The material landscape as a record of human activity

Understanding the landscape as the material record of human activity depends upon seeing it as an objective fact which results from the interaction of humans with nature. This perspective is most closely connected with the cultural geography of Carl Sauer (1889-1975) and his colleagues and followers at the University of California Berkeley from the 1920s onwards, subsequently known as the Berkeley School (Kraftl 2010; Duncan 2009). Sauer’s influence was such that, in the US, ‘cultural geography’ is virtually synonymous with ‘human geography’ (Jackson 1989), and Sauer argued that landscape was the core object of cultural geography, stating that ‘the term “landscape” is proposed to denote the unit concept of geography, to characterize a peculiarly

geographic association of facts’ (Sauer 1963 [1925]: 321). Sauer also provides a classic definition of ‘cultural landscape’ in The Morphology of Landscape, which argues for the reciprocal significance of both natural and cultural factors in the evolution of the landscape:

The cultural landscape is fashioned from the natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. (Sauer 1963 [1925]: 321).

This definition emphasises the cultural landscape as a material record of reality that has been shaped by humans. Studying such landscapes therefore involves a substantive focus on the cultural artefacts of, usually, rural areas; systematically documenting, classifying and analysing architectural forms and distribution patterns (Rogers 2010), and, thus it was the geographers’ task to ‘reveal the characteristics, trace, distribution and effectivity of the human cultures that had inhabited and moulded’ the landscape (Wylie 2011: 304). The cultural artefacts were thus seen as a window on culture, as Colten (2010: 2) notes in his discussion of Kniffen’s (1936) article on ‘Louisiana House Types’:

log houses were more than just a product of the builders’ labor, their assembled knowledge and skills, and available materials; they were an enduring record of larger cultural processes. For Kniffen, the study of this landscape offered insight into the societies that erected them.

But insight into particular societies and cultures was limited by a persistently rural focus, a privileging of the vernacular, and a lack of interest in examining arguments over what should or should not happen in particular landscapes. As the historian Dolores Hayden points out;

[u]nlike social history, which developed an urban bias from the 1960s on, cultural geography from the 1940s on leaned to the study of rural pre-industrial landscapes rather than the complicated urban variety, mapping ethnicity along with vernacular house types or patterns of cultivation considering ecology but avoiding issues of political contestation (1997: 113).

For the architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright, this mapping of vernacular architecture, undertaken by Kniffen and others from the Berkeley School, aligned with a longstanding view that

has located the vernacular in two literally “marvellous,” supposedly unchanging spatial milieus ... A celebration of indigenous traditions in the European and American countryside extolled distinct regional or national folk virtues, ... [and] a fascination with “the primitive” mapped and justified the West’s control over exotic landscapes and cultures being colonized abroad (1998: 475).

Wright argues that this linked the vernacular with other romantic concepts of the era; the ‘traditional peasantry’ and the ‘authentic folk’ of European and American nationalism, thus claiming to preserve an authentic past – ‘the vernacular has come to evoke a timeless realm beyond the reach of social tensions and commercial ambitions’ (Wright 1998: 475). This connection of vernacular with authenticity is particularly relevant because baches could be described as a quintessentially vernacular building type, and, therefore, we should be careful about romanticising them and assuming their authenticity.

This romanticisation of the vernacular also seems apparent in the somewhat later work of the English landscape historian W.G. Hoskins (1955), for whom the landscape is a palimpsest - the material embodiment of people’s activities that could be deciphered if one was attentive to the layers (Bender 2006). His interest, however, was in a thoroughly historical vernacular, with, for instance, no mention of the early 20th _{century ‘plotlands’ settlements that were scattered around} the British coast (see Hardy and Ward 1984). While Hoskins did much to popularise landscape study in the UK and showed that landscapes were not only spatial but irrevocably temporal, Bender suggests that his work was largely unreflexive, and its ‘underlying threnody – his espousal of a rooted sense of place and his loathing of contemporary change – has made him vulnerable to hi-jacking by conservative Little Englanders’ (2006: 304). But Wylie (2007: 39) argues that

Hoskins helped to inaugurate a vision of English landscape under threat that countered the utopian modernism of the pre-war landscape ‘planner-preservationists’, and this ‘melancholic narrative of loss and decline is nearly mainstream today’ among the cultural and natural heritage movement in England. I would argue that a similar melancholic narrative of landscape under threat is also apparent in New Zealand, most obviously in Salmon’s (1960) polemic Heritage Destroyed: The Crisis in Scenery Preservation in New Zealand. Whilst not explicitly mentioning Hoskins, Salmon echoes Hoskins’ style when he notes the ‘delightful tree-lined highways and byways’ of England, and

[h]ow ugly by comparison are the cultivated lands of New Zealand, where scarcely a road exists that is not lined by telephone or power poles or both; where trees are conspicuous by their absence and when they do appear consist mostly of ugly pines or macrocarpa (1960: 93).

For both Hoskins and Salmon it is self-evident what is ugly and that is what is modern and exotic, but for Salmon, this does not seem to include baches.8 _{This narrative of loss and distaste} for the modern is most evident in contemporary opposition to wind energy development proposals in the tussock grasslands of Central Otago, New Zealand (see Graham, Stephenson, and Smith 2009), but baches and cribs are now also seen to uglify the landscape (Mason 1994). Geographers have criticised approaches that have focused on the idea that landscape provides a material record of a particular culture in a number of ways. First, they have argued that such approaches ‘tended to describe rather than explain the patterns of distribution that they mapped’ (Kraftl 2010: 405). Second, Duncan (1980) argued that the Berkeley School adopted a reified ‘superorganic’ conception of culture; which viewed culture as an entity above people and not reducible to individual’s actions, and it also failed to ‘address the wider social context in which

8 _{Salmon (1960) does not explicitly mention baches but in the ‘before and after’ photographs of the effects of hydro} development on Lake Waikaremoana (opposite page 33) it is the wide mudflats that are condemned, while the small bach settlement goes unremarked.

cultures are constituted and expressed’ (Jackson 1989: 18). Third, they had an unproblematic conception of the natural landscape, and consequently there has been a tendency to

treat the process of landscape formation as the result of interactions between natural and cultural processes – both of which tended to be portrayed as somehow definable in, and through, the absence of the other (Hinchliffe 2003: 208).

As Head et al. (2012: 21) note, this dichotomy between the natural and social or cultural is ‘ontologically incomplete … [because it] leads to a conception that entities are “essentially” either social or natural prior to their interaction with one another’, and thus Sauer’s cultural landscape ends up purifying the natural and cultural. While such cultural geographies provide an inadequate conception of landscape, Kraftl argues, that work in the Berkeley School tradition reminds us of the significance of everyday built forms to the early years of cultural geography ‘in the midst of a later preference for more “spectacular” kinds of case study’ (2010: 404). The import of this approach for my thesis is that over the previous 130 years or so, baches and cribs appeared in clusters around many parts of New Zealand’s coastline, lakes and riversides, on a variety of land tenures. Although this research focuses primarily on single case study, it is necessary to explore the wider geographies and histories of bach and crib landscapes to gain some understanding of how and why these vernacular cottages ‘loom large in the national psyche’ of New Zealanders (Kearns and Collins 2006: 229), and consequently these bach landscapes are explored further in Chapter 6. Butthe popularity of baches and cribs is not due solely to their physical abundance in the landscape; it is also a function of how frequently they have been represented in film,

television, art, popular and academic writing and in various forms of advertising. Similarly, native bird conservation has a particularly iconic status in New Zealand, due, in part, to the country’s distinctive ecological history, but also because of how native avifauna have been presented in the media. The next section shifts focus from landscape as a material record to instead focus on the interpretation of landscapes as symbolic cultural products.