New Zealand after Twenty Years: A Geographer's View

Abstract

The world economic depression of the 1930's struck New Zealand towards the close of almost a century of hectic, hurried and uninterrupted development. The transformation of the previous century had been unparalleled in British colonial history in its speed, intensity and wholesale nature. No country, and few parts of any country more than 100,000 square miles in extent, had been subject to such change in so short a time at the hands of an immigrant alien culture. In 1840 Aotearoa was a predominantly forested land occupied sparsely?with little more than one person to each square mile?by a Polynesian people with a Stone Age culture. By 1938 the forest had been all but completely removed, the drier indigenous grass? land tracts had been converted to croplands or burned and grazed beyond recogni? tion, and the European and Maori population stood at more than a million and a half and lived overwhelmingly in hastily-built towns and cities. It is almost twenty years to the day since I arrived in New Zealand and saw for the first time Tasman's land uplifted high. I arrived with a background of urban living in the north of England, and with recent experience of British agriculture in its more difficult and extensive phases on the fells and in the dales of the West Riding. I arrived, too, with next to no knowledge of New Zealand. To a London-trained geographer in the 1930's the Dominion was still a mere appendage to one of the remaining (southern) continents. To recall and record frankly one's more lasting impressions after the lapse of twenty years, I must admit that I found New Zealand a blatantly pioneer colonial land, incompletely transformed, inadequately tamed, still sparsely occupied, raw, fresh and new, but youthfully exciting and inviting. The depression had brought development temporarily to a standstill. In fact, the frontier of settlement was in the 1930's often in retreat. New Zealand was licking its wounds, counting its mistakes and assessing the cost of a century's hurried, ill-planned and boisterous development. With only sixteen persons to every square mile, it used land extensively and wastefully. This was evident in the swelling acreage of land classed as in fern, scrub and second growth, in the hundreds of thousands of acres littered with the gaunt grey stumps and fire-blackened logs of the former forest, and in the declining carrying capacity of the overgrazed, overburned and rabbitand deer-infested tussock grasslands of the South Island high country and the basin plains of the Mackenzie and Central Otago. It was evident, above all, in the ravages which soil erosion was working in varied combinations of forms in different parts of the country?from the insidious and little noticed sheet and wind erosion of the cropland, and of the tussock grassland of the South Island, to the unique and spectacular assemblages of mass slumping and flowage of soil and subsoil in the heavier rainfall and earthquake-shaken districts of the North Island, where in as little as one generation cultural interference had been sufficient to induce a new cycle of erosion.2