-63expected by the Crown. Was a swamp to be classified as a river or a lake? Where would the boundaries exist? Furthermore, how was one to classify such a landscape which would temporarily dry up, flood, and then remain ephemerally wet for a duration? Swamp represented a completely ungovernable landscape to a culture which traditionally sought to assert its governance over the land through the placement of survey pegs, fences and legal boundary lines. What’s more, the Crown could not comprehend how to divide up a landscape that relied so heavily on an interconnection of processes. These processes and systems railed against being subdivided, refusing to be easily packaged up into individual lots. In a myriad of ways swamps represent the antithesis of the boundary lines and grids that were used to ruthlessly imprint England’s stamp of ownership upon the land, and the only way to remedy that was to drain or fill in the offending spaces. Only then could the survey pegs of colonisation be driven into the land. Even within current day society, where there is a real passion stirring for the conservation of wetlands, there is still a deep-seated reluctance to accept the swamp as a landscape which is worthy of conservation. There is still an element of distrust - why help a landscape which, unlike the Beach, could still turn its back at any time? “...[W]e are a culture with a persistent Figure 34. Artificial drains through
farmland.
Old
fear of being lost in swamps, up to our armpits in black water. Perhaps it sand dunes can be seen in Horowhenua is instinctive - some coded, memorial nucleic acid.”52 However, it is this background. region, April 2011 uneasiness society has with the concept of the swamp which gives it a unique
strength for capturing people’s imagination. It is only “as swamps that these
52 Park, G. (1995). ‘Ngā Uruora: The Groves of Life. Ecology and History in the New Zealand Landscape’. Wellington: Victoria University Press. 177.