-23-
Landscape: A tool of colonialism New Zealand’s land has been colonised at least twice. Two successive movements of human and biotic invasion engaged with the land, forever changing the original countenance of the environment.7 Firstly, the ancestors of the Māori who arrived from Hawaiki, and secondly, the European settlers. While both migrations brought with them their own cultures, concepts, and biota, it is undoubtedly the Europeans who worked the hardest to bend the land of New Zealand to their will and to their idealistic notions of place and home by “domesticat[ing] the new environment, translating the foreign into the familiar.”8 This claiming and taming of the landscape was instigated through several mediums. The Economic Gaze, with its emphasis on land as commodity, the implementation of the settlement grid, and the often ruthless acquisition of land from the Māori; the Aesthetic Gaze, encompassing concepts of the picturesque and panoptic, and their visual translations through art and mapping; and the act of naming, which intrinsically links with more abstract concepts such as time and space, ownership, and how these concepts differentiate between colonial and native perspectives. These were the intentional modes through which colonisation was acted out. However, it must be noted that there were other acts of colonisation which crept into the antipodean society. Tools such as language (most obvious in the naming of places and the resultant translation difficulties between the cultures), the Christian religion, and also, the European concept of time, which stood in direct opposition to the Māori concept of time. All of these tools had the effect, both directly and indirectly, of slowly dissociating the Māori from their lands, and over time, dissociating the European settlers themselves from their homeland, and coming to understand New Zealand as their own land and home. 7 Dominy, M. D. (2003). ‘Hearing Grass, Thinking Grass.’. In D. S. Trigger & G. Griffiths (Eds.), Disputed Territories : Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies. Hong Kong: Honk Kong University Press. 18. 8 Byrnes, G. (2001). ‘Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand’. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. 17.