Inventing New Zealand: Surveying, science, and the construction of cultural space, 1840s-1890s

Abstract

This thesis considers the ways in which New Zealand has been invented and re-presented as a European colonial cultural space with specific reference to the activities of surveyors and selected scientists working in New Zealand during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The thesis falls into two sections. 'Tikanga nga ma kairuri: the discourse of surveying' is an analysis of the strategies employed by colonial land surveyors in their construction and re-presentation of new cultural landscapes. This involved reading the land with reference to prescribed models of enquiry; writing over the land; and extending the territory claimed by the European settler society by challenging the physical and cultural boundaries of that space. It is suggested that while the land was being physically prepared for settlement, it was being culturally and spatially possessed: mapped, named, tamed, written over and written about. The second section is an examination of the ways in which colonial scientists were involved in making cultural space through the re-presentation of 'nature and the natives' as discrete textual subjects. 'Nature, natives, and the discourse of science' focuses on selected journeys made by Ernst Dieffenbach in 1839-41, Edward Shortland in 1843-44, Julius Haast in 1862, and James Hector in 1863, and argues that these expeditions illustrated the most salient features of science in nineteenth century New Zealand. The discussion concentrates on the work of these explorer-scientists and considers their contributions to geological, botanical and ethnographic discourses. This includes an investigation of the relationship between science and imperial power; the role of the amateur scientist; the dialogue between metropolitan and colonial science; and the developing independent identity of colonial science as local scholars began increasingly to identify themselves as New Zealand scientists, rather than simply as colonial field workers. The thesis suggests that there was no one moment when New Zealand was invented; rather, the discourses of nineteenth century surveying and science continually created and recreated provisional notions of 'New Zealand'. Moreover, like the identity of the colonial migrant society, the New Zealand that was invented by these discourses was a compromised, negotiated and ambivalent European colonial cultural space.