This photo of a pastoral farm is taken from the roadside of State Highway 3, about 10km south-east of Wanganui City [click here for location]. Hollows in the irregularly formed hillsides attract shadows which gives the landscape an alluring sculptural form, and hints at an intriguing geological history … perhaps the effects of volcanic activity? Continue reading
envirohistory NZ has launched a new page, and a new project: a timeline of New Zealand’s environmental history. This timeline will track developments or events which had significant implications for the New Zealand environment from first settlement of the islands by people from the Polynesian islands, through to today. It will be developed incrementally over time, and comments and contributions are always welcomed.
A lesson from 1793 – How not to set up a flax industry:
1793 saw the first attempt to set up an industry to process flax, which was in demand in the maritime industry for the manufacture of ropes, canvas sails, nets and sacks. Continue reading
Archaeological evidence shows that Maori occupied the south-east coast of the North Island, including Palliser Bay, by the 14th century. Research in the 1970s by Foss and Helen Leach of Otago University showed that people lived in small settlements at stream and river mouths. The people were both gardeners and hunters and gatherers, reliant on what they could take from the forest, rivers, streams, coastal lagoons and the sea – the main sources of food were likely to have been small birds, fish, seals and kūmara (sweet potato). There is evidence of about 300 people in six separate communities on the eastern side of the Palliser Bay. Yet by the 1600s these settlements had gone. Continue reading
When Europeans began arriving in the Canterbury region in the early 1800s, most of the swamp forest – dominated by matai, totara and kahikatea (white pine) – that covered much of the Canterbury Plains in previous centuries was gone. It is thought that it had been destroyed by a great fire that swept across the plains during the moa hunter period, leaving only a scattered bush remnants. Continue reading
Eels (or more broadly, tuna) have long been important in the culture of the our islands. For Māori, not only were they an extremely important food source – particularly for those who lived inland, but they were also of great cultural value. For the European New Zealander, eels were perhaps less vital as a food source, but for much of the 20th century eeling represented what was valued about the New Zealand lifestyle – the accessibility of our outdoors for both recreation and supplementary sources of food and income. However, as the health of our environment has become eroded, so too has this ability to hunt, fish, or recreate as freely as we used to. The eel, though less charismatic or cuddly than many of its land-based counterparts, is nevertheless a powerful symbol of the impact we have had on our environment as well as traditional values.
One indication of the eel’s importance in Māori culture is the number of words that were used to describe different varieties and conditions of eel (like Inuit terms for snow): as noted by David Young in Woven by Water – histories from the Whanganui River, ethnographer Eldson Best recorded at least 166 such words. Continue reading
A new book called “Beyond the Scene: Landscape and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand”, is made up of eleven essays by a diverse range of writers reflecting on a landscape that is important to them. The writers range from farmer, art historian, geographer, landscape architect, environmentalist and poet, among others. Continue reading
Horticulture was integral to pre-European Maori culture. As Bee Dawson states in “A history of gardening in New Zealand”, the ability to produce reliable garden crops influenced the settlement patterns of early Maori. Thus, the warmer areas of the North Island, particularly those with fertile volcanic soils, supported much larger populations than those further south where both climate and terrain made horticulture less viable. The northern two-thirds of the North Island proved most rewarding in terms of horticultural production, while Banks Peninsula in the South Island marked the southern limit of Maori horticulture. Continue reading
As Bee Dawson relates in “A history of gardening in New Zealand”, when Europeans began to settle in earnest in New Zealand in the early to mid-19th century, they not only brought with them “productive” plants, but many other plants, which soon became invasive “weeds”. Continue reading
Today, the day before World Environment Day, the envirohistory NZ website got its 10,000th hit. The website – the first of its kind in New Zealand – was launched on November 15 last year, and since then has received attention from over 60 countries around the world.
This is a good opportunity to say a big thank you to all our subscribers, visitors and contributors for your ongoing support.
The post on the history of pollution in the Manawatu River has been one of the most popular posts on this website. This post adds to that story with a history of Palmerston North’s sometimes beleaguered sewerage system.
In the 1870s, the early years of the township, there was no sewage network. Instead, households had “long-drops”, while hotels and boarding houses built cesspits to bury “nightsoil”. By 1877, the odour from these was becoming unbearable in some locations, and in 1879, the borough council prohibited the digging of open cesspits, instead creating a ten acre “sanitary reserve” for the burial of nightsoil and household refuse.
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