Settler Postcolonial Ecologies and Native Species Regeneration on Banks Peninsula, Aotearoa New Zealand

ABSTRACT

The 2050 Ecological Vision for Banks Peninsula, New Zealand is ‘to create an environment in which the community values, protects and cares for the biodiversity, landscape and special character of Banks Peninsula’. Its aspirational goals point to the peninsula conservation trust’s vision for success on the moral horizons of land and place. These horizons stretch visually from the volcanic crater ridgelines to the outer coastal bays and the sea beyond. Temporally they span 175 years of cultural encounters of peoples and biota, and reveal community-based strategies designed to support thriving biodiversity on land that has been used primarily for production. This article draws on the event, textual and interview data as well as fieldwork conducted in 2015 during the 175th anniversary of organised European settlement. Settler pasts and presents are negotiated in natural heritage preservation through the restoration of native flora and fauna in natural areas and protected connectivity corridors. A settler postcolonial ecology for these hill country lands is committed to the simultaneous conservation of biological and cultural diversity in which indigenous flora and fauna, landscapes and people, are irreversibly hybridised, and endemic species become constitutive of a postcolonial national identity in Aotearoa New Zealand.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation anthropology
• native species regeneration
• settler postcolonial ecologies
• Banks Peninsula
• New Zealand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Fieldwork on place attachment and settler identity in rural Canterbury spans 30 years with previous short-term pilot fieldwork in Akaroa in 1986 and 2010.

2. See Environmental Justice Atlas, https://ejatlas.org/conflict/rights-of-nature-maori-`resistance-results-in-te-urewera-former-national-park-gaining-legal-personality, accessed 16 October 2017.

3. For the text, see www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2014/0051/latest/whole.html, accessed 7 February 2017.

4. My multispecies analysis of indigenous Maori ontologies of grass as ‘hearing’ and ‘thinking’ in colonial New Zealand challenged scientists to understand trees, birds and humans as mutually constituted, thus disrupting the static distinction between the natural and social sciences (Dominy 2002).

5. See Darby et al. (2003), Park (2006), Pawson and Brooking (2013) and Young (2004).

6. Hugh Wilson cites the proposed District Plan for Banks Peninsula by the Banks Peninsula District Council in 1997 as additional evidence for the Banks Peninsula community’s moral commitment to conservation.

7. See http://roddonaldtrust.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/RDBPT-Strategic-Goals.pdf, accessed 22 January 2017.

8. For a history, see chapter V, ‘The French at Akaroa’ in Straubel (1957, 58–86).

9. See chapter II, ‘Navigators, Sealers and Flax-traders’ in Straubel (1957, 33–40).

10. From September 1983 until 1988, Wilson produced a detailed botanical survey of the entire Banks Peninsula, walking the land, scaling the cliffs and crawling through gorse, to record 6 m × 6 m samples plots on a 1000-yard gridpoint system. Frances Schmechel in his forward to Wilson’s natural history specifies that there were 1331 plots (2013, 7–8).

11. Sourced by the Akaroa Museum from Christiane Mortelier (1995) Travels in Oceania.

12. Sourced by the Akaroa Museum from Cheshire County Records Office, Cheshire County Council, UK.

13. Sourced by the Akaroa Museum, translated from French to English by Father Brian Quinn SM, September 2012.

14. See http://naturewatch.org.nz/projects/banks-peninsula-tui-restoration, accessed 18 January 2017.

15. See https://www.iucn.org/news/iucn-welcomes-new-zealand-leadership-invasive-species, accessed 18 January 2017.

16. See https://blog.doc.govt.nz.

17. A Christchurch businessman and accountant, White is a native son of the peninsula, raised across the harbor in Wainui, who met Hugh Wilson at a Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society meeting in Christchurch in 1986. Both men share the same ecological moral vision.

18. See Wilson’s (2002) Hinewai: The Journal of a New Zealand Naturalist for a 14-year history of the reserve extracted from the February 1992 through December 2001 newsletters. For a detailed natural history of the peninsula, see Hugh Wilson (2013).

19. The key indicator plant species are tree fuchsia, fivefinger and tōī (Pīpipi, 2014 (40) 6).

20. See http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/about/news/video/from-gorse-farming-to-carbon-farming. Wilson summarises an audit report on eleven plots samples in which dense-wooded kānuka stores the most carbon; also tagged are māhoe, kānuka and tree fuchsia (Pīpipi 2014, (40) 10).

21. See Wilson (1994, 373) after I. J. McCracken on natural succession in Canterbury.

22. The Native Forest Restoration Trust, the Rod Donald Peninsula Trust and the Christchurch City Council, aided by a price reduction from the Curry family, purchased the property. It is under a covenant by the Queen Elizabeth II Conservation Trust (Pīpipi 2014, (40) 1–2).

23. At the inaugural celebration of the reserve, mature species, such as mataī and kahikatea, Hall’s tōtara and the rare raukawa, were celebrated (Pīpipi 2016, (43) 7). Regrowth of narrow-leaved lacebark, horopito, kānuka, māhoe and ongaonga is likely following the pattern of native forest growth on Hinewai.

24. Simon Day (2014) provides an attractive portrait of the peninsula walk for a consuming public.

25. Hugh Wilson (personal communication) explained that parakākāriki metaphorically refers to a field after battle ‘with the ground churned up and littered with bodies and the injured’, deriving its literal meaning from ‘kākaāriki’ a word referring to the patch of disturbed ground torn up by feeding parakeets.

26. Wilson in Pīpipi (2016, (44) 7) conveyed the remaining six families’ sense of loss and described the choice to either reroute or close down. The departing property cited privacy concerns for its decision.