Remapping Tutira: contours in the environmental history of New Zealand

Journal of Historical Geography, 23, 4 (1997) 418–446

Remapping Tutira: contours in the environmental history of New Zealand Graeme Wynn

Although members of the first generation of professional geographers in New Zealand identified the ousting of the indigenous plant cover and the partial establishment of an exotic (mainly European) vegetation in its place as an essential theme in the history of that country, and Alfred Crosby made a brief case study of the islands in his Ecological Imperialism, scale problems have made it difficult to develop a microgeographical perspective on the often intricate and incremental processes of environmental transformation. To this end, this paper explores a detailed account of the natural history of a single North Island sheep station written by its owner, W. H. Guthrie Smith, in 1921. By reading Tutira, an idiosyncratic but fascinating work, with a geographical eye, the local dimensions of the floral and faunal invasion of New Zealand are revealed. “A record of minute alterations noted on one patch of land” illuminates the biogeographical processes by which New Zealand was transformed and offers insight into an important distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘environmental’ history.  1997 Academic Press Limited

The Colonial Museum, Wellington, New Zealand, 7 August 1869. Mr W. T. Locke Travers, Fellow of the Linnean Society, delivers a public lecture “On the changes effected in the natural features of a new country by the introduction of civilized races”. An eclectic thinker, an effusive, even verbose speaker, his ideas shaped by the great works of a pantheon of nineteenth-century scientists including Charles Lyell, George Perkins Marsh, Charles Darwin and J. D. Hooker, Travers begins with a plea for tolerance from his listeners. “In attempting to compress within the limits of a single lecture so broad a subject . . . [as this] I am aware that I have undertaken no ordinary task, and on this ground alone I should have to crave your indulgence; but when added to its inherent difficulties, I venture to state that my usual avocations are not akin to such investigations, I trust I may have a still further claim upon your good nature.” He then offers rambling comments on prehistoric archaeology, on the ‘great antiquity of man in Europe’, on the physical configuration of New Zealand, and on the early occupation of that territory by the Maori to conclude that New Zealand was “a virgin country, but little modified by the hand of man until the arrival of the European settlers”. He fails, quite miserably, however, to deal with his chosen topic.

Same place, 16 October 1869. Ten weeks after his previous performance, Travers rises again, ostensibly to discuss the effects of newly introduced plants and animals on the fauna and flora of the islands. Well into the second hour of this disquisition—after having 0305–7488/97/040418+29 $25.00/0/hg970061

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flirted with the idea of continental drift, explained ‘natural selection’, and argued that New Zealand constituted a distinctive biogeographical province—he suddenly realizes that he is “compelled to defer to a future occasion, a consideration of the position . . . in which our Flora and Fauna stood immediately before the systematic colonization of these islands, and the effects already produced and likely to follow, from the introduction of competing foreign organisms”.[1] Fully 10 months later, Travers returned, once again, to his grand theme. Finally, he succeeded in conveying to his listeners his sense of wonder that there was “scarcely a nook or cranny in the Middle [i.e. South] Island—a country as large as England, though inhabited by a population not exceeding that of a second-rate provincial town—in which, after thirty years occupation, some evidence of the existence of civilized man is not to be found”.[2] Again he offered an orotund, even diffuse, performance. Having given well over 30 pages of a previous volume of the Transactions to Travers’ enthusiasms, editor James Hector reduced the printed version of this third lecture to a nine-page abstract. Descriptions of the devastation ‘‘caused by floods in the Alps of Provence’’, of the slow recovery of ‘‘natural arrangements’’ disturbed by human actions, of the alteration and modification of the original physical features of New Zealand by new forces, and of the displacement of indigenous plants by invaders in various parts of the world were set aside. Still it is clear that Travers was wrestling with matters of no small significance. By his account, the European settlement of New Zealand had already wrought ‘‘immense direct injury’’ by ‘‘the indiscriminate and reckless destruction of . . . forest’’. Once-gentle rivers had become ‘‘raging torrents’’. There could be no doubt, in his estimation, that processes already underway would lead ‘‘to the extirpation of many of the native plants’’ of the islands. In essence, Travers’ subject was one late but important strand in the biological expansion of Europe or, to use Alfred Crosby’s felicitous term, part of the process of ‘‘ecological imperialism’’.[3] At a time when most commentators found progress and improvement epitomized in the European occupation of thinly peopled overseas territories, Travers struggled to surround New Zealand’s nineteenth-century settlers with the “swarms of pests, crops, diseases, weeds, and domestic herds” (Crosby’s ‘portmanteau biota’) that accompanied them around the globe and transformed the ecology of this remote territory.[4] His efforts were neither entirely consistent nor uniformly successful. A participant in the early settlement of New Zealand, he often offered up paeans to the material progress of his age that deflected him from his concern with the environmental consequences of these developments. References to Mr Darwin’s “laws governing the ‘struggle for life’” were juxtaposed with echoes of natural theology. Perhaps because he spoke extemporaneously, Travers seemed, at times, to contradict himself, or to embrace incommensurable positions.[5] For all that, Travers’ idiosyncratic, rather undisciplined ramblings about the effects of European settlement upon the New Zealand environment raised questions that fascinated his contemporaries and which retain pertinence today. He was, in no small measure, breaking ground that Kenneth Cumberland would reconnoitre some seventy years later, and that Andrew Clark would cultivate to good effect a few years after that with his account of ‘revolutionary’ changes wrought in the South Island of New Zealand by the “invasion of men and their floral and faunal camp-followers”.[6] Since then, his subject has become a virtual, unremarked staple in accounts of New Zealand development. It underpins, for example, much of Cumberland’s hugely popular version of the making of the New Zealand landscape, it is acknowledged en passant in the Oxford History, and is marked as the introduction of a ‘European suite’ of plants and animals in the most recent historical geography of

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the country.[7] Yet these treatments have added little, since the 1940s, to our understanding of the processes by which New Zealand joined the ranks of the world’s biological ‘NeoEuropes’.

An England yet: the biogeographical transformation of New Zealand That many of Travers’ contemporaries were interested, in one way or another, in the transformation of their new homeland should hardly come as a surprise. Christian mission settlements had been established in the Bay of Islands barely a half-century before Travers spoke at the Colonial Museum, and British sovereignty over the islands, formalized in the Treaty of Waitangi, was less than three decades old. Yet as Travers remarked in August 1869, large cities had risen where “all was strange, wild and savage” 30 years before: “The clearing, the farm, the industrious settlement have displaced the scanty cultivation of the Maori, and his ephemeral hut. The progress of a single year outspeeds the work of past centuries, and amid the charred stumps of our hill-side forests, and the rough clearings of our farms, fancy may trace the handsome villas and luxurious plantations of wealthy landed proprietors.” Even the “iron horse [was] doing its work in the colony”.[8] But this remarking of progress, improvement, civilization, change—variations of which had been recited in European colonies for decades—was given a distinctive slant by the timing of New Zealand settlement and the particular conjuncture of society and environment that followed from this. Early European New Zealanders, or at least the educated among them, were heirs to a complex web of ideas about the natural world and how it might be understood. They drew from the Enlightenment tradition a commitment to Baconian empiricism and induction that emphasized the careful collection and cataloguing of information. Occupying islands charted by Captain Cook, whose flora and avifauna had been documented and described by his naturalists, they appreciated their opportunity (proclaimed by Alexander von Humboldt) to contribute knowledge of the cosmos through close observation of its varied, changing geography.[9] They came, on the whole, from the British Isles where natural history was prominent among the ‘rational amusements’ of Victorian society; scientific, morally uplifting, and healthy, it had become, by midcentury, something of an obsession among the middle classes.[10] Imbued with the growing confidence of their era, they were convinced of their capacity to shape, even remake, their world. Set down in a bountiful, richly vegetated land they saw their survival and future prosperity tied to the development of its broad spaces and the exploitation of its natural resources, and they shared with immigrants in general a hankering for the familiar in the face of the new. Quickly and deliberately, they introduced plants, animals, fish, and birds for economic, aesthetic and recreational reasons. To facilitate the process, legislation was passed in the 1840s and 1850s, and settlers established Acclimatization Societies along the lines of Frank Buckland’s organization in the United Kingdom (founded in 1860).[11] At the same time, in the early 1860s, New Zealanders were grappling with the challenge of Darwin’s claim that species evolved through natural selection as their members struggled for existence.[12] And when George Perkins Marsh’s arresting account of human modification of the surface of the earth began to circulate among them later in the decade, they were quick to find evidence, in the geomorphologically recent and relatively unstable physical environment of New Zealand, of the deleterious impact of European clearing, burning, and farming upon the landscape.[13] From its inception in 1868, the New Zealand Institute, with an expanding number of branches in the major cities and larger towns

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of the colony, also provided a stimulus to, and a focus for, inventory, inquiry, and speculation about the New Zealand environment. Through the last third of the nineteenth century, readers of this annual publication were furnished with dozens of reports on the local habitat, many of them focused on the introduction and displacement of species. North and South between shoreline and “the highest points reached by the miner or shepherd”, botanist Thomas Kirk informed members of the New Zealand Institute towards the end of the century, hosts of invaders, animal and vegetable, pressed forward, “ever seizing some new position”. They were taking hold of the country just as they had “long since occupied the vicinity of the chief ports on the great lines of travel from Britain to the Cape of Good Hope, from Yokohama to Cape Horn, so that wherever the traveller lands from his floating home he finds himself surrounded by familiar plants”.[14] By the close of the nineteenth century, the march of acclimatization was even something of a set piece in local poetry. William Pember Reeves saw it tempering the pull of “England, life and art”, upon the New Zealand colonist rooted “Firm and fast” in this new land. Hearts might yet to England cleave, as: This garden tells with blooms and leaves In old familiar throng, And smells, sweet English every one, And English turf to tread upon, And English blackbird’s song.

But familiar, introduced, species had blunted nostalgia’s bitter sting. “Skies without music, mute through time”, now heard “the skylark’s rippling climb”. And hark! A song of gardens floats, Rills, gushes clear,—the self-same notes Your thrushes flute at Home.[15]

In similar vein, memories of ‘scenes long ago’ drew lesser verse but matching sentiments from the native-born Mary Colborne-Veel: Homely flowers set Where our farmsteads rise, Make an England yet Under sunny southern skies. Lilac scent is blown With wattle on the breeze; September bids the leaves grow broad On happy English trees: And apple-orchards smile again In sweet familiar show—[16]

The invasion was not uncontested. Observers noted the impact of introduced species on the local flora and fauna. If few were concerned about the declining numbers of Maori rats in the colony, more worried at the effect of the black and grey rats that replaced them upon populations of native birds. Introduced stoats, weasels, and ferrets were also indicted for “annihilating the surviving portions of one of the most remarkable collections of indigenous birds in the world”.[17] Indigenous species seemed to shrink from competition with more vigorous intruders.[18] To some, the plant and animal life of New Zealand resembled “a house built of incoherent materials”, in that “a blow struck anywhere shakes and damages the whole fabric”.[19] Ere long, concluded others, the introduction of European plants would “certainly result in the extermination of the

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indigenous flora”.[20] Even the most judicious students of the local scene sometimes drew astounding conclusions about the capacity of exotic species to dominate the landscape: so a single grain of rye or meadow grass was considered capable of germinating in and destroying “a compact and extensive sward” of indigenous Triodia exigua.[21] As early as 1872, a history of New Zealand birds brought a sharp rebuke of the “silly mania for ‘acclimatisation’” from a reviewer in Nature: “In a reckless way animals of extremely doubtful advantage have been transported to the antipodes. . . . The memory of the patriotic Scot who could not live without his thistles is not exactly blessed by Australians, and among the pilgrim fathers of New Zealand who will ultimately obtain an apotheosis, the members of their various acclimatisation societies will, we suspect, scarcely be reckoned.”[22] Within New Zealand, the excesses of the acclimatization movement were sometimes caricatured quite sharply, but most commentators were less categoric as they struggled to balance harm and good, to weigh the benefits of birdsong against the suppression of caterpillars and insects. Acclimatizers might have committed mistakes, but ardent enthusiasts were always prone to do so. If their zeal exceeded their discretion, their intentions were good and they ought “not to be denounced as enemies of the Colony”.[23]

Lists without end: marking introductions So the process of naturalization continued, and colonial naturalists proceeded with their work of inventory and classification, although these were no easy tasks. “It has been difficult to decide,” observed Thomas Kirk at the end of one of his complex tabulations of naturalized plants, “whether some . . . [of these] should be assigned to the ‘Denizen’ or ‘Colonist’ class. . . . Without doubt a few years will show the necessity of removing many ‘Colonists’ to the ‘Denizen’ class, and possibly a small number of ‘Aliens’ to the ‘Colonist’ class; and the entire grouping . . . may possibly be revised with advantage, whenever the naturalized plants of the southern provinces are worked up.” In the face of such widespread change, there was little room to doubt that the assignment they set themselves was both important and urgent. Invoking the weight of authority, Kirk reminded those New Zealanders with an interest in botany of the opinion of no lesser figure than Dr Hooker, Britain’s leading botanist, that “now is the time for certifying the dates of the introduction of many plants . . . unknown to the islands a quarter of a century ago”. Delay would rob them of their opportunity. “A few, very few years,” concluded Kirk, “will accumulate difficulties to an extent which can only be appreciated by students of European floras, and make that which might now be done with facility, a work which will task the critical skill of the most experienced observers.”[24] Through the efforts of Hooker, Kirk, and others, the broad patterns of plant naturalization in New Zealand are probably as well documented as those in any comparable area of the world. Although the earliest records are unreliable because several parts of the country were imperfectly surveyed, and because questions of identification, of whether introduced flora were truly able to propagate without human interference and so on troubled even expert observers, the broad parameters of species introduction can be traced with some confidence. Leaving aside details of the earliest introductions by Maori settlers and European voyagers, suffice it to note that Cunningham’s Florae Insularum Novae Zelandiae Praecursor published in 1837–40 recorded 16 introduced species, and that Raoul listed 26 in 1844.[25] At approximately the same time, Joseph Hooker identified 61 naturalized plants in New Zealand, and recognized

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that there were almost certainly more. Twenty years later he listed 170 species.[26] By 1870, Thomas Kirk had enumerated almost 300 introduced species, most of them in the province of Auckland and fully 257 of them ‘definitely naturalized’. In the next three years, he added another 53 species to his list, making (with corrections to his earlier count), he said, “a total of 304 species known to me at the date of my ceasing to reside in Auckland”.[27] Shortly before the end of the century, Kirk put the number of plants, animals, birds, fish, worms, and insects ‘more or less completely naturalized’ in New Zealand at more than 500, marvelled at the additions to the catalogue during the previous half-century, and considered it unlikely that the rate of increase could be maintained.[28] There were, after all, only so many species capable of surviving in any particular habitat, and because so many elements of the biological diaspora were ‘migrants from a common centre’ a large proportion of arrivals henceforth would be identical to species already established in New Zealand. Studies of the 100 or so plants contained in earth ballast dumped in Wellington by a vessel from Buenos Aires early in the 1890s, for example, showed that 70 per cent of them were part of “the great army of combatant weeds . . . distributed along the great lines of ocean travel all round the earth” and that 86 were already naturalized in New Zealand. Less than 20 per cent of the ballast-borne plants were new to the colony, although fewer than a dozen species from South America had naturalized there prior to this; some of the introductions were indigenous to other parts of the world (including South Africa, the USA, and India); and several died out within a year or two of arrival.[29] In the twentieth century, a new generation of botanists continued the work of identification and refined earlier lists almost without end. Definitions of the indigenous flora—upon which the final count of exotics depended—were always contentious. Two years after T. F. Cheeseman listed 576 introduced species in his Manual of the New Zealand Flora, Leonard Cockayne and H. H. Allan argued that 31 of the plants he considered native were probably exotics.[30] In the end, it was almost as difficult to decide whether “a plant collected by Banks and Solander in 1769 . . . [was] ipso facto indigenous”, as to define ‘naturalization’.[31] According to Cockayne’s Vegetation of New Zealand (1928) the country had 514 naturalized plants, although Thompson’s judicious account topped 600 a few years earlier.[32] When H. H. Allan attempted to summarize what was known of “the incoming, establishment, and spread of . . . alien plants” in New Zealand in 1937, he noted that he had, in the previous 10 years, become aware of many hitherto unrecorded species with “distinct claims to be regarded as naturalized”. It would be easy, he said, to enumerate “over 1000 species ‘more or less’ naturalized”, although sensu strictu few more than 400 should be regarded as fully naturalized. Recognizing the dimensions of this grey penumbra, he acknowledged the impossibility of providing an unimpeachable account and opted to focus on 500 species grouped into 261 genera and 63 families.[33] Of these 500 species, over 60 per cent are indigenous to Europe and Asia, and many of these also occurred in North Africa. Almost 14 per cent originally occurred only in Europe; some three per cent are natives of Asia; and a similar proportion are so widespread as to be considered cosmopolitan. Thus fully 80 per cent of naturalized plants in New Zealand can be counted from the Old World. Most of these were introduced from Europe, although some may have come indirectly through Australia or North America. Fifty-four plants (11 per cent) are from the Americas, with almost half of these from North America, and the others in almost equal proportions from the tropics (10) and south (eight). Some six per cent of the naturalized flora of New Zealand derive from Australia, and about half this proportion from South Africa (Figure 1).[34]

424 Brown trout Red deer Rabbit Starling Blackbird Sparrow Gorse Foxglove Mullein White clover Rye grass

G. WYNN Salmon Rainbow trout California quail Radiate pine Tree lupin Monkey musk Barberry Indian strawberry

EuropeEurasia

Mexican poppy Inkweed 4

Kumura

Cape weed Box thorn Watsonia

Opossum Black swan Green frog Eucalyptus Hakea AustralianSheep's Bur

Nassella tussock Wandering jew Onehunga

Figure 1. Geographical origins of exotic species naturalized in New Zealand c. 1935. Source: Substantially derived from H. H. Allan, The origin and distribution of the naturalized plants of New Zealand, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 150th Session, Part 1 (Nov 1937) 25–45.

Within New Zealand, almost three-quarters of these species were first identified in the North Island, where botanists were more active in the early settlement years, and well over half of the total (approximately 275 species) were initially detected north of Auckland (in the Bay of Islands region). Half of the naturalized plants attributed first to the South Island were found in the central region and slightly more than a third in the south. By the 1930s, 353 species occurred in both islands and of the remainder (147), fully 117 were found only in the North Island. In the broadest sense, patterns of naturalization reflected a combination of ecological–climatic and historical influences (Figure 2). European contact was earliest and most intense in the warmer and generally moister north, and some 80 per cent of all naturalized species can be found in Auckland province. By contrast, barely 30 per cent of the country’s introduced plants grow on the west coast of the South Island, where the consequences of a rather cool, very wet climate were compounded by relatively thin and late settlement and the isolation produced by the Southern Alps. Although it is difficult to establish precise dates of entry for many species, it is clear that the majority of introductions occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. By H. H. Allan’s estimates, slightly more than six per cent of the naturalized flora (32 species) reached New Zealand before 1850. Thirty-six per cent (181 species) entered in the next 20 years, and a further 30 per cent (151 species) between 1871 and 1891. The turn of the century decades (1891–1910) brought another 97 plants (19.4 per cent); and the years between 1911 and 1937 only 39 more species. Of these plants, over threequarters are occupants of disturbed ground such as roadsides, vacant lots, and waste places; approximately 40 per cent grow, more or less often, in pastures; and some 17 per cent favour cultivated land. Classified somewhat differently, perhaps a third of New Zealand’s introduced plant species remain ‘rare to local’ in distribution, and approximately half—most of which were brought to the islands relatively early—are

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500 400 300

100 200

Number of species

0 0

100 miles 100 kilometres

Figure 2. Distribution of naturalized exotic plants species, by province, New Zealand, c. 1935. Source: H. H. Allan, The origin and distribution of the naturalized plants of New Zealand, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, 150th Session, Part 1 (Nov 1937) 25–45.

‘common’ to ‘abundant’; these were significant components of the human landscape of the country by the second quarter of the twentieth century.[35]

Plants lately noticed: traces of diffusion Beyond this, problems of scale and evidence make it difficult to understand further the processes of landscape transformation entailed in what Kenneth Cumberland called the conversion of “forest-clad Aotearoa to . . . pasture-biased New Zealand”.[36] The activities of acclimatization societies and nurserymen were obviously hugely important in making available new species of plants, birds, fish, and animals in New Zealand as a whole. Within a year of its inception, the Auckland Acclimatisation Society had introduced over 30 varieties of birds, fish and animals; in its second year, it was responsible for the liberation of “white throats, cape cardinals, robins, Solomon Island cassowaries, Java sparrows, bronze-wing pigeons, chestnut sparrows, New Caledonian pigeons, canaries, bantams . . . and geese” to augment the yellow hammers, skylarks, grey linnets, finches, blackbirds, thrushes and magpies released earlier.[37] By comparison, the Hawke’s Bay Society’s 1874 importation of 357 blackbirds and thrushes, 72 rooks, 206 larks, and 15 partridges, “for the settlers to remind them of Home”, appears decidedly conservative.[38] Through the years, shipments from Britain and Australia, in particular, also brought tens of thousands of trout ova, goats, hares, wallabies, deer and other animals, and plants and trees such as the English waterlily, teazle, Ailanthus, and cinchona to New Zealand believers in acclimatization.[39] Generally, however, it fell to the colony’s numerous nurserymen to supply settlers with many of the plants that changed the face of the countryside, the gorse and broom and sweetbrier privet that

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hedged fields of imported clover and lucerne and sainfoin; the Himalayan cedar, the silver wattle and the stringy bark gum that sheltered farmsteads; and the oaks, apple trees, raspberry canes and ornamental shrubs that filled urban gardens.[40] Between introduction and diffusion, time has drawn a finer veil, however. Contemporary accounts tantalize with local detail about the spread of particular plants. So Ernst Dieffenbach found chickweed and plantain (which indigenous people of northeastern America are said to have called ‘Englishman’s’ or ‘White-man’s’ foot for its propensity to spring up wherever the newcomers trod) growing near Lake Rotorua in 1841, although the local Maori were, he claimed, astonished at his pale skin.[41] So William Colenso “gazed . . . with astonishment, much like Robinson Crusoe on seeing the print of a human foot in the sand” at a single specimen of an unknown plant he discovered early in the 1880s, deep in the North Island’s Seventy Mile Bush. Six months later he had identified it as a burdock. Six months after that, cattle had carried off its sticky burrs in all directions; hundreds of new plants had taken root, “filling the neighbourhood with a much worse weed than the introduced thistle”.[42] And so W. T. L. Travers embellished on the spread of watercress in the River Avon at Christchurch during the 1880s. From ‘some seeds sown near the head waters’ of the river a few years before the plant had become a ‘great annoyance’; in some places it occupied “both sides of the river for a width of twenty feet and upwards”, and grew so profusely “as to permit persons to walk upon it”.[43] More systematic assessments of the transformation of vegetation and landscape at the local, regional or wider scale, are difficult to piece together. Occasionally the contemporary record yields its portion, as in two late nineteenth-century descriptions of cow grass forming green lines beside the tracks on almost every road on the Canterbury Plains, where it marked “exactly the limits within which the soil has been disturbed by traffic” and reflected the transport of seeds in the mud on cart wheels.[44] For the most part, though, contemporary local naturalists were more interested in the occurrence of new and individual species in particular places than in the means by which they spread or in the evolving character of the vegetation landscape. In the twentieth century, as in 1869, it has often been “far easier”, as Thomas Kirk noted, “to recognize results than to watch the processes by which the results are brought about”.[45] By way of illustration, consider Andrew Clark’s approach in treating the dominant ‘invaders’ of the South Island. At least in part because of the difficulties in determining how change occurred, he generally resorted to describing its consequences. Rarely did he go further than he did in discussing the spread of English grasses and clovers—where he charted the acreage of cultivated land in sown grass and marked how ‘volunteers’ such as Yorkshire fog, and weeds such as the ox-eye daisy and Scottish thistle had spread from pastures of cocksfoot and rye grasses.[46] For the most part, he avoided analysis at the local scale, and was thus unable to capture the sense of place and change—the microgeographical perspective—that is so vital to understanding the often intricate and incremental processes of environmental transformation.[47]

Tutira: the cumulative effects of trivialities Although he never used the term, it was precisely this microgeographical perspective that W. H. Guthrie-Smith brought to bear on some 20 000 acres of land lying in an elongated trough between the Maungaharuru range (3200 feet) and the Newton hills, or Tutira Range (1500 feet), north and east of Napier in the North Island province of Hawke’s Bay at the turn of the century. His massive 1921 book, Tutira—titled eponymously for the run that it described—is a remarkable, and gloriously idiosyncratic,

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“record of minute alterations noted on one patch of land”, a careful measure of, and intimate reflection upon, more than three critical decades of environmental change.[48] Based on half a lifetime of acute observation and an unflagging interest in nature that convinced its author that “not one of a thousand rides on the station has been the duplicate of another”, and that each exposed “a fresh page in the story . . . of the overthrow of the old world, and the slow re-establishment of a new equilibrium”, it fully deserves the attention of those interested in understanding the making of the New Zealand countryside.[49] Intended ‘only’ as a natural history of the run, and reflecting, said its author, “the cumulative effects of trivialities”, Guthrie-Smith’s great wordpicture charts the replacement of indigenous forest and scrub by bracken, fern, and grass, and the arrival, on Tutira, of a host of introduced plants, animals, and birds.[50] Read with care, and with a geographical eye, its details can be mapped to illuminate, as Travers had it, “the changes effected in the natural features of a new country” by European occupation. Re-read and re-mapped with an eye to wider horizons than those Guthrie-Smith disingenuously allowed himself when he claimed no more than local knowledge of his subject, the book as a whole prompts reflection on the place of humans in nature and consideration of the role of nature in human life.[51] Born in 1861, in the valley of the Clyde in Scotland, Herbert Guthrie-Smith came to New Zealand in 1880, to work as a cadet on Peel Forest Station (then in the hands of his uncle) in the South Island. With Arthur Cuningham, a friend from Rugby School in England, he also spent three months in a similar position on Tunanui Station, gaining some small experience of North Island conditions, before the two self-described ‘innocents abroad’ purchased Tutira for £9750, the debt accumulated on the property by its previous owners. Overjoyed with possession, the two young men marvelled at their first view of picturesque Tutira Lake and its wooded headlands and bays: “Along its steeps grew brakes of native woodland brightened . . . with the deep yellow blossoms of the kowhai. The silky leaves of the weeping willows were in their tenderest green, the peach-groves sheets of pink. The southwesterly breeze . . . stirred the flax blades, making them glitter like glass.” Years later, however, Guthrie-Smith remembered standing at another vantage point in the spring of 1882. From there, he recalled with the acuity of hindsight, he looked over the run’s seemingly “illimitable wastes of fern” and great blackened areas “about as intelligently as an infant looks from its perambulator on to the world, and with about as little foreboding of the ills it might inflict”.[52] The land that Guthrie-Smith surveyed bore many signs of human presence, and was already severely marked by fire and sheep. This was Ngai-Tatara (Ngai Kurumokiha) territory and several former village (kainga) and fortified pa sites were located in the vicinity of Lake Tutira.[53] Most of these were revealed by the presence of certain native grasses, by patches of introduced rye grass, and by a few acclimatized edible fruits and herbs such as peach, potato, mint, and thyme. Several other introduced species were localized in the vicinity of the first European homestead on the run, among them specimens of Bluegum, Radiata Pine, and dwarf cherry. There were also weeping willows, sprung from stock brought from Napoleon’s tomb at St Helena to the Bay of Islands, from thence to a mission station in Hawke’s Bay, and eventually to the shores of Lake Tutira.[54] Here too, Guthrie-Smith could identify sweet vernal grass and strawberry plants, watercress, and blackberry. Elsewhere, there were patches of broom and gorse; several fescues, Goose grass, and Yorkshire fog (species “damned in every respectable volume on British grasses”); horehound, sorrel, dandelion, and yarrow; and such plants as the Scotch thistle and the Australian sheep’s bur, carried into the country with the stock for which it was being developed. In sum, almost 50 species of plants had naturalized in this small corner of Hawke’s Bay before 1882.[55]

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In the decade since its Maori owners had first leased it to European interests, several thousand merinos had ranged across the hills and flats of Tutira.[56] To provide them with feed, section after section of the run—say several thousand acres concentrated in its eastern corner—had been burnt each autumn and surface-sown with grass and clover. Within weeks, sheep had been released in the burnt paddocks to eat the new bracken fronds that began to appear. With favourable weather, and the appropriate balance of sheep to feed, this process of ‘fern-crushing’ could convert good soils from bracken to grass within a couple of years. But much of Tutira was third-rate land. As a consequence, the classic compromise forced on all who developed new farms by these means—the need to find a middle course between “murdering the sheep and ‘making’ the country”—was elusive.[57] Although Guthrie-Smith’s predecessors had poured money and effort into the property, although they had cut tracks, drained swamps, and sawn timber, although they had spread hundreds of bags of cocksfoot and rye grass as well as some Kentucky Bluegrass (and several other species undetected in the purchased seed) on its surface, and although they had put as many as 9000 sheep on its 20 000 acres, they had conducted a losing campaign. In 1882, the stock they sold to GuthrieSmith and Cuningham was in dreadful condition—“skin and bone, scrags, their wool peeling off”.[58] So too was much of the property. On large areas of poorer land, on the lower slopes of the hills, on the cold, damp spurs, on the far reaches of the run, grass was succumbing to the annual spring rush of bracken. On better, flatter areas, near the lake, flax and fern grew thick and tall. Elsewhere, tutu shrub and bracken were the only significant vegetation of tracts “ploughed and reploughed” each season “by innumerable wild pig”.[59] Toil and hardship were almost the only returns from this rough and abused country in the difficult economic times of the early 1880s. Sheep came to shearing with their bellies and sides bare of wool, scraped away by the fern and scrub in which they were forced to forage. At best, the clip yielded “a poor few hundred pounds worth of wool”. Surplus stock sold for a pittance—and once, at least, they were boiled down for soap, the few pence per head it brought being more than the wretched beasts could fetch alive. Within a few years, Cuningham quit the place, and sold his half-share to GuthrieSmith for five shillings. Only by sitting tight and reducing expenditures to the absolute minimum was Guthrie-Smith able to persist. But the returns from a sudden rise in the price of wool in 1886, and an infusion of capital from a new partner (and former holder of a part interest in Tutira) allowed development and improvement of the run to begin again. Through most of the next 20 years, Guthrie-Smith and T. J. Stuart worked together to increase the productivity of the property. By 1890 they had capitalized on the natural expansion of feed by dry weather and fire, they had brought lands around the edge of the lake under the plough, and they had fenced new and smaller paddocks; 10 000 sheep were clipped, and improved breeding (with Lincoln rams) had so raised the quality of the stock that good returns were received on sheep sold from Tutira. In the early 1890s, most of the light bush land of eastern Tutira was cleared and sown first to rape and turnip, and then to grass. Block by block, the bracken lands were burned and fenced and sown to grass. Year by year sheep were carried “where not a hoof had trod before”. With the flock increasing by 1200 or 1400 a year, almost 30 000 sheep and lambs were clipped in a single season before the turn of the century.[60] Free from debt at last, Guthrie-Smith and Stuart purchased lease rights to some 40 000 acres in the neighbouring Putorino and Heru-o-Tureia blocks; then, early in the new century, Guthrie-Smith bought out his partner’s interest in all three properties (Figure 3).[61] Still the twentieth century brought its vicissitudes. The fertility of newly cleared lands

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Figure 3. The boundaries of Tutira, to 1938. Source: see note 61.

began to decline, and grass grew with less vigour. Wool prices fell. Cool, wet summer weather encouraged the growth of fern and scrub and produced swathes of damp hay instead of good succulent feed from established pastures. Improvements were postponed by uncertainty over the leases under which Tutira was held. Sheep were jammed into an area far less than that over which they should have been feeding, and the quality of the stock and their fleece declined. There were good years too, but by 1914 the Putorino and Heru-o-Tureia blocks had reverted to native control. Guthrie-Smith’s Tutira was again the 20 000 or so acres with which he had begun. At the end of the First World War, with ‘Closer Settlement’ and the subdivision of extensive runs government priorities, and Guthrie-Smith seeking more time for ornithology and his ornamental garden, some two-thirds of this area was subdivided and leased to subtenants. At the same time, some 6000 acres of the Putorino block were allocated, by the government, for the settlement of returning soldiers. Tutira Station proper was now less than 7000 acres in extent. Little more than a decade later, the run reached its nadir. The devastating Hawke’s

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Bay earthquake of February 1931 damaged station buildings and left miles of fencing flat on the ground. Severe drought starved stock; the port of Napier was closed: local freezing works ceased operation; and broken roads and bridges meant that sheep had to be driven to such markets as could be found, “losing condition with every grassless mile”.[62] Again, times improved and the run was rescued from crippling debt. But in the late 1930s the Crown assumed unrenewed leases to most of the property. The lands held by Guthrie-Smith’s tenants, and 1200 acres or so around the northern end of Lake Tutira, were taken up in freehold. Tutira was reduced to a 2000-acre crescent of land encompassing the southern part of the lake. Two years after Guthrie-Smith’s death in 1940, Lakes Tutira, Waikopiro, and Orakai were set aside as a Wild Life Refuge, and their shores declared Public Domain for the use and enjoyment of visitors. On the publication of the fourth edition of Tutira, in 1969, Guthrie-Smith’s daughter noted with satisfaction that the 2000-acre remnant of the once extensive run that trained her father as “a practical hill country farmer” was used, under a cadet scheme run by the Guthrie-Smith Trust Board, to instruct “young New Zealanders in modern methods of practical farming”.[63]

By his weeds ye shall know the man For Guthrie-Smith, all of this was only a part of the story, because he knew that “the annals of Tutira [should also] be read in its weeds”. Each and every part of the ‘orthodox’ human history of the run (summarized above), had “been marked by the arrival and establishment of aliens particularly fitted for the particular conditions”, and he had sought to watch “the rise, decline, and in almost every case, the fall” of every one of them since he had “spotted the blossoming dandelions golden in the turf of the Twenty Acre paddock” on an early September afternoon in 1882.[64] “No fresh human addition to station interests and enjoyments,” he reiterated towards the end of his life, “can occur without a corresponding movement in plant life, without the influx of a more or less specialised host of uninvited vegetative aliens.”[65] Through the last decades of the nineteenth century, Guthrie-Smith delighted in the close observation of his local area, enlisting the assistance of his shepherds to alert him to changes in the environment of his run, and marking the gradual movement towards Tutira of “almost every travelling weed”. In the twentieth century, he was away from the run more frequently, and noted, too, that improvements in transportation had quickened the migration of seeds: “Nowadays,” he wrote in 1921, “they come from beyond my ken, though that—for I, too, move with the times—has also been extended three or fourfold.”[66] Yet there is no reason to doubt the thoroughness and accuracy of his observations, which yield, in sum, a remarkable census of the plants (and animals and birds) naturalized on Tutira after 1882 (Figure 4). To concentrate for the moment on the flora alone: 43 new species between 1882 and 1892; 40 during the next decade; 44 more before 1910; another 18 in the second decade of the century; and 48 more between 1920 and 1939. In short, almost half the naturalized plants identified in New Zealand in the 1930s had invaded Tutira before Guthrie-Smith’s death, although the vast majority—perhaps 90 per cent—were confined to the vicinity of Lake Tutira, to the area about the homestead, the gardens, the orchards, the garden paths, and the roads.[67] The consequences, for the face of the countryside of south-eastern Tutira, are summarized in Figure 5. Remarkable as it is, Guthrie-Smith’s detailed chronicle of the arrival of alien flora on Tutira is well matched by his more or less elaborate account of how almost every

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Figure 4. Arrival on Tutira of naturalized fauna, flora and avifauna, to 1910. Source: W. H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (Edinburgh and London 1921).

one of these 240 introduced species came to the station. Eschewing common practice, Guthrie-Smith elected to group introduced plants according to the date, method, and manner of their arrival on his property. There were dangers in this, he knew. Seeds travelled in many channels. But it was far more revealing to suggest, if not always to verify, the manner of their journeying, than to class them simply and scientifically by order and species. So his discussion centred, in turn, on those plants that he regarded as stowaways, garden escapes, children of the church, burdens of sin, fire and flood weeds, and pedestrians. And to each of them this expatriate Scot metaphorically doffed his cap, confessing in the late 1930s that he found “something austere, distinguished even in the brotherhood of weeds. They are the MacGregors of our artificial highlands seizing as of right—these hard-faced children of the wilderness—conditions they must yet despise—leaf-mould, sieved peats, sharp sands and shredded sods”.[68] Stowaways, of which there were at least 30, arrived on Tutira hidden in grass, oat, or turnip seed, in packets of flower or vegetable seeds, in the corners of gunny sacks and so on. Four of them—hair-grass, crested dog’s-tail, foxglove and common vetch—sprang up in one of the first paddocks developed after 1882, brought there in the sacks of ‘tailings and sweepings’ (cheap grass seed) bought by the impecunious Guthrie-Smith. Goose grass reached the run in a packet of spinach seed bought for the garden. Tutira’s first specimen of white goose-foot, said Guthrie-Smith, was a stowaway “caught red-handed emerging from its hiding place” because its roots were embedded in a rotting sack discarded at a contract labourer’s camp. And yellow pimpernel “smuggled itself on to the station in the company of verbena”.[69] Among escapees from Tutira’s gardens, strawberries planted in a long abandoned

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Slipface Cocksfoot Blackberry Crested Dogstail Clustered Clover Kentucky Bluegrass Sweet Vernal Microlaena stipoides, Danthonia semiannularis

Figure 5. Vegetation change on Tutira station, 1882, 1892, 1910. Exotic species are identified in bold type. Source: Guthrie-Smith, Tutira.

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patch of land survived for decades, carrots grew in some clover paddocks near the homestead, and parsnip and horseradish maintained themselves on the site of an early garden. Guthrie-Smith found it remarkable, too, that potatoes cultivated by Maoris in the mid-nineteenth century, endured “an entire absence of tillage, the strangulation of matted turf, the trampling of stock, the competition of cherry suckers and the shade of trees” for more than 50 years. Trees, shrubs, and hedge plants were also important components of this category, which included at least two dozen species. In the lee of the 50 or so pines (Pinus radiata and P. nigra) planted on the Taupanga peninsula in 1880, a younger generation of each had grown up, and radiata had disseminated widely over the run, its seeds having been carried to remote areas in the fleece of sheep. White poplar had “become a nuisance by way of inordinate suckering”. And seeds from a honeysuckle hedge, dropped by roosting minahs, quickly smothered a little thicket of cherry trees, and macrocarpa and barberry hedges near the homestead. Introduced birds also carried the seeds of asparagus, elderberry, box-thorn, gooseberry, raspberry, and redcurrant further and further afield each year.[70] To a cluster of pot-herbs generally regarded as weeds in turn-of-the-century New Zealand, Guthrie-Smith applied the title “Children of the Church”. These were plants with medicinal value, brought to the islands by missionaries, and spread far and wide in the years before physicians and patent medicines were available to rural dwellers. Fennel, pennyroyal, catmint, spearmint, and horehound all belonged to this category. Thyme, valued for its flavour, and peach and cherry trees were also deemed to have sprung from mission gardens. Against this backdrop there could be little doubt about the local origins of thorn-apple, used to treat pulmonary afflictions and still known in Hawke’s Bay as Priest’s Weed. And so too with sweet briar, commonly called ‘Missionary’, which was spread further about by horses that consumed its red ripe hips.[71] In Guthrie-Smith’s colourful characterization, ‘burdens of sin’ were cast down unintentionally upon the run by ‘pilgrims’. By way of illustration, the arrival of procumbent speedwell in soil attached to the roots of moss-roses planted near the original cottage in 1883 may be cited; so too, the pretty spurge and field stachys that sprang from earth on the roots of several herbaceous plants imported from England, and the white dead-nettle that came with a daphne purchased from a Napier nursery. Any number of garden weeds might have been introduced this way, for even the most careful nurseries failed to “forward only the plants ordered”, and Guthrie-Smith confidently noted over a dozen that had naturalized on Tutira in this manner. Others were dumped on the run by machinery (spurrey) and animals (cineraria, knotgrass, musk thistle). Even “the private taste of a maid” had had its impact on station life, as canary-grass and two other species “appeared within a season or two of the arrival of her canaries”.[72] Given the importance of burning to the process of fern-crushing, it is not surprising that fire weeds formed a significant component of the vegetation in the high-light environments of Tutira’s fire-blackened tracts. Sow-thistle took temporary possession of hundreds of acres of newly burnt forest land. Prickly thistle flourished on fertile eastern parts of the run. Pea-flowers (toothed medick and nonesuch) “throve only on fertile hills and flats”, not on pumice land. Quake-grass appeared on all parts of the station, and brome-grass sprang up in great profusion on hot north- and west-facing slopes, but only after fires had swept the land bare. Small-flowered silene, mouse-ear chickweed, cat’s ear, suckling, and Canadian groundsel also throve “prodigiously on newly burnt land” and sometimes overran hundreds or thousands of acres. By contrast, the only plant whose spread on Tutira Guthrie-Smith attributed to flood was the

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Californian stinkweed, which was deposited along the overtopped banks of the Papakiri River in the late 1890s and flourished there the next season.[73] ‘Pedestrians’ were plants that migrated by “repeated portages over short distances, re-establishments again and again for another and another step inland, upcountry, Tutirawards”. Most of them began this journey in Napier, a place “thickly set with gardens and orchards” long before Tutira was turned to sheep, where there were also broad areas of “beach, dumping-grounds for ballast, waste lands along the railway track and along roadsides” that sustained wild aliens. Before the development of a road into the interior, however, the route to Tutira was a difficult one for even the hardiest of the pedestrian group. “Estuaries, salt beaches, barren shingle strips, unbridged rivers, close-cropped hilltops, high, cold, lean summits of pumiceous ground” presented a challenging range of environments and obstacles to the step-wise migration of plants, and only blackberry, bermuda grass, and centuary were able to complete the journey before the 1890s. Then the construction of a road from Napier to Gisborne brought new opportunities for pedestrian weeds, which marched inland in the loose soil created by the picks and shovels of the road-makers. Ox-tongue, hare’s foot clover, narrowleaved cress, mallow, buckshorn plantain, vervain, ragwort, and fennel arrived at Tutira by this route in the next 15 years or so. Loosestrife and the pearlworts traced a parallel journey through the wet sites along the road. In all, some 40 such wayside weeds reached Guthrie-Smith’s property ‘on their feet’, and others such as the burdock were thwarted in their passage, as the “sheep-farmer triumphed over the weed-observer” and destroyed roadside specimens before they reached the run.[74] Virtually all of these plants were unintentional additions to the vegetation of Tutira. Had the inclinations of its occupants been realized, the run would have been a very different place, a veritable Garden of Eden (said Guthrie-Smith) clothed with selected grasses and fodder plants for domesticated animals, and shrubs, flowers, fruit and forest trees to the taste of its occupants.[75] But neither desire nor legislation could regulate the dissemination of seeds, and this simple truth was demonstrated once again when Guthrie-Smith settled down, in the late 1920s, to plant and beautify the area around his homestead. For a dozen years, ornamental and flowering plants were imported to Tutira from several renowned British nurseries, from Kew and Edinburgh, from Canada, the United States, Africa and Japan; others were acquired by local purchase and exchange.[76] Alpine rhododendrons, various plants of the genera Crocus, Iris, Narcissus, Lilium, Erythronium and others were acquired to grace the garden and rockery of the run. With them came new stowaways, new burdens of sin, among them milkwort, mare’s tail, crosswort, crab-grass, campion and oxalis. “By his weeds ye shall know the man” concluded Guthrie-Smith towards the end of his days, conscious that once again a new phase in the occupation of the station had initiated significant changes in its vegetation, and that without his recent interest in horticulture, few of this latest group of adventitious plants “would have attained their New Jerusalem”.[77]

Of birds and beasts Just as weeds came to outnumber useful and ornamental plants on Tutira, so GuthrieSmith marked how “animal aliens, parasitical and predacious”, came to outnumber breeds deliberately introduced to the area. Birds and beasts together invaded Tutira along a few well-defined routes into the run from north and south, and a substantial number of them were present before Guthrie-Smith took possession of the property. The Maori or Polynesian rat (kiore), an inhabitant of wood and scrub land, was already

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Fish: Trout Avifauna:

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Figure 6. The arrival of naturalized exotic species on Tutira, 1882–92. Source: Guthrie-Smith, Tutira.

scarce in the 1880s, pushed aside by the black rat (a native of the British Isles that arrived in New Zealand with Captain Cook) and its stern competitor, the brown rat (probably introduced to the islands by whalers and sealers early in the nineteenth century). On Tutira, the latter two species had claimed different, if not entirely exclusive, territories. The black rat occupied the trough of the run, native woods, and high, wet, forested areas; the brown rat ran in the farmyard, across cultivated land, and in the warm coastal hills. The mouse was a later arrival, most likely, though Guthrie-Smith, carried up to the run from the port of Napier with the provisions of its early European occupants. Other introduced species were far less numerous. A lone red deer stag—possibly the progeny of the deer from England’s Windsor Great Park introduced to New Zealand in 1862—had reached the Tutira area from the south by the late 1860s. And a few ornamental and game birds—black swans, pea-fowl, partridges and pheasants—imported by district run holders, were seen occasionally, although some were surely temporary sojourners.[78] English larks were there too, although their relative quiescence seemed to disappoint the early rising Guthrie-Smith, who lamented that the notes of the native kaka and tui pierced the air long before the lark had stirred: “It is only later, when the shepherds brush from the dew-soaked scrub the hanging drops, and the last stars pale and fade, and the steam of the little waterfalls rises on the sharp, keen morning air, that the lark sings in the grey dawn.”[79] Forming, as it were, the narrow waist of an hourglass between the open, fertile coastal districts of Poverty Bay to the north and the good limestone and marl country lying between southern Hawke’s Bay and the Wairarapa to the south, Tutira was a natural highway for migrating avifauna, and the decade or so after 1882 brought a great influx of introduced birds to the station (Figure 6). By July 1895, Guthrie-Smith had counted 15 imported species (as well as 35 of the 176 known New Zealand birds) on his property.[80] Several of these were local introductions. Australian magpies, minahs,

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goldfinches, yellow-hammers, and greenfinches were all liberated by the Hawke’s Bay Acclimatisation Society, and the last three of these flourished immediately in an environment rich in the plant and insect life on which they fed. Magpies proved a nuisance for their attacks on sheep dogs and their numbers were kept down with guns until they found a niche in the pine and bluegum plantations near the Tutira homestead in the 1930s. Minahs, liberated in 1877, remained novelties, nesting only in the immediate vicinity of homesteads, until the 1890s, when they took to the wild and multiplied. Sparrows, which reached Tutira a month after Guthrie-Smith took possession of it, had migrated, by contrast, some 200 miles through the largely uninhabited forest, tussock-grass, and bracken lands traversed by the Great South Road since their release by the Auckland Acclimatisation Society in 1867. Transplanted to New Zealand, Passer domesticus had retained its instinctual dependence on humans, finding food in seeds and crumbs discarded, often inadvertently, by travellers and their domesticated animals moving along the way. The thrush and the blackbird, introduced into Auckland in the same year as the sparrow, but less dependent on human hosts, took almost a decade longer to reach Tutira, having followed (Guthrie-Smith deduced from dates and places of sightings) a more circuitous route around the east coast of the island. Chaffinches and redpoles made their way to Tutira even more slowly, after their release in 1868 and the early 1870s respectively. Neither was seen on the run until 1902. They too had migrated eastward along the coast from Auckland in the wake of the blackbird and thrush. Arriving at Opotiki somewhat later than these species, they had found a newly opened ‘line of light’—farming country carved from the forest that had once separated the Bay of Plenty from Poverty Bay—and followed this across the high watershed, thereby avoiding the trek around East Cape. Starlings, by comparison, had an easy pilgrimage to Tutira. Brought to Hastings from Otago and Auckland (sites of their earlier liberation in New Zealand) by the Hawke’s Bay Acclimatisation Society, they spread relatively slowly at first, and did not reach Tutira until 1895. Several years elapsed before they began to nest in pollarded willows and cabbage trees and to breed on the station. Populations of most of these species varied considerably through the years. Changes in the operation and the environment of Tutira affected the availability of suitable cover, nesting grounds and feed, and the pulse of migratory movement waxed and waned. The Californian quail, which reached the run in the mid-1890s, initially increased quite rapidly, but numbers stabilized when growing populations of goldfinches, larks, yellowhammers and sparrows competed for the insect food supply. Indeed, only the yellowhammer appears to have maintained a significant and stable population on Tutira in the years after its introduction. Blackbirds were breeding on the run in 1893, but not until the early twentieth century was their presence marked by the loss of the cherry crop, which had previously “remained for weeks, sweet, black and wrinkled, on the laden trees”. Even sparrow numbers remained small on “the naked, treeless, povertystricken” station of the early 1880s. Not until maturing pines provided good nesting areas and cultivated fields offered plentiful quantities of oats and other feed was it a “fit place for any decent self-respecting sparrow”. Thereafter, however, the population fluctuated. Were it possible to chart the number of sparrows on Tutira over the years, reflected Guthrie-Smith, it was quite possible that totals would reflect the price of wool in London, because good prices meant that more land was ploughed, more horse-feed was grown.[81] Commercial and domesticated species—sheep, cattle, pasture grasses—aside, perhaps the most significant and consequential of introductions to Tutira during these years was the rabbit. The bane of rural New Zealand for decades, it did not invade the run

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in numbers until the first years of the twentieth century, although a single specimen was spotted in the early 1880s, and “rumours of rabbits, and traces of rabbits” were common through the next two decades. Rabbits released in the Wairarapa, to the south, had quickly become “a curse, increasing and multiplying until many of the local squatters were eaten out, their stations left desolate and they themselves ruined”. Enormous effort went into reducing their numbers and staying their northward advance. The Hawke’s Bay Rabbit Board imposed fines and penalties for failure to comply with measures to limit the population. Rabbiters were hired to hunt down the invaders, and thousands were poisoned, trapped, and shot. Still, there was “no strip of open land from coast to mountain ridge” along which rabbits did not move. The contraction of grassland in northern Hawke’s Bay during the hard years of the 1880s, and the depredations of hawks, as well as of the native birds of prey—harriers, wekas and moreporks—helped to keep numbers down for a while, especially when the rabbits were forced into the high open country by want of feed at lower levels. But shortly (and ironically), after the first weasel was seen on Tutira in 1902 (for the weasel had been introduced to New Zealand to counter the rabbit nuisance—an example said Guthrie-Smith of trying “to correct a blunder by a crime”), rabbits began to proliferate on the run. Thereafter, only the employment of contractors, hired to hunt them out, kept rabbit numbers in check.

The world in a grain of sand For all its complexity and specificity, there was, said Guthrie-Smith on the last page of his great book, nothing unusual in this chronicle of Tutira. Every station in Hawke’s Bay had been subject to the same forces as had shaped his run. Each and all of them had been “moulded by a great rainfall”. They possessed their own “legends and relics of a splendid aboriginal race”. Their original cover of “forest, flax and fern . . . [had] been subdued by pioneers in desperate straits for cash and credit . . . [and] overrun by an alien vegetation and alien beasts”. By putting one sheep station “under the microscope”, his book had revealed “what is to be found in all”. Indeed, the making of Tutira was a process repeated, in broad, across much of the North Island. Variants on the Tutira theme were played out, at different times, at different scales, and with different rhythms in the Waikato and the Seventy Mile Bush, in Taranaki and the King Country. Across the broad swath of territory that was converted from indigenous vegetation to pasture and plough land in three-quarters of a century after c. 1860, farms and farmers were subject to most of the changes, vagaries and vicissitudes chronicled by Guthrie-Smith. Consider, by way of a single example, 400 acres of third-class land in the King Country opened for settlement in a Crown Lands ballot in 1913. Tucked away at the narrow top end of a valley that widened out before splitting into a number of tortuous clefts, all of them rising to a great semi-encircling watershed . . . [the land was] thick and heavy [with] bush that made it quite impossible to know what the cleared land would look like. . . . [In short order, however, this tract exhibited] an appearance of settled and civilised pastoral order. . . . Near the house . . . [two orchards and shelter trees, as well as] an excellent sole of mixed grasses and clover had been established. . . . [Beyond] higher up, and away at the back . . . the better quality grasses that had grown so lavishly among the litter of fallen burnt trees were beginning to disappear; with a few possible exceptions only the danthonia seemed likely to survive . . . and even the danthonia was seen to be immediately menaced by biddy-bid and bracken fern . . . and more remotely threatened by the appearance of manuka seedlings. . . . [Fenced and subdivided into a dozen paddocks, this] land and [its] stock were

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G. WYNN mortgaged; fully occupied by his work of transforming the countryside, of trying to bring it closer to the human pattern by making it fruitful in a particular way, [the farmer, like his counterpart on the much larger Tutira] . . . was more or less dictated to and directed by the petty financiers of the local town.[82]

From ecology to history In the final analysis, however, Guthrie-Smith’s portrait of Tutira was more than an account of the changes effected in the natural features of this new country by the arrival of European settlers and the flora and fauna that accompanied them. Although he set out to record nothing more than the “minute alterations noted on one patch of land”, and, in so doing, to provide a natural history of this small corner of the globe, his curiosity about, fascination with, and fondness for this place led him, ultimately, to reflect not only upon its transformation but also upon his role in the process of environmental change.[83] And this is important, because it carries the book beyond its local and proto-scientific ambitions to engage questions of purpose and value; it is this that transforms it from an environmental impact statement into a work that demands engagement with questions about how humans have used, and interpreted their interactions with, nature. It is precisely this intrusion of the self, this recognition of human agency and the sense of reflexiveness that stems from it, that turns Tutira from a study of ecology into a work of history. It is this, more than the fact that the invasion of alien plants, animals and birds sketched in its pages cannot be repeated, that gives Guthrie-Smith’s story of his New Zealand sheep station its integrity as a study in environmental history, its moral centre, its lasting relevance to understanding the choices that face humankind and the world they inhabit.[84] Revising the text of Tutira for the third edition of the work, Guthrie-Smith reflected that “the difference between Tutira of ’82 and Tutira of 1939 is the difference between youth and old age; the face of the one smooth, that of the other wrinkled and lined”.[85] Over the years, sheep had reticulated the untrodden wild until its surface resembled the rind of a cantaloupe melon. With teeth and toes they had transformed the countryside from sponge to slate, and hastened its crumbling towards the sea. Beyond the flats of central Tutira, observed the aging Guthrie-Smith, the bed of every creek, rivulet, and rill has been metalled by the shingles and sands crumbled into it by sheep’s feet, or blown and washed down by wind and rain. Creek crossings, at one time barely capable of supporting a man on horseback, can now be negotiated by a loaded dray. Immensely increased quantities of material have found their way to the main streams too. The fluctuations of the streams themselves are more marked: there is a higher rise in flood, a lower fall in drought. Instead of a permanent percolation from the whole body of the countryside, there is a violent brief scour.[86]

The consequences were nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the valley of the Waikoau river. In the 1860s, when the region’s first wool clip was borne to tidewater on its flow, its lower reaches ran straight and “slow and deep between dense containing walls of luxuriant—almost tropical—vegetation”. Half a century later, the growth along its banks destroyed and its catchment scourged by every rain, “a score of wasteful channels trickle[d] over . . . [the] wide, stony, shallow bed” of this braided stream; neither boat nor barge could make 50 yards along its course (Figure 7).[87] Such were the consequences of development, and they were attributable to each and every settler who had, inadvertently, unknowingly, perhaps (by his or her own reckoning) even unavoidably, hastened the processes of denudation and erosion. Even GuthrieSmith found himself “compelled to side against what he would fain cherish and protect”. To save the pastures of Tutira from “the devouring plague of blackberry” that had

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Present

Figure 7. The estuary of the Waikoau River, past and present, 1921. Source: Guthrie-Smith, Tutira.

taken hold of two outlying portions of the run during the First World War (when labour was too scarce to keep it in check), and which threatened to spread even more widely with the increase in introduced bird life in the 1920s, goats were brought on to Tutira. “Preferring prickly leaves and thorny runners to grass and clover”, they held back the tide of Rubus fructicosus, but they were also markedly undiscriminating in their diet. Seedling trees and saplings of all sorts suffered from their presence. Beyond the cliffs and precipices of the run, lamented Guthrie-Smith, sylvan growth was doomed. The quest for pastoral perfection that had energized its early occupants was turning Tutira into “an almost naked land . . . [largely] bare of trees, of woodland, of sedge”. The habitats of native birds were being destroyed. Forty years of pastoral expansion had shorn the country of its fleece; to a troubled Guthrie-Smith it seemed that in years to come it might “be flayed of its very skin”.[88] By 1939, the enthusiasm of Guthrie-Smith’s youth and the uneasiness of his mature years had given way to the anxieties and misgivings of judicious retrospection. Introducing the third edition of Tutira, the author sought to impose shape on his experience and his doubts by reference to the siren calls of his ancestors, tenacious Scots and temperamental Irish Celts. The dualities they represented rose before him “like the ghosts of the kings in Macbeth”: honest Scots facing the blast of adversity and bearing the burden of life; resilient Irish “basking easily and complacently in the prosperous sun” and enjoying life’s benefits. From the shades of dour Scottish ancestors, “sad, grim in grain from age-long struggle with unpropitious soils and weeping skies”, he had heard the mantra of toil and progress: “A man’s first duty is to the soil, the station must come first and foremost, consideration of its flocks and herds; there is yet bracken to be destroyed, undergrowth to be cleared, pastures to be renovated, weed growth to be eradicated.” The counterpoint came in the soft brogue of southern Ireland: “Heed not over much the old sheep station, bow not over low to the cult of the olive and the vine . . . put money in your purse.” Increasingly troubled by his parts in the substitution of one flora for another, the replacement of native birds by introduced species, the quickening of New Zealand’s erosion into the Pacific, he wondered whether he had listened aright to those ancestral voices. Should he have obeyed the chorus of “stalwarts saved by works”: “Destroy your fern! Clear off your woods”? Or should he,

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rather, have heeded another refrain: “Oh, be content. . . . Admire, conserve, let well alone”? There was shape but little comfort in all of this. “Have I” an anguished GuthrieSmith asked himself, “for sixty years desecrated God’s earth and dubbed it improvement?” These were melancholy thoughts, and an old man near the end of his days needed both absolution and hope to endure them. In palliation of his offence, he noted how difficult it was for individuals to “withstand the stream of tendency”, and diverge from long-established and widely accepted patterns of behaviour. If he had fallen, he had done so unwillingly, he had been drawn “like water into the whirlpool”. But now he better understood the currents in the stream, and could identify the course that had led him and others where they were. Too little heed had been paid the long view. This was part of the price imposed on humankind by the quick succession of its generations. Were homo sapiens to “enjoy even the elephant’s lease of life a more sagaciously ordered world would be forthcoming”.[89] But the price was heightened in New Zealand by the drive for profit, progress, and material improvement. Few among the newcomers showed much desire to live on the land of their parents and grandparents. Prevailing values gave precedence to the market, and valued monetary returns over local experience and attachment to place. Almost unavailingly . . . could New Zealand be searched for instances of the French peasant’s feeling for his little holding. 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?[90]

Too bad, concluded Guthrie-Smith, that the newcomers had so neglected the Maori example, for they were a people who recognized in the land “something more than the ability to grow meat and wool”.[91] But the end was not yet. If New Zealand’s European settlers had been drawn like dust into the draught of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century capitalism, they knew that the wind blew differently in other times and places. Perhaps it was even shifting direction again. Guthrie-Smith certainly saw “more of hope than of fear for the future” in his final reading of the horizon. With enthusiasm for Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States, and a slow-dawning awareness of the problem of soil erosion in New Zealand, it was possible to believe that a new era was beginning.[92] The lamentable laisser faire in regard to misuse of land and water is passing away. For the first time in the history of the globe we are about to cease to maltreat this kindly old world of ours. The future of mankind is to make of his life-home an earthly paradise, cleansing its waterways, staunching its wounds and waste, conserving its fertility, renewing its forests, watering its deserts, beautifying it with colour and elegance of plant life, reanimating its woods with song and movement of birds.[93]

Half a century on, as maltreatment of the earth continues, and the worldly paradise remains a distant promise, it is clear that Guthrie-Smith celebrated a false dawn. But in his optimism, his commitment, his concern for the future, and his affection for nature, inhabitants of this fragile planet can still find essential signposts along the difficult road to the New Jerusalem for which he longed. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, West Mall, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5

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Notes [1] W. T. L. Travers, On the changes effected in the natural features of a new country by the introduction of civilized races, Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute [hereafter TPNZI] 2 (1869) 299–313, 313–30. [2] W. T. L. Travers, On the changes effected in the natural features of a new country by the introduction of civilized races (Part iii). Abstract of a lecture delivered at the Colonial Museum, Wellington, August 27, 1870, TPNZI 3 (1870) 326–35. [3] A. W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (London 1986). [4] W. H. McNeill, quoted on the dustjacket of ibid. As early as 1871, a New Zealand botanist observed that “European plants have largely displaced indigenous kinds in the vicinity of the seats of settlement”. T. Kirk, A comparison of the indigenous floras of the British Islands and New Zealand, TPNZI 4 (1871) 247. [5] For more on the articulation of natural theology in nineteenth-century New Zealand, see P. Star, T. H. Potts and the origins of conservation in New Zealand (1850–1890), (Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Otago, New Zealand). I am indebted to John Stenhouse, supervisor of this thesis, for discussion of this point. [6] K. B. Cumberland, A century’s change: natural to cultural vegetation in New Zealand, The Geographical Review 31 (1941) 529–55; A. H. Clark, The Invasion of New Zealand by People, Plants and Animals. The South Island (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1949) 381. [7] K. B. Cumberland, Landmarks (Auckland and Sydney 1982); W. H. Oliver, The Oxford History of New Zealand (Oxford 1981); A. H. Grey, Aotearoa and New Zealand: A Historical Geography (Christchurch 1994) 17–18. [8] Travers, On the changes effected, 313. [9] S. Zeller, Land of promise, promised land: the culture of Victorian science in Canada, (Unpublished mimeo). [10] L. Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870 (New York 1980) 13–26 provides a lively, if somewhat scornful summary. [11] The only study of the work of the Acclimatisation Societies in toto is R. M. McDowell, Gamekeepers for the Nation: The Story of New Zealand’s Acclimatisation Societies 1861–1990, (Christchurch 1994). Written by a biologist, its treatment of the nineteenth century is highly uneven and does not do justice to a rich, albeit scattered, body of source materials. It is complemented by several society histories written, for the most part, by members. By 1869, according to J. M. Wellwood (Ed.), Hawke’s Bay Acclimatisation Society Centenary, 1868–1968, (Hastings 1968) 128, there were Acclimatisation Societies in Auckland (1866), Hawke’s Bay (1868), Nelson (1867), North Canterbury (1863), Otago (1864), Southland (1867), and Wanganui (1868). McDowell constructs a slightly different chronology, giving Auckland pre-eminence in time with an 1861 foundation (although the society was moribund for some years before ‘revival’ in 1867) and assigning an 1863 foundation date to the Wanganui society. By this account the Nelson society was founded in 1863, though not registered until 1868, and the [North] Canterbury society first met in 1864; Southland and Hawke’s Bay are assigned to 1867, and Wellington to 1871. By 1878, there were 11 societies in existence. The general aims of these societies were well summed up in the declaration of purpose from the Tauranga society: “the introduction, acclimatisation, and domestication of all innocuous animals, birds, fishes, insects and vegetables. Whether useful or ornamental, the perfection, propagation, hybridisation of species, newly introduced or already domesticated; the spread of indigenous animals etc. from parts of the Colonies where they are not known; the procuring whether by purchase, gift, or exchange of animals etc. from Great Britain, the British Colonies and Foreign Countries.” See Peter Scott, Tauranga Acclimatisation Society 1882–1982, (n.p., 1982). Buckland’s role in the mania for acclimatisation in the UK can be followed in Barber, op. cit., 139–51 and G. H. O. Burgess, The Curious World of Frank Buckland (London 1967). [12] C. Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; reprint edition London 1950); S. Zeller, Environment, culture and the reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859–1909, and J. Stenhouse, Darwinism in New Zealand 1859–1900, both in R. Numbers and J. Stenhouse (Eds), Responding to Darwin (forthcoming). [13] G. P. Marsh, Man and Nature (New York 1864); G. Wynn, Pioneers, politicians, and the conservation of forests in early New Zealand, Journal of Historical Geography 5 (1979)

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[14] [15] [16] [17]

[18] [19] [20]

[21] [22] [23] [24]

[25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33]

[34] [35]

G. WYNN 171–88; G. Wynn, Conservation and society in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, New Zealand Journal of History 11 (1977) 124–36. T. Kirk, The displacement of species in New Zealand, TPNZI 28 (1895) 2. W. P. Reeves, A colonist in his garden, in W. F. Alexander and A. E. Currie (Eds), New Zealand Verse (London 1906) 22–6, from Reeves, New Zealand, and Other Poems (London 1898). M. Colborne-Veel, Emigravit, in Alexander and Currie, op. cit., 14–5, from Colborne-Veel, The Fairest of the Angels, and Other Verse (London 1894). Kirk, loc cit., 8; C. King, Immigrant Killers: Introduced Predators and the Conservation of Birds in New Zealand (Auckland 1985) has shown that the depredations of weasels, stoats etc., were appreciable, but that deforestation, scrub burning, and hunting by humans were also significant in the reduction of indigenous bird populations. See also H. B. Martin, Objections to the introduction of beasts of prey to destroy the rabbit, TPNZI 17 (1885) 179–82 and J. M. Diamond and C. R. Veitch, Extinctions and introductions in the New Zealand avifauna: cause and effect, Science 211 (1981) 499–501. J. D. Hooker, Notes on the replacement of species in the colonies and elsewhere, The Natural History Review (1864) 124. Travers, On the changes effected, 312–3. J. F. Armstrong, On the naturalized plants of the province of Canterbury, TPNZI 4 (1871) 285. On this theme see also R. Gillies, Notes on some changes in the fauna of Otago, TPNZI 10 (1878) 306–22 and A. Bathgate, Some changes in the flora and fauna of Otago in the last sixty years, New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology 4 (1922) 273–83. Kirk, loc cit., 19. Ornithology of New Zealand, Nature (18 July 1872) 219, a review of F. W. Hutton, Catalogue of the Birds of New Zealand, with Diagnosis of the Species (New Zealand 1871) and W. L. Buller, A History of the Birds of New Zealand, Part I (London 1872). Morning Herald, Dunedin, 26 January 1881. T. Kirk, On the NATURALIZED PLANTS of New Zealand, especially with regard to those occurring in the Province of Auckland, TPNZI 2 (1869) 145. See also T. Kirk, Plants observed during a visit north of Auckland, TPNZI 1 (1868) 140; J. Buchanan, Flowering plants and ferns of the Chatham Islands, TPNZI 7 (1875) 333. Raoul (1844) and Cunningham cited in H. H. Allan, The origin and distribution of the naturalized plants of New Zealand, Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 150th Session, Part I (November 1937). J. D. Hooker, Handbook of the New Zealand Flora (London 1864–7). Kirk, On the NATURALIZED PLANTS; Kirk, The displacement, 24. Kirk, The displacement, 24. T. Kirk, On the products of a ballast-heap, TPNZI 28 (1895) 501–7. Kirk refers to his investigation of the ballast-borne plants in Kirk, The displacement, and offers a slightly different account of his findings from that in the 1895 report. T. F. Cheeseman, Manual of the New Zealand Flora (Wellington 1925); L. Cockayne and H. H. Allan, Notes on New Zealand Floristic Botany, etc., TPNZI 57 (1927) 48–72. Allan, loc cit., 26. L. Cockayne, The Vegetation of New Zealand, Vol. 14, Die Vegetation der Erde. (Leipzig 1928); G. M. Thompson, The Naturalisation of Animals and Plants in New Zealand (Cambridge 1922). Allan, loc cit., 29–31. See also H. H. Allan, A Handbook of the Naturalized Flora of New Zealand, NZ DSIR Bulletin No. 83/Botany Division pub. No 4 (Wellington 1940) and A. J. Healy, Introduced vegetation, in G. R. Williams (Ed.) The Natural History of New Zealand: An Ecological Survey (Wellington 1973) 170–89. The details in the next three paragraphs are extracted, in large part, from Allan, The origin, 25–45. It was, of course, exactly at this point that the geographers Kenneth Cumberland and Andrew Clark arrived in New Zealand. Little wonder that they were impressed by what they saw for, as Cumberland had it, “what in Europe took twenty centuries, and in North America four, has been accomplished in New Zealand within a single century—in little more than one full lifetime”. Within a few years of his arrival in the country, Cumberland was convinced that “The ousting of the indigenous plant cover and the partial establishment of an exotic (mainly European) vegetation in its place is at one and the same time the essential

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[36] [37] [38] [39]

[40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] [47]

[48]

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theme of the history of New Zealand and the foundation of the regional differentiation of its area”. See Cumberland, A century’s change, 529–30. In pursuing the importance of ‘invasions’ to this story, Clark (in common with many other geographers of his day) was more concerned with patterns of land use than with biogeography. Although he has a chapter on animal pests, his treatment of invading animals and plants focuses on the domestic and the commercial—sheep, cattle, the minor domesticated animals, potatoes, wheat, the brassicas, grasses, and clovers, exotic trees and shrubs—and with regional patterns of rural economy. See Clark, op. cit. Cumberland was quick to realize that “nature’s revenge was already in evidence” and moved on to important work on soil conservation. See K. B. Cumberland, Soil Erosion in New Zealand: a Geographic Reconnaissance (Wellington 1944), and A. G. Anderson, Introduction, in A. G. Anderson (Ed.), The Land Our Future: Essays on Land use and Conservation in New Zealand (Auckland 1980) 1–15. In Canterbury, in the 1960s, there were “few, if any landscapes at altitudes below 2,000 feet in which adventive species are not prominent, with many so widespread, so abundant and in such isolated situations as to present, especially to the non-botanist, every appearance of being indigenous”. A. J. Healy, The Adventive Flora in Canterbury, in G. A. Knox (Ed.), The Natural History of Canterbury (Wellington 1969) 264. Cumberland, A century’s change, 534. C. R. Ashby, The Centenary History of the Auckland Acclimatisation Society, 1867–1967 (Auckland 1967) 11, 34. Wellwood, op. cit., 24–8. W. C. R. Sowman, Meadow, Mountain, Forest and Stream: the Provincial History of the Nelson Acclimatisation Society, 1863–1968 (Nelson 1981). Among the many testaments to the driving enthusiasm for acclimatization, two are worth note here: (a) a letter from Frank Buckland, Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, England and Wales (see note 10 above) enclosed in J. C. Andrew to . . . the Premier, 20 September 1873 (in Journals of the House of Assembly of New Zealand, Appendix H-8, 1874). Commenting on the effort to establish salmon in New Zealand, he wrote: “Reasoning from analogy, I think they ought to succeed there. English men and women live there. English cattle and horses thrive there, the temperature seems altogether very much the same as in England. Trout have already succeeded in Australia . . . and I cannot see why salmon should not succeed in New Zealand. He is a cohabitant with Englishmen here; why should he not be a cohabitant with Englishmen in New Zealand also”; and (b) the words of a correspondent of the Weekly Herald (Wanganui) 5 February 1870, 2 who wrote: “Instead of the discordant and ridiculous note of the tui, we should have the melody of the thrush and the blackbird.” Cited by R. Arnold, New Zealand’s Burning: The Settlers’ World in the Mid 1880s (Wellington 1994) 280. Nineteenth-century newspapers from all parts of the country include scores of advertisements for plants and seeds. For examples, see The Press [Christchurch] 8 June 1861, 7; 5 October 1861, 6; 30 November 1861, 7; 16 August 1862, 8. E. Dieffenbach, Travels in New Zealand (Christchurch 1974) I 393, cited by Crosby, op. cit., 253. W. Colenso, A brief list of some British plants (weeds) lately noticed, apparently of recent introduction into this part of the colony; with a few notes thereon, TPNZI 18 (1895) 289–90 W. T. L. Travers, Acclimatisation in Canterbury, New Zealand Country Journal 8 (1884) 500. Ibid., 500. Kirk, On the NATURALIZED PLANTS, 131; Armstrong, On the Naturalized Plants, 286. Clark, op. cit., 342–58. Almost three decades after Clark’s work, botanist A. J. Healy reflected on the paucity of attention given the adventive flora of Canterbury and brought exactly the sense of place and change—of local geography—that is missing from The Invasion to bear on the botanical literature in a ground-breaking essay that characterized the main plant communities of Canterbury and their habitats. See Healy, Adventive flora in Canterbury. W. H. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira: The Story of a New Zealand Sheep Station (Edinburgh and London 1921) xxi+400; 2nd edition (London 1926) xxvii+405; 3rd edition (Edinburgh 1953) xxxi+444; 4th edition (Wellington 1969) xxxi+464. All quotes are from the 4th edition. Biographical material on Guthrie-Smith can be found in A. H. McClintock (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of New Zealand (Wellington 1966) 889–90; A. E. Woodhouse, GuthrieSmith of Tutira (Christchurch 1959); and V. Yarwood, Guthrie-Smith of Tutira, New Zealand

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[49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56]

[57] [58] [59] [60] [61]

[62] [63] [64] [65] [66] [67] [68] [69] [70]

G. WYNN Geographic 27 (July–September 1995) 46–62. His self-deprecating characterization of himself as “a not altogether idiotic sheep-farmer” obscures his importance as a naturalist and conservationist whose writings were major contributions to the study of New Zealand birds; see his Mutton Birds and Other Birds (Christchurch 1914), Bird life on Island and Shore (Edinburgh and London 1925), Birds of the Water Wood and Waste (Wellington 1927) and The Sorrows and Joys of a New Zealand Naturalist (Dunedin and Wellington 1936). Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 398–9. Ibid., 320. D. Worster, Doing Environmental History, in D. Worster (Ed.), The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge 1988) 292. McClintock, op. cit., 890; Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 152–3, 166. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 65–73 and 74–103 passim deals with the Maori presence at some length. Ibid., 263–5. Ibid., 231, 239, 242. Guthrie-Smith was particularly sensitive to the Maori presence, and the manner in which the Tutira lease had been signed. Reflecting on one renewal of this lease, he wrote: “Often I have wondered if any work at all done on the station was legally done, for if I am to credit the local natives, the original lease was signed by many who had no sort of claim on the Tutira lands; no proper supervision seems to have been exercised, many of the signatures were forgeries, or if that is too strong a word, one native signed for another; then again was it clearly defined that Newton [the first European occupant] and succeeding tenants of Tutira were permitted to destroy the ancient vegetation of the run, to cover it with clover and grass, to drain its swamps?” See Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 225. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 139. Ibid., 150. Ibid., 152, 155. Ibid., 226–33. This discussion represents my best efforts to sort out an imprecise, confusing, contradictory set of accounts about the changing boundaries of Tutira. The main sources are: (i) GuthrieSmith, Tutira, which is often vague, and sometimes internally inconsistent with regard to both chronology and acreage; (ii) Woodhouse, op. cit., which specifies the maximum extent of the run as 64 000 acres, despite Guthrie-Smith’s claim that this area was 61 140 acres; and (iii) a set of four unattributed, hand-drawn and hand-coloured maps on A-2 card, stamped “University of Canterbury, Department of Geography, 19 Oct 1971” and filed as “NZ Historical Maps” at that place. These maps show various features (roads, tracks, drainage, place names, boundaries) for the period 1872–1971, and derive in part from the two sources noted above, as well as from cadastral maps of the New Zealand Department of Lands and Survey. I thank Ms Katrina Richards for her work on these maps, as well as her assistance with other illustrative material in this paper originally prepared for a plate provisionally titled “Introduction of Species: the floral and faunal recolonisation of New Zealand” in the New Zealand Historical Atlas (forthcoming 1997). On this, see note by Eric Pawson in this issue of the Journal of Historical Geography. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 416. B. M. Absalom, Preface to Fourth Edition, in Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., np. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 237–9. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 240. Ibid., 236–45. Ibid., 297. Ibid., 246–51. Ibid., 252–6. The discussion, on 255–6, of how Tansy made its way to Tutira demonstrates both Guthrie-Smith’s remarkably intricate knowledge of the biogeography of his run, and the inferential method on which his analysis of floral change often depended. Found only beneath an angle-post in the boundary fence between Tutira and a neighbouring run, this plant reached Tutira from the Arapawanui station garden. Ordered to repair the boundary fence, Guthrie-Smith posited, a worker from Arapawanui lifted a spade from the garden and rode out to the broken fence. It was not difficult, then, “to observe the soil adhering to the tool; to visualise the tiny seed wrapt in its coatings of clay” making its way to the

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[77] [78] [79] [80]

[81] [82] [83]

[84] [85] [86]

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edge of Tutira—provided that “the earth might not, during the strapping on to the saddle, during the brushing through scrub, during preliminary repair work, have become detached along a section of the fence, traversing bush where the seed would perish for want of light” or been deposited where the seed might “have been choked on dense sward or rotted by exposure, or bitten below the crown by stock, or perished by too deep burial, or been annihilated by slugs, or washed out by torrential rains, or crushed underfoot, or mildewed by blight, or baked by drought”. Only a remarkable combination of factors, in short, allowed the acclimatization of this new alien on Tutira. From this it was surely obvious that “[p]robably, of seeds that reach New Zealand, not one in ten thousand succeeds in establishing itself”. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 257–65. Ibid., 266–71. Ibid., 272–7. Ibid., 278–94. Ibid., 294. My presentation of part of this paper at the Environmental Cultures: Historical Perspectives Conference in Victoria, Canada in April 1996 called forth evidence of one link in this worldwide network. Noticing my title, Athabasca University historian Jeremy Mouat wrote informing me that he owns a “handsomely inscribed copy of Tutira, sent by Guthrie-Smith to [his] grandparents”, former residents of Royston, Vancouver Island who bought the nursery stock of the Buchanan-Simpsons on Lake Cowichan during the 1930s and “became very well-known rhododendron nursery people”. They corresponded with Guthrie-Smith, and there are likely rhododendrons (and perhaps even weeds) from Royston on Tutira as a result. Guthrie-Smith, op. cit., 295–303. Ibid., 330–41. H. Guthrie-Smith, Bird-life on a run, TPNZI 28 (1895) 368. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, 367–75. Several of Guthrie-Smith’s essays on the avifauna of his property, first published in The Forerunner (Havelock North) between 1909 and 1914, have been collected under his name in Birds of Tutira (Whatamongo Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound 1990). Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, 353, 363–4, 387. F. Sargeson, Sargeson (Auckland 1981) 53–9. Although this is nowhere made explicit, the inspiration for Guthrie-Smith’s attempt at a natural history of his run may well have been Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789). The format of Tutira differs from that of Selborne (presented as a series of letters) but the New Zealand book certainly shares in the claim made by John White of the 1802 edition of Selborne that it “has probably been supposed by many to be formed upon a more local and confined plan than it really is. In fact, the greater part of the observations are applicable to all that portion of the island in which [the author] resided”. See P. G. M. Foster, An Introduction to Selborne, in G. White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1813 Facsimile edition, London 1993) xx. Equally suggestive is Guthrie-Smith’s designation of the “steep [wooded] eastern slope situated immediately behind the present homestead” (321) as ‘The Hanger’; the same term was applied by the people of Selborne to the long hanging wood that clothed the chalk hills to the southwest of the village. See also the 3-page pamphlet by S. H. Cunningham, The Hanger Tutira Station (Napier 1976) which discusses the ecology of this area, and for some discussion of the influence of Selborne in the Antipodes, T. Griffiths, ‘The natural history of Melbourne’: the culture of nature writing in Victoria, 1880–1945, Australian Historical Studies 23 (1989) 339–65. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, Original preface, [1921], np. For more on the moral centre of historical discourse see W. Cronon, A place for stories: nature, history, and narrative, Journal of American History (1992) 1347–76. Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, 196. The imagery in the following sentence is also Guthrie-Smith’s. Ibid., 197. Impacts of this sort were documented by H. Hill in a paper read before the Hawke’s Bay Philosophical Institute in June 1895 (Denudation as a Factor of Geological Time, published in TPNZI 28 (1895) 666–80) which records 1000 acres of land slips on the clays and limestones of Tutira after heavy rains and floods in 1893–4. For a brief but useful recent introduction to the scientific work on this topic, see P. W. Williams, From forest to suburb: the hydrological impact of man in New Zealand, in Anderson, op. cit., 103–24.

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Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, 198. Ibid.; preface to the Second edition, np, and 204. Ibid., 320. Ibid., 325. This was, of course, disingenuous to the extent that Guthrie-Smith himself expressed profund “feeling for his little holding” and gave his acres wonderful due in Tutira, but he was feeling his distinctiveness, and the rhetorical point was his purpose. [91] Ibid., 325. Again, a rhetorical point is made. Recent work has indicated that pre-European Maori impacts on the vegetation and bird life of New Zealand were significant. See A. Anderson and M. McGlone, Living on the edge—prehistoric land and people in New Zealand, in J. Dodson (Ed.), The Naive Lands (Cheshire 1992) 199–241 and more provocatively T. F. Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and Peoples (Port Melbourne 1994) 242–53. Guthrie-Smith fully appreciated their impact on the site of Tutira. The idea that indigenous peoples have had a more harmonious, caring attitude towards their environment than European colonizers has a long and contested history. It has found particular purchase in emphasizing the destruction wrought by modern settlement of ‘new worlds’. For an introduction to the issues see D. J. Buege, The ecologically noble savage revisited, Environmental Ethics 18 (1996) 71–88, and J. B. Callicott, Traditional American Indian and western European attitudes toward nature, and J. B. Callicott, American Indian Land Wisdom? Sorting out the issues, in J. B. Callicott, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany, NY 1989). [92] M. McCaskill, Hold This Land: A History of Soil Conservation in New Zealand (Wellington 1973). [93] Guthrie-Smith, Tutira, 422.