain”, he writes: “In New Zealand Nationalist rhetoric, the canvas or page spreads all over the native earth, and that earth is spread all over the page or canvas” (Pound, 2009: 53). In such accounts, the meaning of the earth appears obvious. The soil — and, by implication, the wider landscape — is purely autochthonous. Static, inert, timeless, and outside of human culture, it provides an inert substrate upon which the psychodrama of settler identity formation might play out.
Certainly, references to soil pervade the cultural manifestos and commentaries that began to pour out of New Zealand presses from the 1930s onwards. “Culture is a growth”, Roderick Finlayson maintained in Our Life in this Land (1940):
And what it grows from is the soil and the honest cultivation of the soil […] [A]fter one hundred years of settlement we are strangers in a strange land, having no identity with the soil nor even any knowledge of it. We are much greater strangers indeed than our pioneering grandparents were. (Finlayson, 1940: 15)
A link between soil and culture is also made in the period’s most influential critical statement, Allen Curnow’s introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse, 1923–1945 (1987/1945: 45), which valorizes the New Zealand poet as questing for “forms as immediate in experience as the island soil under his feet”. Such claims reflect the impetus of a Romantic nationalist sentiment, influenced most directly by the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Walt Whitman, and extending back to the writings of Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried von Herder. This posited that national identity derives from a deep emotional attachment of a people to the territory they inhabit (Newton, 2017: 26–30; Penrose, 2002: 286–287). In the second edition of his anthology, published in 1951, Curnow again invoked the earth to suggest that poetry might support the emergence of a “common imagination” better attuned to the colony’s “natural order”:
We are fortunate that some not insubstantial poems have sprung from those very anxieties about our footing upon our own soil, our standing in the world, which must continue to inhibit us as a people […] [I]t is clear that some of the poems of the last half-decade begin to flourish in a soil already broken and tenanted. (1987/1945: 74)
Such “anxieties” are easily read as metaphor, yet another expression of an unheimlich sense of settler identity disturbed by an Indigenous presence it is nevertheless unable to acknowledge (Smith, 2011: 114). However, Curnow’s concern over “our footing upon our own soil” also resonates, more directly, with a growing sense of alarm over the physical instability of the colonized landscape.
Patrick Evans (1990: 96) recounts the poet and publisher Denis Glover’s “joking habit” of referring to cultural nationalism’s iconic literary journal, Landfall, as “Landslip”, which he reads metaphorically as demonstrating its contributors’ “desire to bury the past”. Yet Glover’s joke has a more literal meaning, given the repeated references to erosion contained within its covers. In Landfall, essays on culture touched on the “magnitude of the soil erosion problem” (Olssen, 1949: 213); poems pondered “the heart’s erosion” (Newbury, 1955: lines 6, 10); short stories described “erosion-sagged earth and bleak hill-pasture” (Shadbolt, 1956: 313). Put another way, we have thus far read the cultural nationalist preoccupation with the soil in isolation from the actual state of the colonial landscape at the time. I wish to explore how our understanding of these familiar authors and texts, which constitute “not just the most studiously mythologised chapter in our literary history, but also […] the most critically productive” (Newton, 2017: 15), might change if we read less allegorically, and begin not with culture but with nature: that is, by looking for the scars of erosion.
The meaning of cultural nationalism’s “soil mysticism” takes on a different hue when viewed from the perspective of a contemporaneous work of geography: Kenneth Cumberland’s Soil Erosion in New Zealand: A Geographical Reconnaissance (1944).
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Drawing on extensive fieldwork, Cumberland’s central contention was that New Zealand was indeed distinguished by its soil — due to the severity of its problems with erosion. Despite being “the youngest of the British Dominions”, he begins, New Zealand “has a soil erosion problem of greater significance in its relation to the future well-being of the country than has any one of the older members of the Commonwealth” (1944: 6). Cumberland’s (1944: 178) subsequent analysis strongly suggests that the “island soil” invoked by Curnow could no longer be understood in isolation from settler culture:
In view of the short history of European occupance of the area, it is surprising how widely surface soil in New Zealand has been given a quite new character. The character of some soils is almost completely man-made: others owe more to man and his animals than they do to the natural soil-making processes: still others are to a varying minor degree man-modified. […] In altering the topsoil man’s agents have been fire […] the plough and a host of related soil-working devices, the hooves and jaws of millions of introduced animals, drainage and reclamation operations, artificial fertilizers, and exotic grasses, crops and weeds.
In charting the consequences of the colonial displacement of “natural” with “cultural” vegetation — that is, forests with grasslands — Cumberland zeroed in on the “instability and reversion of […] hill grazings”, where “accelerated mass-movement of soil occurs almost universally” and is producing “depressing spectacles of desolation” (1944: 169, 170). “Miles upon miles of the Hawkes Bay, Poverty Bay, Wanganui, and Taranaki-Whangamomona inlands have slip scarred slopes and silt and stump-strewn talwegs”, he observes: “The recent history of these regions is one of abandonment, of decreasing population, of a succession of serious floods, and of slip-severed communications” (1944: 170). Indeed, erosion was contributing to the “strongly differentiated” character of the nation’s regions: “In its varied forms and incidence this new element of the New Zealand landscape intensifies the personality of areas and facilitates their differentiation” (1944: 7, 8). Soil Erosion in New Zealand testifies that, by the middle decades of the twentieth century, Pākehā writers could not straightforwardly appeal to ideas of unspoilt nature. When writers mentioned the soil under their feet, or lifted their eyes to the hills, they did so with an awareness of settlement’s thorough and ongoing geological impact.
In suggesting turning our gaze once more to the landscapes of mid-century New Zealand literature, it is not to reposition their authors as unappreciated environmentalists. Rather it is because of their potential to illuminate the ways we now talk about the Anthropocene, “a geologic epoch in which humans have become the major force determining the continuing livability of the earth”, and the challenges and possibilities associated with its literary conceptualization (Tsing et al., 2017: G1). The archive of cultural nationalism attests to a dawning awareness that the impact of settlement was geological in nature, and a growing anxiety that settler society’s economic and social priorities were imperilling its ongoing viability. Attending to this strikingly orogenic sense of environmental crisis — and the rich and complex literary responses it generated — supports the broader critical project of historical recollection in response to the Anthropocene proposed by Anna Tsing and her collaborators in Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet:
[W]e approach this problem by showing readers how to pay better attention to overlaid arrangements of human and nonhuman living spaces, which we call “landscapes”. Our hope is that such attention will allow us to stand up to the constant barrage of messages asking us to forget — that is, to allow a few private owners and public officials with their eyes focused on short-term gains to pretend that environmental devastation does not exist. (Tsing et al., 2017: G1; emphasis in original)
In what follows, I first place New Zealand’s mid-century settler writing more fully in a context of growing national and international alarm about erosion. In New Zealand, its pace and scale were “enormously accelerated” by widespread deforestation, as the geomorphologist C. A. Cotton (1945: 110) put it. The occurrence of dramatic flooding events highlighted its apparent threat to the very possibility of settler culture. I then highlight the prevalence of references to erosion in criticism and commentary by Curnow, Monte Holcroft, and Charles Brasch. In so doing, I suggest that their calls for new aesthetic practices and forms of identity were often founded on appeals not to a pre-contact soil but to colonization’s damaged earth. Next, geology is shown to inform a range of literary works — prose by Frank Sargeson, poetry by Curnow and Brasch — by shaping plots, perspectives, and notions of historical time. This collectively expresses an antagonistic, masculinized opposition between geological nature and settler culture. I conclude by considering some contrasting approaches to imagining the relationship between geology and settler culture — Ursula Bethell’s poem “Weathered Rocks” (1936), and Herbert Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921/1953) — in order to suggest the cultural value of multifaceted literary responses to such complex and implicating environmental questions.
“When anarchy breaks loose in Nature”
Concerns about erosion were not restricted to New Zealand, or even to the twentieth century, but were consistently marked by the assertion of linkages between soil and culture. The rise of geological science in the early nineteenth century had taught the Victorians to think of erosion as an “insensible process” that took place over “the immensity of time” (Lyell, 1830: 63). Erosion was brought within a human timescale, however, by George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (2003/1864). In his book, Marsh stressed the links between deforestation and processes of desertification, and the volume quickly achieved global prominence (Lowenthal, 2003: 303–305). His prediction that the new world would follow the pattern of the Roman Empire, where “the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon” (Marsh, 2003/1864: 42), influenced debates and legislation in numerous colonial jurisdictions, including New Zealand (McKelvey, 1995: 31–34). By the 1930s, erosion had again become a matter of widespread scientific and political concern. The Dust Bowl in the United States and similar dust storms in southeast Australia were spurring concerns about global food supply (Cattle, 2016).
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The threat posed to Western ideas of culture and progress was brought to the fore by two scientists from Oxford’s Imperial Bureau of Soil Science, G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. In The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion (1939), they argued:
To gain control over the soil is the greatest achievement of which mankind is capable. The organization of civilized societies is founded upon the measures taken to wrest control of the soil from wild Nature, and not until complete control has passed into human hands can a stable superstructure of what we call civilization be erected on the land[.] (Jacks and Whyte, 1939: 17)
The stakes were especially high in settler colonies such as New Zealand, where colonial identity and economic survival were both inextricably bound up with the success of agricultural production. At a popular level, an interest in the remediation of the soil is evidenced by the popularity of Compost Magazine, which began publication in 1941 as the official organ of what would become the Soil and Health Association of New Zealand, and had a circulation of 44,000 by 1944 (Stuart, 2011: 15). Its editor, the poet A. R. D. Fairburn, maintained in one column that “all offences against the soil” ought to be criminalized as acts of sabotage for “strik[ing] at the very foundations of our existence” (Fairburn, 1944: 1; see also Evans, 2007: 131–132). At the same time, one New Zealand soil scientist (Taylor, 1938: 659) wrote in 1938, “Much is heard of public assets — good buildings, roads, railways, and the like are regarded with pride — but, next to the people themselves, the outstanding asset of this Dominion is the soil”. Yet Jacks and Whyte, the latter raised and educated in New Zealand, suggested that the transplantation of British understandings of soil risked doom for such populations, rendering them “more like a plant that will burst its bud and blossom for short time in a vase than like a tree that will grow indefinitely with its roots in fertile soil” (1939: 17). Erosion was thus cast as a problem of “human ecology”, a symptom of “maladjustment of human communities to their environment” that also signalled pending societal risk: “For when anarchy breaks loose in Nature the involvement of mankind in the consequences cannot long be delayed” (1939: 36–37). Such disorder was indeed increasingly apparent across the highly modified landscapes of New Zealand.
In New Zealand, rising concerns over hillside erosion were inseparable from discussions of deforestation and flooding, 3 and their implications for the pastoral and agricultural economies (Beattie, 2003). “And now we have erosion”, wrote the historian J. C. Beaglehole (1940: 45), in an essay on “The New Zealand Mind”: “the farmer, standing on the paddock he has ploughed and grassed and top-dressed, may watch a river in flood after a day and night’s rain sweep down from the treeless hills and carry away farm and fences, strip by strip, or cover the whole thing with mud to his window sills”. In the century since British sovereignty was imposed in 1840, New Zealand’s forests had been systematically erased through fire, sawmilling, and the introduction of new animal species. Indeed, they had been “converted”, as Cumberland (1944: 165) put it, “into an elaborate and progressive farm”. Economic historian J. B. Condliffe (1930: 116, 118) lamented the “depressing story” of New Zealand’s forests, such that “to-day the forest area of the Dominion is […] less than a third of what it was in 1840”. The impact of deforestation was heightened by topography — the landscape is predominantly hilly, even mountainous — and by climate: “the greater part of New Zealand has heavy precipitation. Five-sixths of the total area have over 40 inches annual precipitation and of this almost 75 per cent has over 60 inches” (Cumberland, 1944: 143). As Marsh had pointed out long before, the risk of calamitous landscape degradation was highest “in countries of irregular and mountainous surface, and in climates where the precipitation is confined chiefly to a single season” (2003/1864: 47). By the 1920s, the pastoral frontier had effectively closed as settlers reached the limits of available exploitable land. The newly-created hill country pasture was already visibly undergoing the geological process of “denudation”, or soil erosion. “Much evil can therefore be attributed to clearing of the bush lands”, declared an editorial in the New Zealand Herald (1925: 8). This went on: “Floods in time of heavy rain, parched soil in dry spells, erosion on steep country, land slides, silting of river mouths, all these evils are aggravated if not entirely due to forest destruction”. A little more than a decade later, one event in particular brought these concerns to a head in a manner that precipitated a cultural crisis of sorts, and eventually prompted a degree of meaningful government action.
In April 1938, over a period of two and a half days, as much as 24 inches of rain fell in the fertile Esk Valley, in the Hawke’s Bay region on the east coast of the North Island. The hills of the valley had been converted to pasture, so that the deluge simply washed the soil off the exposed slopes. Consequently, in the lower parts of the valley where the population was greatest and agricultural production most prolific, an area of 1,750 acres was covered in at least three and a half feet of silt and some parts were buried up to ten feet deep (Cowie, 1957: 69–71). As the scale of the event became apparent, the almost total desolation of an exemplary scene of settlement was held to be little short of a national catastrophe. As the New Zealand Herald (1938: 17) reported a few weeks later:
The descriptions of utter ruin in the once beautiful Esk Valley, near Napier, have not been exaggerated in the slightest. A few weeks ago this valley was not only among the most picturesque, but also among the wealthiest farming areas in New Zealand, its fertile lands so perfectly tended that they recalled glimpses of English landscape. To-day it is nothing but a leaden layer of silt.
The Esk Valley flood spurred the creation of a government-commissioned committee of inquiry into questions of soil deterioration, which in turn led to the passage of the Soil Conservation and Rivers Control Act (1941), described by one geographer (McCaskill, 1973: 27) as “the most important date in the history of land use in New Zealand”. It was also upon such eroded terrain, therefore, that New Zealand literature took a new shape between the 1930s and 1950s.
“The world which poetry builds anew”
Many of cultural nationalism’s most prominent manifestos and critical statements frame their concerns in geological terms. Critics have consistently read these references as predicated upon a sense of the natural world as untouched by colonization. Patrick Evans (1990: 93–94), talking of Monte Holcroft’s critical writings about the landscape, finds New Zealand depicted as “an unavoidable, brooding presence, something enormously solid and at times threatening”. He maintains that writers of the period felt the land’s “potential as an authorising spirit for art […] [to be] a given that barely needs to be questioned”. In a similar vein, John Newton (2017: 174) observes of the proliferation of writing about the South Island’s mountainous landscape that its appeal lay in being “configured as a frozen desert, historically uninhabited because sublimely uninhabitable. The task of the settler is simply to tame it”. Indeed, on first glance, Allen Curnow’s references to the “forbiddingly different” appearance of the land, and to “a natural time, a natural order, to which our presence in these islands is accidental, irrelevant” (1987/1945: 47, 71), seem to task writers with confronting the precolonial natural world. Thus the poet who comes to feel “his own land and people, his footing on the earth, to be in any way inadequate, unstable, unreal”, faces an obligation to more securely bind the settler population to the soil it possesses (Curnow 1987/1945: 49). Yet any indigenizing impulse such comments might suggest is complicated by some earlier comments by Curnow. A year or two previously he had written about poetic “fantasies of indigenous plant and tree”, which he dismissed in favour of works that portrayed the pine tree, “symbol, as it is indeed far more than the native forest, of the peopled landscape of New Zealand” (1987/1943: 40). Monte Holcroft made a more literal appeal to the soil in his lengthy essay, The Waiting Hills (1950/1943), arguing that the task of local poets was “to acclimatize the muse”:
[T]o open their minds and the minds of their readers to influences that can be found in this country and nowhere else. […] The hills, the rivers, the plains and the forest: all the moulded contours, the granite foundations and the vegetable growths of our moist soil are new things, new combinations of form and colour in the world which poetry builds anew from the flow of appearances. (1950/1943: 172)
Here, too, the apparent appeal to unspoilt nature is more fraught than first appears, for the deeply colonial act of acclimatization involves imposition as much as adaptation. Writing in 1950, government ecologist K. A. Wodzicki (1950: 2) echoed Holcroft’s language in describing how multiple distinct phases of acclimatization activity had created “a new complex environment” in New Zealand. Put in this light, Holcroft’s emphasis appears to fall less on ideas of untouched nature than on new possibilities — “new things, new combinations of form and colour” — yet this is still admittedly some distance from an explicit discussion of erosion.
The subject of erosion is taken up directly, however, as the manifestos’ most frequently cited environmental concern. Although motivated by numerous factors — a perceived attenuation of national culture associated with the soil; a critique of transactional attitudes towards land; and anxiety about the long-term viability of the nation — appeals to soil and belonging are above all inseparable from claims of cultural crisis. W. H. Pearson’s (1974/1952: 28) critique of settler culture, “Fretful Sleepers: A Sketch of New Zealand Behaviour and Its Implications for the Artist”, published in Landfall in 1952, argues that Pākehā “haven’t made friends with the land”:
We use it as a convenience, an expedient: no farmer that I know draws breath with a change of light on the foothills, sieves the earth through friendly fingers. If he did he wouldn’t let it run wild with gorse and blackberries, then cruelly put a match to them regardless of soil erosion.
A decade earlier, Curnow (1987/1943: 33) had pointed out that the aesthetic critique of deforestation offered by nineteenth-century poets such as William Pember Reeves by mid-century had fresh urgency for “[a] later generation worried by erosion and other soil problems”, as that “poetical argument […] has been taken up by scientists”.
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Returning to the same theme in the Introduction to the Book of New Zealand Verse, Curnow (1987/1945: 49) details “The revenges of Nature in our own time, erosion, exhaustion of the land”. Holcroft also discusses erosion in the lectures published as Creative Problems in New Zealand (1948), which Stephen Hamilton (2008: 153) suggests he “regarded [as] his best work”. Here the land is unquestionably presented as degraded, evidence of a profound misalignment of settler values:
But we see also the bare hillsides, the remnants of forest, the flooding rivers, and in some districts the impoverished soil. The balance of nature has changed. Are we to assume that a people which possessed the land in this manner — raping it in the name of progress — can remain untroubled and secure in occupation? (Holcroft, 1948: 25–26)
Surveying the nascent environmental movement, Holcroft (1948: 26) argued that it represented “symptoms of uneasiness, of a growing realization that a new land cannot be exploited with impunity”. At such a moment, Holcroft comes close to asserting that the geological agency wrought by settlement is rendering life unsustainable.
In response to these concerns, commentators did not simply envisage a restoration of the pre-colonial soil or the ecosystems that it once sustained. Instead they sought to imagine how Pākehā culture might now be established upon these damaged foundations. The logic is spelled out most clearly in Charles Brasch’s (1941) essay, “New Zealand, Man and Nature”, published not in a literary journal but in The Geographical Magazine. The essay begins with another version of the commonplace that settler culture is yet to establish an appropriate relationship with the New Zealand landscape: “The settlement of New Zealand by Europeans, though now more than a century old, has not yet resulted in a marriage between the people and the country” (1941: 332). Unsettling the idea of a happy marriage, Brasch also asserted the legitimacy of prior attempts to transform the land, which he cast in language that verges on sexual violence. The whole purpose of settlement to date, he argued, has been an attempt to “penetrate and win a living from this intractable country, to overcome or circumvent the natural obstacles of bush, great mountain ranges, sweeping rivers” (1941: 332). Now that a settler population has been established, however, a new attitude is required: “Nature was an enemy. But at last man has established himself; he meets nature as an equal, and is no longer to be threatened, no longer on sufferance” (1941: 332). The task of settler artistic production is to meaningfully interpret the new landscapes of colonization. What is more, “all our seeing must be temporary”, until the emergence of a genuinely local aesthetic can bring about “the marriage that we await between the people and the country, and their real maturity” (1941: 342). Thus, Brasch envisages literature and art will emerge from a direct relationship with a land that has first been beaten into submission.
“Among the shaggy mountains cast away | Man’s shape must be recast”
Among prose writers, the processes and effects of erosion were explored most directly and extensively by Frank Sargeson, notably in the short story, “‘Gods Live in Woods’” (1943), and his first novel, I Saw in My Dream (1949). Both are based on the experiences of Sargeson’s uncle as a sheep farmer in the hills of Te Rohe Pōtae/the King Country, a region that Cumberland (1944: 170) described as one of the North Island’s “depressing spectacles of desolation”.
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“‘Gods Live in Woods’” is set on a hilly sheep farm that still bears traces of the deforestation that transformed it into pasture — its “marriage” to the settler population, in Brasch’s terms — and is now increasingly under threat from the effects of those changes:
[P]laces where the grass still held were scarred by slips that showed up the clay and papa [soft mudstone]. One of these had come down from above the track, and piled up on it before going down into the creek. A chain or so of fence had been in its way and it had gone too. You could see some posts and wires sticking out of the clay. (1982: 229)
The “great bare faces” of the landslips not only show the changes that colonization has wrought on the landscape, but also convey a sense that the resultant settler culture lacks depth. It is “as though everything to see was there to be seen”, in stark contrast to the small area retaining its original forest cover, where “you couldn’t help but feel that it was quite different” (1982: 229–30). Sargeson returns to a similarly blighted scene in I Saw in My Dream. “That’s where a man’s farm goes […] down into the swamp, or else down the creek”, one farmer observes of the hilly terrain: “They talk about people leaving home, but round these parts it’s more a case of home leaving them” (1949: 126). The novel suggests that the place of the “white man” on the land is “only […] on a sort of lease”, regardless of the legality or otherwise of any claim to its ownership, “with the wear and tear all the time getting him down” (1949: 136). Indeed, the least sympathetic Pākehā farmers in the novel ultimately meet their fate in a landslide, their home engulfed by “a hill of rock and soil and clay that was glistening wet, running with water, and looking almost liquid and somehow alive as it still moved and tumbled and slid and settled” (1949: 268). While such an ending appears as a straightforward matter of retribution, “the natural order’s resourcefulness on hitting back” against the impositions of pastoralism (Sargeson, 1973: 54), beneath it lies a sense that such geological upheaval is now an intrinsic and unavoidable part of colonial life.
It is more common in poetry, however, to find settlement conceived of in geological terms. Geology is occasionally an explicit subject, as in A. R. D. Fairburn’s Dominion (1938), “an ambitious national epic in which there is some confusion about whether the ‘nation’ reside in the people or the place” (Stead, 2002/1966: 69). In that poem, Fairburn’s (1938: lines 37–40) critique of present-day New Zealand is traced in part to its unglamorous prehistoric origins: “These islands; | the remnant peaks of a lost continent, | roof of an old world, molten droppings | from earth’s bowels, gone cold”. More commonly, a geological perspective is manifested in the abandonment of an individualized lyric persona in favour of a concern with “man”, and the comprehension of historical time in terms of geographical change. Both features are on display in a couplet from Curnow’s poem, “The Scene”, originally included in a collection, Island and Time (1941), whose name suggests an earth-systems textbook: “Here among the shaggy mountains cast away | Man’s shape must be recast” (2017/1941: lines 5–6). As Newton observes, Curnow’s poems from this time “insist grimly on a human scale, in which geography is the setting for repeated failures of consciousness” (Newton, 2017: 176). The same poem elevates a nameless farmer to a universal symbol of the settler project, caught between erosion and economic exigencies:
Here will be one who begs One season more to bind his difficult acres Devoured by rivers or blind with early snow; Man’s still equivocal face Brave in cloudbursts, disordered by figures When clerks confirm what the winds overthrow. (Curnow, 2017/1941: 43–48)
Many of Brasch’s poems also approach the problem of settlement as a collision between “man” and geology. In the third of three linked poems, “The Land and the People (iii)”, Brasch (1939: lines 15–19) writes, “Only in the wash of time | Identifying, as the sea | Isolates, can earth and man | Into understanding grow | And to a common instinct come”. Brasch (1945: lines 13–15, 21) also invokes an abstract settler “man” in “The Silent Land”, one of the central exhibits in Curnow’s Book of New Zealand Verse, which imagines sufficient passage of time such that “earth will tame her tamer”: “Man must lie with the gaunt hills like a lover, | Earning their intimacy in the calm sigh | Of a century of quiet and assiduity”. Patrick Evans (Evans, 1990: 115) has argued that this remarkable demand — to “lie with the gaunt hills like a lover” — “expresses perfectly” the cultural nationalists’ imagined “fusion of self and place”. Yet in describing the hills as “gaunt” — emaciated and denuded — Brasch calls for nothing less than an eroticized settler identification with a damaged landscape.
By the 1960s, the geological impact of settlement had become something of a touchstone for imagining Pākehā identity. A sonnet by Hubert Witheford (1950: lines 5–8) could thus deploy erosion as a metaphor for disillusionment and ageing: “And now the autumn of my mind, | And now with rake and spade to toil | To gather up the flooded land | Where water gouged great pits like graves”. Such texts demonstrate the ecological concept of “shifting baseline syndrome”, whereby “newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality” (Tsing et al., 2017: G6). The most sustained poetic explanation for this literary normalization of erosion is provided by Brasch’s “Letter from Thurlby Domain” (1957), a meditation on the ruins of the mansion built by his great-grandfather in the wake of the Otago gold rushes of the 1860s. Building on the ideas outlined in “New Zealand, Man and Nature”, Brasch (1957: lines 59–61) imagines settlement’s environmental impacts as a form of sexual violence: “Cast on this Eden we must violate still, | Where shall we find that good for which we do ill | By necessity, but so long?” Yet through the changes now wrought by nonhuman nature, something amounting to “reconciliation, the laying of a ghost” has occurred in response to the harms caused by settlement, “brute man breaking in on nature, | Defiling its sanctities, altering its rhythm and feature, | That represents us all” (1957: 21–24). Brasch does not view the decaying estate as a resurgence of “primitive nature”, as Sargeson (1973: 55) saw at work on his uncle’s declining farm. Instead he treats it as a coming to terms with an “earth” that is already “man’s earth”, fundamentally transformed by settlement: “is it not now | Man’s, marked with the sign of axe and plough, | Watered, shaded, settled?” (1957: 30–33). It is just such acts of aestheticizing the colonized land, rendering it picturesque, that Brasch (1957: 5) imagines will “marry us to the earth”.
“And we are kin, compounded of the same elements”
Taken together, the texts under discussion so far plot an antagonistic relationship between present-day settler culture and the earth, “a soil which is a living force hostile to our intrusion” as one review of Brasch put it (Stead, 1957: 257). The refusal to view the landscape with sentiment is of a piece with cultural nationalism’s vehement reaction against the literary sensibility of an earlier mode of colonial writing. Curnow (1987/1943: 33) had taken particular aim at what he felt was a feminized avoidance of reality, which “constructs naturalistic whimsies upon situations merely personal or sentimental”. He lauded instead a masculine agonism of “searching heart and brain for a real earth to live in” (1987/1943: 39). Denis Glover’s (2012/1937: lines 68–69) infamous misogynistic attack on women writers, “The Arraignment of Paris”, similarly dismissed the intrusion of sentiment into portrayals of nature: “in great gulps the scenery they swallow; | out come their notebooks, down go pretty phrases”. By contrast, the soon-to-be canonical poet James K. Baxter (2001/1953: lines 19–21) would assert the bleaker view that this male literary culture was in search of: “For us, the land is matrix and destroyer, | Resentful, darkly known | By sunset omens”. One consequence of this sharply gendered valuing of literary production was the foreclosure of other means of understanding settler culture in geological terms. As Newton points out,
[T]his re-gendered regime will eclipse (make invisible) an earlier system of aesthetic priorities and values. […] In a language that nationalism shares with first-wave modernism, the “feminine” is aesthetically re-coded, so that creative priorities at odds with those of nationalism (beauty, for example, or spirituality or sentiment) must now contend, in unequal struggle, with the force of militant masculinity. (2017: 129–130)
Accordingly, I wish to conclude by highlighting two alternative literary formulations of geology from this period that offered different ways of conceptualizing the settler relationship with the natural world.
First is Ursula Bethell, whose rise to prominence came late in life, with the publication of her collection, From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929). Her work earned a tenuous place in Curnow’s anthology due to its formal experimentation. However, his enthusiasm was severely qualified due to its mysticism and “recondite words, ill-placed, or perverse phrasing […] descriptive contrivances and mannerisms” (1987/1945: 74): 70). Bethell’s garden was located in the hills outside Christchurch, in the South Island, with a view of the Southern Alps mountain range. Her poems are often coloured by a geological perspective that diminishes the human without framing that relationship as a conflict. Such sentiments are expressed most radically in “Weathered Rocks”, from the collection Time and Place (1936). Bethell begins by rejecting the anthropocentrism of poetry that, through placing “one in the similitude of another”, diminishes the natural order: “Chaining the whole universe to the ecstasies | Of humanity” (1997/1936: lines 2, 3–4). Instead, contemplating the richly varied appearance of naturally eroded mountain boulders, “Tattoo’d and stained, silvered, denigrated”, the poem asserts they have “no equivalent” (1997/1936: 5, 7). Drawing on yet also exceeding her Anglican theology, Bethell’s recognition of independent meaning and value asserts an ontological equality between the human and the geological realm, which in turn enables a more relational logic of understanding: “Rock, thorn, cryptogram, each has significance, | Each makes contribution to eternal parabole; | And we are kin, compounded of the same elements, | Alike proceeding to an unknown goal” (1997/1936: 17–20). The poem concludes by imagining “when informed particular | Has respect unto the dignity of the whole” (1997/1936: 27–28). Bethell’s acknowledgment of geological “dignity” somewhat resembles the “thing materialism” described by political philosopher Janet Bennett (2004: 349). For Bennett, “one moral of this materialist tale is that we are also nonhuman and that things too are vital players in the world”. As she writes, “I pursue this project in the hope of fostering greater recognition of the agential powers of natural and artifactual things, greater awareness of the dense web of their connections with each other and with human bodies, and, finally, a more cautious, intelligent approach to our interventions in that ecology” (Bennett, 2004: 349). What is perhaps most striking about “Weathered Rocks”, therefore, is that it comes to these materialist sentiments by way of a seemingly outmoded theology and an aesthetic practice equally peripheral to the avant-garde of cultural nationalism.
Second is Herbert Guthrie-Smith, who in the 1880s became part-owner of the Tutira sheep station in the Hawke’s Bay region, not far from the Esk Valley. Over the subsequent decades, he chronicled the interrelationships between the geology, flora, fauna, and human populations in and around the sheep station, in what is now recognized as a canonical work of environmental literature, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (1921). Evans has described Guthrie-Smith’s project as an attempt “to establish the land in its own right as a solid geological entity under the reader’s feet, a ‘Pākehā turangawaewae’ that can endure” (2007: 122). Yet Tutira stands out for the manner in which it imagines the land itself. This imagining differs profoundly from that found anywhere elsewhere in the forms and dispositions of cultural nationalism. Tutira recounts the Māori history of the area, detailing a dense constellation of place names and stories gleaned from conversations with elders of the Ngāti Kurumōkihi hapū (subtribe). It is this encounter with a Māori worldview that allows Guthrie-Smith to articulate the idea that the land might not be simply an inert or indifferent resource:
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 kahore nei i whakaaro ki te 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. (Guthrie-Smith, 1953: 325; emphasis in original)
In contrast to the possibilities of antagonism or marriage employed by other writers, Guthrie-Smith transmutes his understanding of “the traditions of the Maori race” into the language of rights and obligations. This sidesteps the possibility of a more profound affiliation with the Māori understanding of the land as Papatūānuku, or Mother Earth, where “People’s emotional, intellectual and spiritual selves are born daily from the land, and thought itself is seen as coming from the land” (Royal, 2010: 40). Nevertheless, Guthrie-Smith shifts the discussion from questions of emotion and sentiment — the domain of personal ethics — onto a legal terrain where land is now endowed with independence and is approached as a political partner. Indeed, Guthrie-Smith’s conception of rights appears to echo the indigenous legal principles of tikanga Māori. Here, as Jacinta Ruru (2018: 217) describes, “contracts concern not the transfer of rights for a prescribed consideration or immediate return, as is typical in Western transactions, but the establishment of a permanent and personal relationship with reciprocal obligations where the main benefit to both sides would come in the course of time”. As with Bethell, it is notable that the ability of Tutira to articulate an alternative understanding of geology — and thus to shift the terms of wider environmental debate — is also derived from outside of the Pākehā aesthetic and intellectual mainstream.
In broad terms, this essay has suggested the value of returning to the past environmental wreckage of colonized places, and the forms of cultural expression that took shape in such contexts, with an awareness of widespread and pressing environmental crisis in the present day. On the one hand, familiar literary archives take on a new urgency when they are no longer approached with an assumption that the land and environment are merely the stage for dramas of identity and aesthetics. On the other hand, settler writers’ responses to the complexities of environmental degradation have the potential to jolt us into new ways of thinking. In the environmental humanities, discussion of the Anthropocene does not typically focus on the material substances of geology, so much as on the broad array of planetary-scale environmental changes wrought by human activity. “Originally defined as the age in which humanity came to have an impact upon long-term geological processes”, point out Greg Garrard et al. (2014: 149), “it now stresses that our species has become a crucially significant factor in potentially cataclysmic climatological and biogeographical changes”. Yet what emerges from the archive of mid-twentieth century settler writing in New Zealand is a strikingly literal, visible sense of the Anthropocene. This is because the geological agency of settlement was plainly evident in the nation’s eroding hillsides and flooding rivers. In the main, the aesthetic strategies adopted by these writers are reminiscent of the present-day “gloomy trio of Anthropocenic futures — business-as-usual, mitigation, and geo-engineering” (Garrard et al., 2014: 150). However, writers such as Bethell and Guthrie-Smith demonstrate that it was possible to think outside such terms. They drew on different aesthetic and cultural perspectives to offer a more radical questioning of the choices and values that created and sustained the culture of erosion. If their work highlights the value of the multiple perspectives that literature can bring to bear on the Anthropocene, it also suggests the potential for occluded or marginalized forms of knowledge to reanimate environmental thought. And overarching the entirety of this discussion, I suggest, is a sense of awkward kinship with a past moment that was also marked by the uneasy coexistence of aesthetic wrestling with and complicity in environmental crisis.
