Recent accounts of the conservation estate’s development convey an almost undeniable sense of certainty and resolution to its purpose even if it is yet to be fully realised. Descriptions of the conservation estate reinforce the rhetoric of a nation who had the foresight in earlier times to set aside many of its unspoilt regions in ‘perpetuity’.64 For example Kevin Smith writes, “Today,
anything other than the permanent protection of all of the south-west’s
57 The New Zealand Outdoor Equipment and Clothing Industry will be looked at in more detail in Chapter Five. 58 See, for example, http://www.nzwalk.com/index.html, and http://www.bushandbeach.co.nz/tours.htm : accessed
19th March 2008.
59 See, for example, Vervoorn, 2000, Mountain solitudes : solo journeys in the Southern Alps of New Zealand. 60 Campanella, 1997, The Rugged Steed. Also in a New Zealand see http://www.tongariro.org.nz/partners.htm :
accessed 19th March 2008
61 Beardsley, 2000b, Kiss Nature Goodbye.
62 Lawrence, 2005, Branding terroir in the New World : Modes of representation in the wine industry. 63 See, for example, http://www.doc.govt.nz/templates/news.aspx?id=44387 and
http://www.doc.govt.nz/templates/PlaceProfile.aspx?id=38413 : accessed 19th March 2008
64 And as marking “a coming of age for New Zealand society … an end to the colonial or pioneer mentality”. Stated by the Minister ‘proclaiming the formation of the new Department of Conservation’ in 1986 and cited in Galbreath, 2002, Displacement, conservation and customary use of native plants and animals in New Zealand, p41.
superlative natural phenomena seems unconscionable”.65 Likewise in
Fiordland… the incredible wilderness: the story of New Zealand’s first World Heritage Park while much is made of the ‘ancient mountains’, the ‘primeval forest’, the ‘alpine wilderness’ and also histories of exploration and mining, no account is included of the park’s genesis itself. It is as if this is a fait accompli, whose inevitability, timelessness and certainty warrants no discussion. Or as is stated at the start “Fiordland is, today, just what it has always been. A million hectares of virgin wilderness – a wilderness so remote and so vast that no- one has seen it all”.66 Such an interpretation, while acknowledging challenges
occur, suggests they relate less as to what vision should be followed and more as to how it might be achieved.67
Yet are such accounts as robust as their authors might assert? Could the implicit closure with which the present is regarded also indicate a blindness in recognising both the significant ongoing changes in people’s relationship with the types of land that make up today’s conservation estate, and also the potential for further change. For in the future both wider circumstance and also issues specifically related to the conservation estate might prompt the need to reformulate its purpose. For example the consequences of climate change and related effects of sea-level change, demand for renewable energy and also carbon sinks, and diminishing fish-stocks, water availability and water quality are external influences, which could significantly impact on the role of the conservation estate. Similarly issues more directly related to the conservation estate which might also change its use and function include whether current usage patterns privilege certain groups over others, how people’s use of the conservation estate might fit within a rubric of sustainability, what possibilities does an emphasis on the preservation of the conservation estate preclude, how might the demands of the large and economically significant tourism industry be accommodated and so on.
Nor is the Department of Conservation unaware of these pressures. In recent years a change in how the department perceives the underlying purpose of the conservation estate can be sensed. Remarks in the department’s annual
65 Apse and Dennis, 1997, South-west New Zealand World Heritage Area = Te Wahipounamu, p7.
66 Cobb, 1987, Fiordland… the incredible wilderness: the story of New Zealand’s first World Heritage Park %p8. 67 While the tone of Young’s semi authorised history of the conservation estate acknowledges greater diversity of
interpretation it nonetheless suggests a current emergence of an enduring conservation ethic. Young, 2004, Our islands, our selves : a history of conservation in New Zealand. This desire for ‘cultural maturity’ is further discussed in Hilliard, 2002, Colonial Culture and the Province of Cultural History.
report by the newly appointed Conservator-General clearly signal that the conservation estate must now expand its concerns beyond recreation and endangered endemic species.68 Carbon credits, flood mitigation, access to
riparian strips and enlisting a greater public participation in the conservation estate within the conservation estate are some of a number of initiatives that are currently being implemented within senior levels of the Department.69
However it appears that lobby groups with specific interests in the conservation estate – for example Fish and Game, Forest and Bird, Federated Mountain Clubs (FMC) and the New Zealand Tourism Council (NZTC) – commit most of their efforts to fending off or supporting development at specific sites rather than considering the longer-term role of the conservation estate.70
Yet given the dynamic heritage of the conservation estate it seems naive to consider that the current position should somehow be the stance by which a relationship that is sustainable ‘in perpetuity’ might best be pursued. Indeed this research can be read as a questioning of the sense of closure that many perceive in the purpose of the conservation estate and also the meaning of wilderness. And in this regard it is helpful to consider the development of the conservation estate.
As little as 150 years ago there was neither the need nor the foresight for anything resembling today’s conservation estate. According to Paul Shepard, in his investigation of English Reaction to the New Zealand landscape before 1850, arrival brought disappointment and a ‘cultivated contempt’ for what was waiting. The forest, and the rough terrain to which it clung, was ever-present. It was “desolate and repulsive in the extreme”71 and “not only uninviting,
rugged, and repulsive … but unproductive and accursed.”72 Here the waiting
land was a place of hardship and emptiness73 that was a significant obstacle
to the agricultural ambitions of both individual and the colony.
68 Department of Conservation, 2007h, Statement of Intent 2007-2010, p7-8.
69 Johnson, Wouters and Wright, 2007, Building community capacity to undertake conservation: principles for effective skill sharing between government agencies and the community. ; Wouters, 2006, Assessing the Socio-Economic Effects of Concessions-Based Tourism.
70 For snapshot of some of the types of debates around Outdoor Recreation in New Zealand see Sutton and Department of Conservation, 2006, Full Notes of the Proceedings, and also Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand., F.M.C. Bulletin : Newsletter of the Federated Mountain Clubs of New Zealand Inc.
71 J. Polack, writing in 1838 cited in Shepard, 1969, English reaction to the New Zealand landscape before 1850, p25. 72 Ibid, p3.
Orderly settlement began with the surveyor’s gaze. Historian Giselle Byrnes states the purpose of this work was to speculatively document the land “not as it was, but as it might be”.74 For reasons of efficiency the surveyor
subdivided the land wherever possible with straight lines and standardised grids. This also created a sense of order and sameness with adjoining blocks so that if one block was sold the one next to it – looking identical on the map – could be offered instead. Working with theodolite, chain and survey pegs the surveyor located a two-dimensional array of always adjacent but never overlapping entities: sections, farm blocks, roads, and reserves for schools, hospitals, churches, markets and recreation. According to Byrnes this process of ‘opening up’ the land for the colony’s development incorporated a simultaneous slicing “through existing lines of Maori settlement and cultivation. While the land surveyors had helped to create one cultural landscape, they had systematically destroyed another.”75 Nor was this erasure
the result of ambivalence. As Shepard notes the land the settler found was to them immoral, barren and heathen like the godless wilderness of Christ’s temptation “because of man’s failure to retain God in his thoughts”.76 Hence
domesticating the ‘wilderness’ had a missionary sensibility and that within which the “necessity of clearing and fencing was inextricably associated with Christianising the Maoris.”77
However nineteenth century New Zealand was defined less in the language of wilderness and more by the term ‘the bush’. In the Dictionary of New Zealand ‘bush’ means “land covered with native or indigenous rain forest”.78
Not only did ‘the bush’ pervade the land but also the settler’s vocabulary. As a result bush, and the terms associated with it, make up the Dictionary of New Zealand’s longest entry.79 ‘The bush’ could be ‘heavy’ or ‘light’ depending on
its undergrowth, and ‘virgin’ or ‘working’, according to how it was being utilised. One could ‘go bush’, ‘bush it’, ‘bush-bash’, ‘be bushed’ and become ‘bush happy’. There were ‘bush trams’, ‘bush tracks’, ‘bush cattle’, ‘bush bread’, ‘bush bunks’ and ‘bush shirts’. And people could be ‘bush baptists’, ‘bush
74 Byrnes, 2001, Boundary markers : land surveying and the colonisation of New Zealand, p39. (Byrnes emphasis) 75 Ibid, p38.
76 Shepard, 1969, English reaction to the New Zealand landscape before 1850, p4. 77 Ibid, p14.
78 Orsman, 1997, The Dictionary of New Zealand English : a dictionary of New Zealandisms on historical principles, p106
79 In all it is forty-six columns long. See Star, 2003, New Zealand Environmental History: A Question of Attitudes, p468. Bush is also a specific theme on Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand. See http://www.teara.govt.nz/TheBush/en : accessed 20th March 2008
doctors’, ‘bush-hands’, ‘bush-bosses’, ‘bush philosophers’ and ‘bushmen’. Bush not only produced pasture, but was also, as Graeme Wynn states, the material from which the colony was literally being made. It delivered up “kauri, rimu, kahikatea, and matai … for house building; kahikatea for boxes; tawa for barrels and tubs; [and] totora for telegraph poles and railway sleepers”.80 Yet
‘the bush’, and many of the terms associated with it, only gained value and meaning for the colony, as a shifting frontier that in the process of it being rolled back produced timber and pasture. Hence the meaning of the bush, and most of the activities associated with it, had a quality of transience.
It was concern that the country’s forest resources might be squandered that led to Premier Julius Vogel’s introduction in 1874 of the New Zealand Forests Bill. The bill advocated conservation, but not in the preservation sense that the term has today. Rather it sought to conserve forests along the lines of the wise use arguments that had been developing in North America. However the approach was unsuccessful with the bill being passed only after considerable dilution, and then being subsequently repealed two years later.81 Instead the
‘fever’ of land conversion continued unabated.82 In the 1880s alone, as the
urge in many places for farmland overran both the ability to mill timber and the demand for such timber, forests covering 14% of New Zealand’s land area were felled and cleared for pasture.83 The effect being that mile after mile of
the country was “lands with fallen timber, stumps blackened by fire, and great trunks standing scarred and broken, with no vestige of green upon them”.84
It was accounts like these in the British Press, combined with a growing awareness of the uniqueness and increasing scarcity of New Zealand’s native birds, that became the catalyst for New Zealand politicians to take action to preserve the nation’s ‘scenery’.85 In 1888 the first birds were fully protected by
legislation. “By 1907 the list extended to 28 birds including … bell-bird,
80 Wynn, 2002, Destruction Under the Guise of Improvement? The Forest, 1840-1920, p106. 81 See Wynn, 1977, Conservation and society in late nineteenth century New Zealand.
82 As Geoff Park terms it: Park, 2006, Theatre country : essays on landscape & whenua, p96. Also see Kuzma, 2003, New Zealand Landscape and Literature, 1890-1925. Booth and Simmons note that Te Heu Heu’s gifting to the crown New Zealand’s first National Park was in part motivated by a desire to ensure the land would not be cleared. Booth and Simmons, 2000, Tourism and the Establishment of National Parks in New Zealand. However Star considers a portraying all ‘pioneers’ of the nineteenth century as environmentally ‘uncaring’ as not truly reflecting the range of attitudes at the time: Star, 1998, New Zealand’s changing natural history: evidence from Dunedin, 1868–1875. 83 Park, 2006, Theatre country : essays on landscape & whenua, p222.
84 Mrs Robert Wilson from In the land of the tui: my journal in New Zealand (1894) cited in Park, 2006, Theatre country : essays on landscape & whenua, p212.
fantail, huia, kiwi, tui”.86 Only those native species that impacted on agriculture
remained unprotected, of which the most notable was the kea.87
One of the underlying preoccupations of settler societies is the emergence of identity, and as Paul Star notes, this is frequently grounded by identifying uniqueness of landform, flora and fauna. A number of New Zealand’s indigenous birds became emblems of such uniqueness. Yet dwindling habitats were making these icons increasingly rare. It was during this time that New Zealand first began to be described as ‘the land of the tui’ and its people as ‘kiwis’.88 Significantly, for Park, the move to preserve fauna institutionalised an
erasure of Mori practices within New Zealand’s forests. Many forested valleys that could “sustainably yield thousands of snared kereru each season” were lost to agriculture.89 Indeed the growth of scenery preservation coincided
with laws that by protecting remnant fauna and “expunge[d] native custom from the landscape”.90
In 1903 the Scenery Preservation Act was passed. This signalled a shift from previous efforts that had focused only on protecting the barren tops and remote edges of the country. The emphasis of this act was towards “areas of bush which New Zealanders now appreciated as scarce and beautiful and which they increasingly associated with their identity.”91 These lands, which
became the foundation for today’s conservation estate, were intended to provide forested interludes and appealing vistas for the travelling visitor and came mainly from undesignated and unsurveyed blocks of ‘Crown Land’ or those still held by Mori.92
It was this process of procurement that resulted in today’s conservation estate being constituted from the remnant of the agricultural impetus to convert lands, and is readily evidenced by the relative lack of representation of lowland forest and swamp in its makeup today. In other words the land set
86 Galbreath, 2002, Displacement, conservation and customary use of native plants and animals in New Zealand, p43. 87 See Tiro Tiro, 1930, The Sheep Killer. Kea are an endemic New Zealand mountain parrot.
88 Galbreath, 2002, Displacement, conservation and customary use of native plants and animals in New Zealand, p39. 89 Park, 2006, Theatre country : essays on landscape & whenua, p104. Kereru are also known as wood pigeon. 90 Ibid, p141.
91 Star, 2002, Native Forest and the Rise of Preservation in New Zealand (1903–1913), p288.
92 For a map of protected areas as at 1906-07 see Star and Lochhead, 2002, Children of the Burnt Bush: New Zealanders and the Indigenous Remnant, 1880-1930, p120.
aside was those “bits left over…that could not be made to fit into the pastoral vision of Britain’s southern farm”.93
Nor did legislation like the Scenery Protection Act signal an immediate sea change in opinion. For example the Bush and Swamp Crown Lands Settlement Bill, also introduced in 1903, sought to encourage land improvement for agricultural purposes “by forgoing rates for the first four years on bush lands (as long as burning and clearing took place), for three years on swamp, and for two years on scrub.”94 It was the ongoing speed and
scale of land clearance that continued to drive the urge for protection of the forest.95
Yet ultimately, as Star identifies, the impetus for indigenous forest conservation came through an inevitable shift in supply and demand. As the availability of millable forest decreased the value of these forests shifted to becoming long-term timber reserves, and for their necessary role in limiting erosion in downstream catchments.96
By 1913 it was realised that both the amount and quality of usable timber remaining had been overestimated, and that the forests that remained would produce poorer yields than the forests which had already been consumed. Coupled with the slow growth of experimental plantings of totora and rimu, policy makers became convinced that the country’s future timber needs would have to be met by exotic timber plantations.97 And as a result the bush had
changed from a moving frontier to a vanishing remnant, and whose value would be necessarily found elsewhere including supporting tourism and recreation.
New Zealand’s Department of Tourism and Publicity was the world’s first national tourism organisation. It was established in 1901 to both promote the country to overseas visitors and ensure that the necessary infrastructure existed to meet their requirements. In its first years the emphasis was to promote Mori culture (particularly around the Rotorua region) and also the spectacular scenery found throughout the country. As well as fostering a
93 Pawson, Ibid.The Meanings of Mountains, p148.
94 Star, 2002, Native Forest and the Rise of Preservation in New Zealand (1903–1913), p277. 95 Ibid, p278.
96 Ibid, p279-280.
picturesque appreciation of the country the department also set about making them more ‘attractive’ in ways that would conflict with today’s understanding of the conservation estate. In its 2001 centennial publication, 100 Years of
Pure Progress, Tourism New Zealand describes how its first director T.E.
Donne “immediately set about the importation of game … to establish hunting and fishing as key attractions to the visiting sportsman of the 1900s”.98 Stocked with exotic species including deer, wapiti, pig, trout, duck,
quail, swan and pheasant, and controlled with licenses, seasons and quotas, his goal was to establish in the country’s forested reserves ‘a sportsman’s paradise’.
Over time other attractions were added to the ‘product mix’. 100 Years of Pure Progress charts the development of national parks for the tourist including the advent of purpose built walking tracks, guided walks and mountain climbs, ski fields, ski planes, scenic flights, establishing hotels, cave visits, jet boat rides, rafting, kayak tours and most recently the addition of eco-tourism that “enables us to show visitors the symbiotic relationship between tourism, habitat management and wildlife welfare, while still protecting our