James Beattie

Empire, environment and religion: God and the natural world in nineteenth-century New Zealand

This article, using colonial New Zealand as a case-study, and integrating environment, empire and religion into a single analytic framework, contends that Christian and environmental discourses interpenetrated and interacted in irreducibly complex ways during the long nineteenth century. Many of the colonyʼs mostly Protestant settlers interpreted the book of Genesis as giving them responsibility to ʻsubdue and replenishʼ the natural world; dominion theology played an important role in legitimising the improvement projects integral to settler capitalism whose consequences have aroused ambivalence from many modern scholars. Yet some, perhaps many, colonists also believed that they had a duty to take care of the land and its creatures even while transforming it. A commitment to large-scale environmental change could and often did co-exist with interest in and respect for nature. When the unexpected and unwanted consequences of environmental transformation became apparent, as they did shortly after the beginning of organised settlement, concerned Protestant community leaders deployed Christian discourse, biblical images and Protestant ethics along with utilitarian and scientific arguments to mobilise environmental concern and a conservationist conscience.

Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840-1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservation

The history of environmental anxiety in nineteenth- and twentieth-century New Zealand can be traced by focusing on problems caused by deforestation. In the 1840s concerns emerged that deforestation was causing climate change, soil erosion, sand drift and flooding. In the 1900s concerns about soil erosion overtook fears of climatic deterioration. A continued priority towards agricultural development at the expense of forestry constantly hampered conservation efforts throughout the nineteenth century. Only when the extent of agricultural expansion slowed down in the 1900s could these concerns be addressed; only then could a stronger, independent forestry service be established.

Colonial geographies of settlement: Vegetation, towns, disease and well-being in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1830s-1930s

A fruitful new area of environmental history research can be undertaken on the relationship between plants and health in colonial societies. By using New Zealand as a case study, I demonstrate the strength of settler beliefs in the connections between existing environments, environmental transformation, and their own health. I attempt to reconnect the historiographies of medical and environmental history by arguing that urban settlements – as much as rural areas – were important sites for debates about environmental change and human health. I adopt a broad perspective in order to sketch out the contours of a new field, demonstrating the complicated connections between health, aesthetic appreciation, medicine and garden history. Furthermore, I argue that many environmental-health ideas associated with miasmic theories became incorporated into the microbial ʻrevolution ̓taking place from the late nineteenth century. Finally, I note that a close study of settler environmental-health ideas reveals a far more ambiguous – a far more anxious – history of European engagement with temperate colonies than the existing historiography on the topic posits. Rather than wholly confident and arrogant agents of environmental exploitation, it reveals that great anxieties about health existed side-by-side with confidence in the environmentally transformative potential of colonisation.

Japanese gardens and plants in New Zealand, 1850-1950: Transculturation and transmission

Abstract Oscar Wilde once wrote that ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention’.1 This comment hints at the complex processes behind cultural transfer and transculturation between different areas of Asia and the West from the 1850s onwards.2 The development of gardening aesthetics in New Zealand from the mid-Victorian to Edwardian periods showcases just how inventive, complex and sometimes contradictory Western society’s cultural engagement with the rising Asian world power could be.

Natural history, conservation and health: Scottish-trained doctors in New Zealand, 1790–1920s

This article considers the nexus between environment, health and colonial development through the migration, and visits, of Scottish-educated doctors to New Zealand. In arguing for the importance of local social, environmental and economic factors to explain their changing prominence within, in particular, the field of natural history, this article enriches and in some cases modifies the work of Richard Grove and John M. MacKenzie.

‘Hungry dragons’: Expanding the Horizons of Chinese Environmental History—Cantonese gold-miners in colonial New Zealand, 1860s–1920s

Tens of thousands of Chinese seized on the opportunities presented by British imperialism to take advantage of resource frontiers opening up in places like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Utilising British legal apparatuses and financial systems, Chinese migrants grafted them, in varying ways, onto their own networks of expertise and environmental knowledge drawn from China and elsewhere. This article brings to light neglected aspects of global, British imperial, and Chinese environmental histories. Just as Chinese environmental historians have overlooked the environmental history of overseas Chinese, so environmental historians of British settler colonies have likewise ignored Chinese. The article fills these historiographical gaps by examining the environmental impacts of Cantonese gold-miners in New Zealand, who adapted water technology from their homeland of Guangdong Province and from elsewhere, such as in California and Victoria, Australia. In New Zealand, Cantonese mining caused soil erosion, reduced timber supplies, displaced vegetation, and used up scant water resources, in addition to establishing environmental exchanges between parts of New Zealand and southern China. The article also argues that studying the environmental impacts of overseas Chinese can present new research on both Chinese environmental history and comparative global environmental history. (Text from author’s abstract)

Reflections on the history of Australasian gardens and landscapes

Where appearances recede into the depths of space and time even as they come forward to stake their claim on the phenomenal realm, they make special demands on our powers of observation. 1 When Eur...

South Asian and Australasian Forestry Anxieties and Exchanges, 1870s–1920s

This chapter builds upon previous ones on the influence of particular groups to examine some of the direct exchanges of environmental anxieties and policies that shaped Australasian and South Asian conservation into the early-twentieth century. Advocates of forest conservation in Australasia drew upon the same centres of environmental knowledge (notably India by the 1870s, but also Germany and France and, by the early 1900s, the US) at the same time as they accumulated local knowledge of environmental processes and problems. This chapter reveals that they constructed similar arguments to justify forest protection, demonstrating that what Richard Grove identified as an ‘Edenic’ narrative of conservation on tropical islands also applied to Australasia.3 An Edenic argument went something like this: Colonisation and the unfettered example of private interests, proponents of conservation argued, caused an Environmental Fall, resulting in deforestation and, with it, alternating cycles of drought and flooding that threatened agricultural production. Only state-directed scientific forest conservation and forestation, they argued, could reverse the excesses of private interests and restore agricultural prosperity to areas ruined by deforestation. Through examination of the forests-climate idea in Australasia and India, this chapter also examines the changing relationship between environmental anxieties and scientific credibility.

Imperial Health Anxieties

As these quotes demonstrate, the pervasiveness of nineteenth-century European belief in the power of environments to affect health meant that discerning and mitigating its adverse effects took on particular importance in empire. Contemporaries held that imperialism displaced European bodies, and sometimes even minds, by subjecting them to unknown environmental influences, the effects of which could have immediate and far-reaching impacts. Tropical climates sapped the fighting powers of British soldiers or prevented administrators from efficiently overseeing empire while by the early-twentieth century, the spectre of white degeneration in the settler colonies and in India haunted policymakers, leading to increased government intervention in society to alleviate its ill effects. To colonists, indeed, the very security of the British Empire seemed to hinge on the interaction of people and environments. Fears of tropical climates prevented permanent European migration to India and, at different times, to parts of tropical Australia, but made India’s higher altitudes attractive, along with migration to temperate parts of Australasia. Europeans encountered existing unhealthy environments, but could also, through pollution, create equally dangerous places. As well as facilitating the migration of people from India to Australasia, anxieties about the environmental impacts on health stimulated detailed environmental health surveys, anti-pollution legislation, urban tree planting, and the introduction of plants such as eucalyptus, which were believed to improve the health of a particular locality.

China on a plate: a willow pattern garden realized

One of chinoiserie’s ‘defining characteristic[s]’, observes David Porter, is its ‘boundless adaptability, its repudiation of any fixed standard or accepted model’. Those qualities are evident in the story of the development of the ‘Willow Pattern Garden’ in 1960s Hawera, New Zealand. It is a story that is inextricably bound up with the British culture that made the garden’s motifs legible and which brought willow-pattern ware into the colony in the nineteenth century. In detailing that history, this essay explores new geographical and methodological frontiers in garden history suggested by different interpretations of Hawera’s ‘Willow Pattern Garden’ and the design on which it was based (see figure 6 below). Opened by the Republic of China (ROC) Ambassador to New Zealand in 1968, the story of this garden affords a curious and fascinating example of the multiple meanings chinoiserie elicited — not least, the ongoing attraction of the willow pattern plate in inspiring everything from musical productions, plays and poetry, to diplomatic put-downs, critiques of colonialism and the pattern’s three-dimensional representation in garden form in twentieth-century New Zealand. This last manifestation of chinoiserie provided the newly arrived Republican Chinese Ambassador with the opportunity for taking political pot shots at the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For Hawera residents, the garden had an equally important diplomatic role — not of world realpolitik, but local garden one-upmanship, thanks to the garden’s promotion of the town’s burgeoning civic garden culture through its realization of a playful oriental fantasy. A broader discussion of the willow-pattern design’s meaning in New Zealand suggests the need to reconfigure understandings of cultural encounters — at least their spatial and cultural expressions — away from experiences simply of intimidation and domination, as suggested by Mary Louise Pratt. What can chinoiserie, it asks, reveal as a repository of creative encounter in New Zealand? But first to 1960s Taranaki.