the colonial ghosts haunting our suburban ritual

Written by Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

Real New Zealanders like mowing their lawns. I certainly do. Until I met my partner I thought everyone did. But she and I have strong views on mowing lawns – and they pull in opposite directions.

I’m from the conventional keep-the-damn-things-under-control school of thought, while she’d rather the grass was left to grow, if not to infinity and beyond, then at least to knee height.

Lawns and I go way back. Mostly, I associate them with Dad. Each Saturday he’d don his lawnmowing gear (stubbies, a daggy old tee-shirt of indeterminate colour, towelling hat) and spend an hour or so running the Masport up and down.

There was a narrow strip between our house and the neighbour’s fence, and when he got to that part he would drop the blade a notch and carve out a passable cricket strip.

As soon as he was done I’d be in, armed with a pile of lemons, and remove an entire World XI of the top international batsmen of the time – Viv Richards, Greg Chappell, David Gower – for next to nothing. Each one of them bowled middle stump or, if I was having an off day, caught behind. None of them ever hit my lemons for six – scratchy singles were all I ever conceded.

But eventually the lemons would disintegrate, or I’d have run through the World XI, the last of them (Imran Khan) out retired hurt, trying to hook a short lemon which got big on him, and I’d wander off looking for something to eat.

After Dad died, I took his shorts, shoes and the Masport down to the bach at Te Whārangi Foxton Beach. The mower was the first to give up the ghost. The shorts went next, more hole than short by the time I reluctantly put them away in a bottom drawer. The shoes were the last to go.

I found that quite hard. Dad had worn them for years, and they were the last of his things in my possession that had been in direct contact with his skin. I should probably biff them, but for now they’re sitting quietly alongside the new Chinese mower out in the shed.

‘Colonist grass’

Lately, the relationship between the grass and me has begun to shift. Somehow, the lawn has become caught up in my thinking about the many ways in which the big, nation-building stories of colonisation are entwined with the small ones found in the histories of settler-colonial families like mine.

It seems an odd thing to have happened, but there is no getting away from it: the more I look at it through a settler’s eyes, the more clearly I see Maurice Shadbolt’s “colonist grass”.

The lawn – the “telltale patchwork quilt of European settlement” – arrived in this country with the British. The ones established over here were intended to mimic and to elicit an emotional connection with the ones left behind. In early Pōneke Wellington, an observer noted, “many of the principal residences [are] standing in a green lawn, with a pretty garden at the back” and this “reminds one of an English villa”.

the colonial ghosts haunting our suburban ritual

This was by design, not accident; it was both natural and entirely contrived. Like the introduction of other exotic flora and fauna, pastoral farming and parliamentary government, the laying down of the lawn was one of the ways in which colonisation marked this land. Perhaps not at the very beginning, when most new arrivals would have been busy felling trees, draining wetlands and burning bush. But once the footholds had been established and life had become a little less precarious, it was time to take up the challenge of civilising the new colonial spaces by reproducing the landscapes of Home. Time to impose order upon chaos and inscribe empire on the land. Time to cultivate the lawn. Laying down the lawn I didn’t think much about this sort of thing while I was cleaning Geoffrey Boycott out for a duck. Neither would it have occurred to me to wonder where the grass I was trundling up and down on came from. I’m not generally given to browsing scientific papers on the composition of New Zealand lawns, but lately I’ve taken to reading studies of what I’ve always thought was a local phenomenon but turns out to be no such thing. None of the most popular lawn grasses we use in our lawns – perennial ryegrass, blue grass, fescue, meadow fescue and browntop – originated here. Our lawns are dominated by alien grass species, and there is very little in the way of native grass at all: encounters with settlers didn’t usually end well for the local species, and those that have survived are often regarded as weeds. Not really grass at all then, but something undesirable. One study of the lawns of Ōtautahi Christchurch reckons that native grasses account for just 13% of all of the lawn species down that way, and 19% across the entire country’s lawns. I am struck by how similar those figures are to the proportion of Māori in the human population: perhaps the exotic does not much discriminate between Indigenous people and indigenous flora. And those data mean that I have been waging a never-ending and unwinnable war on behalf of the imports against the indigenes – weeds, insects and the like – which are endeavouring to return our lawns to something resembling the way they once were. Take your eyes off the insurgents for more than a week or two, and they will be all over you. Miriam Sharland has smartly suggested that what we call a “weed” is really just a plant that happens to be in the wrong place, or which annoys us because it doesn’t need our help to grow. What lies beneath The lawn is more than a square or a rectangle or a tangle of angles of grass. It is also an idea that reaches back to an earlier New Zealand. Its potency has not been diminished by the passage of time – even if its origins, like those of some of the roads we drive on and land we farm, have also been lost, ecological amnesia taking its place beside other forms of forgetting. Where once I saw simply grass, now, as I fire up the mower, I also glimpse the flickering ghost of the colonial project which carried the lawn to this place. In some places, the soil beneath the crown of green lies uneasy. The lawns I grew up with in Taranaki are on unquiet ground. Up that way, and in the other parts of the country where whenua was confiscated from those who were in the way of progress, and then surveyed, converted into sections or farms and sold to Pākehā farmers, the cutting, trimming and general keeping of things under control is a contemporary expression of old patterns of behaviour. Ecological imperialism is just as imperial as the kinds that rely on soldiers and civil servants. The language of the lawn can grind a little in those parts. We talk of controlling the grass; of keeping things trimmed, cut and tamed. We keep the section tidy and the grass down. Wage war on the weeds. Stop things from getting out of hand. These are terms of conflict and subjugation, the rhetorical descendants of words my forebears might once have used as they slashed, chopped, felled and burned the native bush. Cleared the land of obstacles that needed to be removed so that new lives could be built. Invaded people’s villages and tore down their homes. This is also the lexicon used by those who colonise to characterise what must be done to those who have been colonised. Indigenous people need to be kept in their place just as much as indigenous flora does, and for much the same reason: give them half a chance and they’ll get away on you. Beneath words of this kind is a fear of what might lie behind or beneath us; of some primeval force that might rise up in the dead of night if we do not keep things buttoned down, neat and tidy, under control. Of what might come lumbering out of the unknown. ‘Wakefield’s folly’ Moreover, the entwining of soil and finance lie deep in our colonial heritage. In 1839, Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company issued the terms of purchase for land in its first settlement, the location of which had yet to be determined but would eventually become known as Pōneke Wellington. Some 1,100 sections, each comprising one “town acre” and 100 “country acres”, were advertised for sale at £101 per section. The company undertook to set aside 110 sections – or 10% of the total – for distribution among the “chief families of the tribe from which the lands shall have been originally purchased”. The conditional tense is important, for at the time the lottery took place, in late July 1839, no company official had yet set foot in the new colony and no land had been purchased from Māori. This did not stop the New Zealand Company from selling 99,999 acres of other people’s land to British land speculators. You can see why former New Zealand diplomat Derek Leask refers to the whole shoddy business as “Wakefield’s folly”.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, circa 1850–1860. Wikimedia

The act of surveying called the section into existence. The section’s rectilinear shape was not an accident but intentional, enabling the attribution of financial value where none had existed.

It was one of the means by which the spatial imagery of an alien West was inscribed upon a way of seeing and inhabiting the world that was already here. And it happened not because the section was, or is, in any sense a “natural” construct, but because this is how you ascribe value to land. This is how you build a system of private property rights. This is how space is created for some and taken from others.

The sale of land – of sections and farms – is what this colony was based on. Between 1844 and 1864, the Crown paid Ngāi Tahu £14,750 – roughly NZ$2.5 million in today’s terms – for the entirety of Te Wai Pounamu South Island. Take Rakiura Stewart Island (which sold for £6,000) out of the equation, and that amounts to less than a penny per acre.

The land was then on-sold, the proceeds used to fuel the development of the colony. One North Canterbury block of 30,000 acres went for £14,750, which was both the same price as the Crown shelled out for the whole South Island and fully 1,142% more per acre than the Crown paid Ngāi Tahu. Now, that’s what you call a capital gain.

Grass of empire

I still like a good lawn. But it turns out that ours is not just something I mow. These days I’m aware that when I pull on the new boots which replaced Dad’s old sneakers and head outside, I’m doing a bit more than keeping things tidy. And perhaps I’m overdoing it, conflating the mowing of a lawn with the ongoing effects of colonisation.

But I find I’m unable to do the first without thinking about the second. It is no longer prosaic, our lawn, but is its own little piece of landscape, imbued with meanings I’m still learning and stories I’m just beginning to hear. There is something immersive and interactive going on here; its borders are not where I thought they were.

It has ceased to be a space in which I think, and become a place that makes me think. Of people who are long gone. Of a past which still resonates. Of the knowledge that colonisation is not just about the movement of people and power across time and space. Ideas, too, are instruments of empire. As is grass and the land it grows on.

This is an edited extract from The Good Settler: Essays from other people’s lands published by Massey University Press.

Authors: Richard Shaw, Professor of Politics, Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa – Massey University

the colonial ghosts haunting our suburban ritual

‘Colonist grass’

Grass of empire

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