5.
RECOGNITION OF LANDSCAPES OF THE MIND
“The
hunger for spaces that give meaning … grows everywhere around
us. The trouble is, they’re hard to see clearly, except in retrospect.”
18
Examples
of a recognition of memories, of the spirit of places held in the mind,
are few as yet, save for special heritage areas such as the Treaty Ground
at Waitangi, which has been protected as parkland. The Department of
Conservation has one particular project which illustrates how an innovative
approach can make a difference.
Whale
Island, or Mou-tohora, off the Bay of Plenty coast, has been protected
and managed for nature conservation since 1984. A fire watch programme
through several summers has helped to encourage biodiversity recovery.
Ecological restoration has included planting the edges of streams, and
restoring the coastal forest by planting 14,000 trees, many of which
had been destroyed by possum browsing, predators and fire.
According
to the tradition of Ngati Awa, the voyaging canoe from the Cook Islands,
Mataatua, made its initial landing in New Zealand nearby. The signs
for habitation were not right there, so the canoe sailed across the
bay to an island and anchored. There, the twin sons of Muriwai, the
sister of the captain were drowned. The canoe, with grieving crew, departed
again from what was obviously not an auspicious place. They were accompanied
by a pair of birds, saddlebacks, as they departed from the island. The
birds were seen as guides by the canoe. Their avian escorts took them
to their final landing place. The site was confirmed as ‘the place’
by other signs recorded in legend. Their guiding duty fulfilled, the
two saddlebacks flew to Mou-tohora, before returning to their home island.
These same saddlebacks feature in other legends of the tribe Ngati Awa.
Although
the tribe had been consulted on a range of management issues concerning
the island, there was still a strong sense of alienation from the island
which features so strongly in their history. A powerful symbol seemed
required and a plan was hatched to bring 40 of the species of the original
two saddleback birds back to Mou-tohora, even though they were not regarded
as a keynote species for the island in biological terms. The ceremony
for the birds’ release was dramatic and moving and instigated
a step towards partnership between the descendents of the Mataatua canoe
and the Department of Conservation. This renewed sense of connection
with place has been reinforced by the naming of the conservation hut
after the first chief known to have inhabited the island, and the erection
of a pou-whenua, that is a pole to identify land, representing another
eminent chief of Ngati Awa.19
Recognition of the links between nature and culture, and more particularly
the resurrection of landscape memories of place show how such values,
or the spirit of place, can be recognised and shared by the community.
Such recognition also requires the building of relationships and understanding
between cultures.
This
instance at Mou-tohora Island primarily uses ecology to reassert and
accommodate Maori cultural meaning in the landscape. Similarly, grand
narratives have also been expressed in smaller scale landscape design
such as Te Aho o Maui - the civic plaza overbridge in Wellington. Designed
by Maori architect Rewi Thompson and artist Para Matchitt to bridge
a busy road and link the civic plaza with the seafront, the bridge is
a book without words. It recounts in both its form and its treatment
as a ‘canvas’, a layered series of narratives that span
the Pacific and express Maori meaning, both specific to Wellington and
more generic. At its broadest this playful and rich design narrates
the story of the demigod Maui fishing up the North Island, the northern
of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s two islands on which Wellington sits.
Of this Thompson said:
What
I have done is to see Maui as a person of discovery, of intrigue [and]
adventure.… The Aho itself is a line that connects us from the
water’s edge or the harbour into the city and so it makes connections
therefore to the South Pacific. And of course Maui was a discoverer
of the Pacific himself as well as Aotearoa so we are really creating
a bridge that links the harbour into the city. (Douglas 1993)
Much
more specific to Wellington, the sides of the bridge narrate the creation
of its harbour – Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara – through the efforts
of two taniwha (fabulous monsters) called Ngake and Whataitai, who forced
a passage out to the open sea from what was originally a lake. Their
tails adorn the bridge’s northern parapet.
As
well as these longstanding meanings, the bridge also conveys some much
more contemporary and politically charged narratives in a series of
pou at its eastern end. These powerful structures carry images used
most notably by Te Kooti, the 19th century prophet who established the
Ringatu religion. The images include the crescent moon, the cross, snow-covered
mountains representing Aotearoa/New Zealand, the pierced and bleeding
heart and the six-pointed Star of David.20
These are all icons that are thought to have symbolized the sufferings
and the hopes of the people who followed Te Kooti through exile and
war to a lopsided peace. This is a powerful narrative and a significant
statement to make in an important public space in the capital city.
In this it expresses the potential for meanings to be expressed that,
to the literate at least, are challenging, confrontational, powerful
and reaffirming of values and hopes.
The
preceding examples have described big meanings… events, deeds
and people, both historic and prehistoric, that are of mythic proportions
to their Maori proprietors. However, as is shown by Te Aro Park in central
Wellington, meaning within the designed landscape can also express narrative
at a more domestic scale. Te Aro Park was jointly designed by Maori
ceramics artist Shona Rapira Davies and the Wellington City Council
and is named after the Maori community that occupied the site (which
was originally known as Te Aro Pa) until the 1890’s. Like Te Aho
o Maui, the design is layered, although this time with meanings that
spring from the site’s history and from the earth. At its broadscale
the park represents a canoe that has perhaps paddled up the harbour
and beached on the old shoreline that was the original site. The tall
V-shaped structure at the park’s narrow eastern end represents
the sternpost, and the cabbage trees (Cordyline australis)
along its sides are its oarsman.
The
second thread, the trappings of which are the most apparent, expresses
the ‘female principle,’ primarily through adopting an overall
framework and a design detail that refers to the (usually) women’s
art of weaving floor mats. This reference gains more poignancy when
seen in the light of the comment by Maori artist Dianne Prince that
“...many of us use weaving in our work…almost [to] make
a statement... a reaffirmation of the status of our own women’s
art form.21 In addition
the design speaks of women by using tile paintings on the pool floors
to portray the earth mother (Papatuanuku), and women in old age, young
adulthood and in youth.
The
third narrative is manifest in the use of water itself and alludes to
Maori beliefs about the spiritual states of water, expressing cleansing,
blessing and renewal, while the water flow symbolises the original Te
Aro stream and the shoreline. Finally and asserting tribal identity
and narrating layers of meaning through association through time, the
‘bridge’ and the inside of the ‘canoe prow’
are lined with tiles naming the tribes associated with the greater Wellington
area. This again adds an explicitly political strand to the meanings
that have been encapsulated in threads of narrative. Like the use of
the bleeding heart and Star of David by Te Kooti, this narrative will
be meaningful only to those in the know. Those who can read the signs,
decode the imagery and who have enough prior knowledge to make the connections,
will be primarily Maori. So these designs are hermeneutic constructions
aimed at two distinctive audiences, for whom they will generally have
quite different meanings.
6. PLANNING AND
DESIGN FOR SPIRIT
There
are few Maori landscape architects and the following examples of work
undertaken are only a small step along the way to recognising different
cultural meanings in landscapes. The first is a landscape planning and
ecological restoration project undertaken by Di Lucas Associates for
a tribal group. The plan calls for the rehabilitation of wetlands, not
as lakes or systems of scenic beauty, but as ditches and swamps to provide
habitats for eels for traditional food collection, as well as for developing
understanding and capability in ecological restoration and management
by the tribe.
Part
of a park close to Christchurch City was designed to provide a source
of flax or harakeke for traditional weaving by local people as well
as to preserve the cultivars which had been selected and exchanged over
hundreds of years for specific types of weaving. These special cultivars
had been recently collected by a Government owned land management enterprise,
Landcare Research, and the cultivars thought most desirable by local
Maori weavers were selected for the pa harakeke or flax garden. In addition,
the design incorporated plants used for traditional medicine, called
rongoa, and the plants sought, while not all endemic to the area, were
those which local healers found difficulty in collecting. Planting was
also undertaken for forest restoration on once grazed hillsides. A walkway
which is linked to others was planned and built. The landscape plan
also incorporates a gateway that tells the local history and was carved
by inmates of a local prison as a contribution to the project. A memorial
plaque was intended, with the often quoted Maori proverb:
Hutia
te rito o te harakeke,
kei hea te komako e ko.
Rere ki uta
rere ki tai.
Ki mai koe ki au,
‘He aha te mea nui o te Ao?’
Maku e ki, He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
If
the centre [fruiting] shoot of the flax bush were plucked
where would the bellbird sing?
You fly inland
you fly to the sea
You ask me,
‘What is the most important thing in the world
I would say, ‘Tis people, ‘tis people,’ tis people’.
22
This
affirmation of the intertwined relationship between people and the world
was cited during the discussions about the establishment of the flax
garden by one of the garden’s champions who died prior to the
garden’s completion. It was planned to be attached to a large
natural boulder. Initially it appeared that budget restrictions (all
the development costs were donated) would prevent this, but when a flash
flood occurred near the end of the project, the ideal boulder appeared
on site and was positioned by the digger called to clean the adjacent
culvert. The project was planned as a community millennium celebration
and so involved local people including the sub tribe and school children
to do some of the planting, and other volunteer and community groups.
In this way it was hoped that knowledge of the resource and the garden
would be maintained.
Finally, in this series of case studies, we will turn briefly to two
examples where Maori-owned and administered sites have been designed.
The first of these is an as yet unbuilt landscape design for a kura
kaupapa Maori, a school where the Maori language is the medium of education.
In the context of this paper, most noticeable about this project were
the aspirations of the school children, expressed through designs prepared
by each of the sixty pupils. Predictably there were numerous requests
for play equipment, tree huts and other ‘childish things’
albeit some, such as a cave, have a clear Maori character. Less predictable
were the requests, supported by the teachers and parents, for a variety
of things to facilitate what was clearly a strong spiritual and metaphysical
dimension to the way the school was perceived and in its activities.
This led to requests for a forest, for a special place to conduct ‘sacred
learning’, for a guardian for the school and for the physical
infrastructure that would support the protocols of ceremonial welcomes,
among other things. All of this highlights that sites such as these
play a different role in the Maori community to that of the mainstream,
requiring the school’s landscape to be imbued with meanings that
are distinctively particular to their role as a centre for Maori education.
The
second site, again as yet unbuilt, involves a design for Whatatutu marae
by a group of landscape architecture students from Lincoln University.
Their task was to prepare a landscape design for the site, which was
the focus for the local Maori community and the venue for meetings,
weddings, baptisms, funerals and all the other events that marked its
social rhythm. The site was well established with a meeting house, a
large and exceptionally ornate dining room with attendant kitchen, an
early childhood education facility and housing for the elderly. What
it lacked was shelter from the cold winds of winter and the fierce summer
sun, spatial definition and above all a landscape that expressed the
strength of the community and the pride it took in its marae.
During
the project the students worked closely with the community, with whom
they stayed for nearly a week. The result, expressing the students’
narrative filled stay, was a series of designs that not only attempted
to solve the predictable problems of circulation, shelter, character
and place, but attempted to do so with stories. Using water, planting
and circulation patterns they told of how Poua formed the Waipoua River.
Using gateways and paths other designs spoke of the community’s
suffering during the period that Te Kooti was pursued by government
troops. Still other designs attempted to express the battles that that
community had fought in years gone by. Interestingly it was this aspect
of the designs as an expression of self that the community connected
with most enthusiastically. Clever gateways and shelters scarcely rated
a mention but to quote from one local “…it was the stories
that brought it to life and made it ours.”
7.
PROSPECT
“I
try to listen to each place, to let it speak, to address its demons
and its angels, to wonder why it still retains some hold on me.’
23
Much
of this paper has been concerned with accommodating Maori meaning within
a contested landscape. It is worth noting however, that among the Aotearoa/New
Zealand’s post-colonial settler population there is a growing
confidence that the country is their cultural as well as their physical
home. Leading, in part anyway, to an increasing desire to express ‘self’
and ‘place’ by referring to aspects of the Maori culture;
non-Maori All-Black supporters paint themselves with Maori inspired
facial tattoos at rugby games; haka (‘war’ dances) are performed
before, after and during events ranging from university graduations
to contests on the sports fields. Maori art and design is increasingly
seen as representative of the country and in some quarters traditionally
designed Maori flax bags (kete) are essential fashion accessories. Perhaps
most illustrative of this trend are the large number of Pakeha who wear
greenstone or whalebone jewelry, often wearing it almost as a talisman
under their clothes, putting it on show when they want to flaunt their
native land. Similar changes are occurring in the corporate and governmental
worlds, where, although less intimate, they are no less significant.
Maori designs adorn crests, logos and the tail of Air New Zealand’s
fleet of planes, while there is scarcely a branch of government that
doesn’t have a Maori as well as an English name. Such things were
all but unheard of even thirty years ago.
Of course these symbols, practices, words and icons are understood differently
by Maori and Pakeha, with few Pakeha having more than a superficial
understanding of what they mean. For Maori they are vehicles for family,
sub-tribe, tribe and sometimes pan-Maori meaning, while for all but
the aficionado among Pakeha their symbolism is more generic, speaking
of country and home rather than of deeds, genealogy and self. However,
the fact that these icons are being used valued and identified with
marks an important progression in the conceptual development of Aotearoa/New
Zealand and a significant potential for landscape architecture. For
the majority of Pakeha Aotearoa/New Zealand ceased being an outpost
of Europe (which for most meant Britain) two or more generations ago.
However, the sense of identity that they had was rooted in landscape,
countryside and lifestyle and took little from the Maori culture. The
recent adoption of these elements from the outer most layers of the
Maori world therefore marks a significant development. In effect it
describes objects, words, images and events being vested with a new
and more generic layer of meaning, that is in many ways distinctive
from the original understandings of the Maori cognoscenti. That is,
it shows Pakeha creolising elements of the Maori culture, through reinterpreting
them as expressions of the country as a whole.
This is a complex package containing both the exciting prospect of cross-cultural
sharing and valuing within the landscape, and the frightening potential
for Maori to be colonised culturally (which can be no more than acknowledged
in this paper). However, for us as people concerned with the development
of the landscape and looking for a way forward within culturally contested
and congested environments, this recent trend in Aotearoa/New Zealand
may express part of the solution we seek. What it highlights is the
potential for Pakeha to enjoy and value expressions of the Maori culture
and for them to understand and value these differently from Maori. Against
this measure, landscapes such as Te Aho o Maui don’t need to be
understood equally to be valued by the different cultures that use them.
Rather, the opposite applies and these landscapes should be thought
of as holograms, where the landscape is read and understood differently
depending on the cultural perspective from which it is seen. Following
this approach, the issue is not the need for the meaningful content
of landscapes to be equally accessible or understood, but a preparedness
to accept that these landscapes will be understood differently and valued
for different things, but that they will be valued nonetheless.
8. CONCLUSIONS
“Until
we learn the lesson that man is an integral part of the natural order
and that he has obligations not only to society but to the environment
so long will he abuse the Earth. To realize he is a child of the Earth
will help him in working to restore and maintain the harmony and balance
which successive generations of human kind have arrogantly disrupted.”24
In
essence this paper has been a case study in how to respond to cultural
difference within the landscapes that we develop and design. We have
described four key things. Firstly, that the conceptual landscapes used
lived in and developed by Maori and Pakeha are frequently distinctly
different in their innate meanings and in the relationships and histories
that they express; something that is increasingly leading to tensions,
conflicts, disagreements and litigation over development. Secondly,
through a series of examples, we discussed the potential of ecological,
broadscale and detailed site design to express and reinforce Maori meta-narratives.
Thirdly, and building on this, we presented a series of smaller scale
examples where site design has been used to express the social, historic
and contemporary Maori meanings of location and people. Finally, in
more of a muse than a topic, we discussed some of the changes occurring
in how Pakeha relate to the Maori culture and the possible implications
of this on landscape design.
| With
more of an eye to the future than to the past, several key conclusions
spring from this: |
| • |
Firstly,
the broader the scale of the development and the more ‘metaphysical’
the Maori relationship with its intended landscape, the more difficult
it is to accommodate Maori within it. |
| • |
Secondly, and
in happy corollary to this, Maori meaning is relatively easy to
accommodate and express within site design. |
| • |
Thirdly, expressing
Maori meaning within the landscape requires a degree of sharing
in terms of knowledge that many Maori will not be comfortable with,
but, it can be done without sacrificing the meaning’s cultural
integrity. |
| • |
Fourthly, the
changes in self identity that are currently occurring within Aotearoa/New
Zealand’s Pakeha community now mean that many Pakeha as well
as Maori appreciate and value elements of the Maori culture, albeit
in a different way. |
| • |
Fifthly, instead
of looking to design to express one set of meanings, it should be
expected to express multiple meanings to multiple cultural users.
|
| • |
Finally, while
it isn't easy or straightforward, different cultures can be accommodated
in development and design – it requires practice, sensitivity
and confidence. |
During the debate over the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840,
Mohi Tawhai said:
Let
the tongue of everyone be free to speak; but what of it. What will
be the end? Our sayings will sink to the bottom like a stone, but
your sayings will float light, like the wood of the whau tree, and
always remain to be seen. 25
While his sad prediction did come true, it is our belief that reasserting
the Maori voice is not only possible, but will help create a richer,
more enjoyable and more inclusive world. It can be done! All of which
resonates with the issues of globalism and place, two of the meta-narratives
of this conference. Expressing the point that the accommodation of indigenous
cultural meanings within the landscape will help to assert place, locality
and particularity into all of our daily lives and allow us to live where
we are.
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