Histories of Science, Environment, Gardens
Symposium, 19 August 2015
Hamilton Gardens, Hungerford Crescent, Gate 1 Cobham Drive, Hamilton,
New Zealand
SESSION 1: Earth 1 (9.00-10.40)
James Beattie
China on a Plate: A Willow Pattern Garden Realised
Abstract
This talk explores new geographical and methodological frontiers in garden history suggested
by different interpretations of Hawera’s ‘Willow Pattern Garden’ and the design on which it
was based. Opened by the Republic of China (ROC) Ambassador to New Zealand in 1968,
the story of this garden affords a curious and fascinating example of the multiple meanings
chinoiserie elicited—not least, the on-going attraction of the willow-pattern plate in inspiring
everything from musical productions, plays and poetry, to diplomatic put-downs, critiques of
colonialism and its three-dimensional representation in garden form in twentieth-century New
Zealand. A broader discussion of the willow-pattern design’s meaning in New Zealand
suggests the need to reconfigure understandings of cultural encounters—at least their spatial
and cultural expressions—away from experiences simply of intimidation and domination, as
suggested by Mary Louise Pratt. What can chinoiserie, it asks, reveal as a repository of
creative encounter in New Zealand?
Keywords: Chinese gardens, willow-pattern ware, chinoiserie, identity, imperialism
Biography
James is Director, Historical Research Unit, University of Waikato, where he teaches
imperial, environmental, garden, and world history. He is fascinated by most things, but
especially environmental history, history of science, garden history, and art history. He has
written or co-edited six books, including most recently: Eco-cultural Networks and the
British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (co-editor with Emily O’Gorman and
Edward Melillo, Bloomsbury, 2015) and Visions of Peace: The H.W. Youren Collection and
the Art of Chinese Cultural Diplomacy (co-written with Richard Bullen, 2014). He is also
Founding Editor of: International Review of Environmental History, co-editor of Palgrave
World Environmental History book series, and Co-Leader of a Marsden-funded project on
Rewi Alley, Art and Chinese Cultural Diplomacy. His next book, co-edited with Ts’ui-jung
Liu, is Environment, Modernization and Development in East Asia: Perspectives from
Environmental History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Email: [email protected]
________________________________________________
Michael Roche
“[W.W.] Smith’s Dream”: Public gardens as a yardstick for Scenic Beauty in early 20th
century New Zealand
Abstract
W.W Smith, a Scottish-trained gardener previously foreman at Burghley Park before
migrating to New Zealand and a noted amateur naturalist was lured from the curatorship of
Ashburton domain by R.J. Seddon to serve as Secretary of the Scenery Preservation
Commission, 1904 to 1906. Smith was credited with turning the Ashburton Domain into a
local beauty spot by drawing on British parkland ideas of the scenic as well as use of formal
flower beds and less formalist plantings of exotic (i.e. familiar to Smith) and some
indigenous species. He never discussed in print the principles that guided his ‘scenic eye’ in
Ashburton (or later at Pukekura Park in New Plymouth). However, in his work as Secretary
of the Scenery Preservation Commission Smith travelled widely across the country inspecting
sites making recommendations about for some to be preserved as Scenic Reserves under the
Scenery Preservation Act, 1903. In making these recommendations Smith had to explain in
writing what he saw as scenic and worth reserving. Drawing on the papers of the Scenery
Preservation Commission, some sense of Smith’s scenic preferences now emerge as ones that
were shaped by his UK training and experience. Smith’s time on the Commission,
interestingly enough also captures some transitions in his sense of what constituted ‘scenic’
adding to and modifying his British sense of the aesthetic and engaging with the new
possibilities of his New Zealand home. Smith was, for instance, much interested in old Māori
pa and tended to see them as relicts of an ancient heroic age.
Keywords: W.W. Smith, Scenery Preservation Commission, Ashburton Domain, scenery
Biography
Michael Roche is Professor of Geography in the School of People Environment and Planning,
Massey University. An historical geographer he has published on aspects of New Zealand’s
forest history, on early 20th century land settlement especially the discharged soldier
settlement scheme, and contemporary agri-food geographies. Along with others he has drifted
into the WWI arena and has undertaken some work on Anzac Day commemorations, Indians
in the NZEF, and enemy aliens in Ashburton.
Email: [email protected]
____________________________________________
Annette Bainbridge
Women, Gardens and Social Cohesion in Colonial Canterbury
Abstract
This talk examines the role of women and their gardens in the social cohesion of the
Canterbury settlement 1850-1914. From the earliest stages of colonisation gardens became
places of social activity and facilitated the growth of integrated communities. Women
gardeners were integral to this process through their establishment of wide-ranging seed and
plant exchange networks. These networks often crossed class boundary lines and became an
important part of travelling and visiting rituals in colonial society. Thus social occasions
became the means through which women settlers exchanged gardening information and ideas
on an informal basis. These knowledge-sharing networks became an integral part of female
settlers’ efforts to ameliorate the harsh realities of colonial life and gain a greater
understanding of their new environment.
Women settlers also used kitchen garden produce to provide communal hospitality,
sometimes on an impressive scale, and they used the pleasure garden as a site for sporting
activities, social occasions and community events. These social occasions helped bind
together raw new settlements and soften the rigid class lines that characterised contemporary
British society. Furthermore, many of the essential rituals of the colonial life-cycle such as
weddings and anniversaries were celebrated in the garden. Through their use of gardens as
sites of social contact, colonial women played a key role in the establishment of a relatively
stable and cohesive society in a potentially alienating environment.
Keywords: colonial, women, gardens, environment.
Biography
Annette Bainbridge has just completed a Master's degree in garden history at the University
of Waikato. She is currently working on preliminary research for commencing a PhD on
colonial garden and environmental history in 2016.
Email: [email protected]
Morning tea (10.40-11.10)
SESSION 2: Earth 2 (11.10-12.20)
Katrina Ford
Keeping the Country Clean: Science, environmental transformations and farming
practices in New Zealand, c.1890-1910
Abstract
In 1901, a speaker at the Waikato Farmers’ Club admonished farmers for their apparent
apathy in the face of the threat of anthrax: ‘God gave you a clean country; keep it clean.’
Outbreaks of anthrax and blackleg in stock from the 1890s were attributed by the Department
of Agriculture’s experts to the increasing use of imported bone dust from Australia and India
as a fertiliser on New Zealand’s pastures. These explanations reflected the growing
dominance of bacteriological understandings in both animal and human disease, as well as
rising awareness of global disease ecologies. As a result, the relationship between disease,
environment and locality underwent profound shifts. The health of New Zealand’s people,
animals and pastures could be threatened by the epidemiological environments of places
many thousands of miles away. Agricultural officials also blamed unhygienic farming
practices for the spread of disease on New Zealand’s farms, arguing farmer complacency
regarding New Zealand’s pastoral purity was putting that very purity at risk. This paper looks
at the measures that were proposed to keep the country clean, as well as farmer responses to
them, in the context of questions about the construction of science, expertise and pastoral
agriculture in New Zealand and the world.
Keywords: Science, disease, medicine, agriculture, bacteriology, anthrax, nineteenth century,
twentieth century
Biography
Katrina Ford is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Auckland. She received
her PhD in History from the University of Auckland in 2014. She has also worked as a
Teaching Fellow in the History Programme at the University of Waikato. Her current
research interests involve the examination of the connections between human health and
animal health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Email: [email protected]
_________________________________________________
Joanna Bishop
Exploring Different Interpretations of Science through the use of Medicinal Plants in New
Zealand, 1850s-1920s
Abstract
This paper will explore various interpretations and applications of scientific knowledge in
New Zealand through case studies on two popular nineteenth-century medicinal plants, thyme
(Thymus vulgaris) and monkshood (Aconitum napellus). Using Susan Star’s concept of
boundary objects, this paper demonstrates how objects such as medicinal plants may be, and
commonly are, interpreted differently, a process she describes as ‘interpretive flexibility’.1
Scientific understandings and analyses of medicinal plants were widely accepted by various
types of healers during the late nineteenth century. These understandings of plants co-existed
with other translations or interpretations and were reflected in their multiple uses and roles in
medicine and culture. Boundary objects, such as medicinal plants were often tailored to local
use, making them more relevant to a particular group. By comparing the use of two popular
nineteenth-century medicinal plants, Thymus vulgaris and Aconitum napellus by three types
of nineteenth-century healers – herbalists, domestic healers and doctors – this paper explores
different interpretations of plants as well as science and argues that each group used science
to legitimise and bolster their claims of efficacy.
Keywords: Medicinal plants, science
Biography
1
Susan Leigh Star, ‘This is not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of the Concept’, Science,
Technology and Human Values, 35, 5 (2010), pp. 601-617; Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer,
‘Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkley’s Museum of
Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39’, Social Studies of Science, 19 (1989), pp. 387-420.
Joanna Bishop has recently completed her PhD in the history department at the University of
Waikato. Her multi-disciplinary doctoral research examined the introduction and use of
medicinal plants in New Zealand, 1850s-1920s. Since then, Joanna has published one article
in Health and History on domestic health care in colonial New Zealand and is working
towards submitting a book outline and proposal to New Zealand publishers based on her
doctoral research. She was recently awarded the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Postdoctoral Stipendiary Award at The University of Waikato.
Email: [email protected]
Lunch (12.20-1.30)
SESSION 3: Air (1.30-2.45)
Ross Galbreath
Vedalia's Legacy: Insect Pest Control in California and the rise of 'Economic
Entomology' in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand
When a new scale insect pest began devastating orchards in California and around the world
in the 1880s, local entomologists in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were drawn
into the American effort to find a 'natural enemy' to control the pest. Their introduction of the
Vedalia ladybird from Australia and New Zealand was almost miraculously successful. The
local entomologists felt they were ignored in the American triumphalism over this, but the
success did give credibility to their branch of applied science, 'economic entomology,' and led
to the appointment of American-style government entomologists across all the southern
British colonies.
Keywords: Vedalia, pest control, entomology,
Biography
Ross Galbreath began in science (as an entomologist, working on insect pests) before starting
again in history. Since completing another Ph.D., at Waikato University, he has enjoyed a
precarious living as a contract historian, writing on science, conservation and business history.
Email: [email protected]
Matt Henry
Meteorology’s Instruments: Radiosondes, Weather Balloons and the Making of a
New Atmosphere
Dr Matt Henry, Resource and Environmental Planning Programme, Massey
University
Abstract: The history of meterology in New Zealand is largely coterminous with
the instrumentation of meteorology as a discipline. Indeed, it can be argued that
meteorology itself is defined by its struggles with developing its own
measurement systems, and the instruments through which weather can
measured and inscribed into graphical forms including the ubiquitous synoptic
map. Yet, with a few exceptions, the histories of meteorology have largely
relegated meteorological instruments, their philosophy, manufacture, circulation,
certification and use to being footnotes. This paper places one of these
instruments, the radiosonde, at the centre of its analysis. A radiosonde, which
when attached to a weather balloon, enables meteorologists to take upper
atmosphere observations. The paper explores the introduction, development and
use of radiosondes in New Zealand after the First World War, how their use
enabled the discovery and exploration of new weather spaces, and how they were
embedded into already existing networks of meteorological practice. In making
possible the exploration of new weather spaces the paper argues that use of
radiosondes presented meteorologists with the opportunity to extend their
credibility, but in doing so it also presented them with practical and
epistemological challenges as to how to integrate the new atmosphere they were
discovering into existing networks of weather forecasting.
Keywords: meterology, radiosonde, New Zealand
Biography
Dr Henry is a senior lecturer in planning in the School of People, Environment
and Planning at Massey University. His current research interests focus on the
technopolitics of metrics and measurement systems. He is a co-editor of the
recently released book Climate, Science and Colonization: Histories from
Australia and New Zealand.’
Email: [email protected]
SESSION 4: Water (2.50-4.10)
_________________________________________________
Jonathon West
What Lies Beneath? History and New Zealand's Oceans
New Zealand is almost all ocean, but the sea is seldom central to our histories. Even in
maritime history the sea itself is treated superficially: it is simply a surface crossed in order to
reach shore. We have not attempted to plumb the depths of oceans past and ask: What lies
beneath? How has our history here been entangled with changes to the living ocean? How
have we changed the ocean, and been changed in turn? These questions are always hard to
answer: there is a reason why scientists call the sea the black box. Yet, in New Zealand we
have unparalleled evidence of how people have interacted with the sea ever since arrival here.
The Otago coast offers illuminating answers to these broad questions of marine
environmental history. Kai Tahu whanui on this coast encountered an extraordinary
abundance of fish, shellfish, seals, and seabirds from which they gained up to two thirds of all
their food. They had minimal effects on fish and shellfish, but seals and seabirds proved
vulnerable. Nevertheless, Cook's sightings still drew the shock troops of imperial expansion
south: sealers and whalers. Their search for commodities entangled Kai Tahu in 'the webs of
empire'; yet if the subsequent destruction of fur seals, sea lions, and right whales is well
known, the effects on the web of life of eliminating the sea's most important species are not.
Nor is it widely known how quickly from the 1860s settlers depleted shellfish stocks, inshore
fisheries, and sea bird populations, overriding the protests of Kai Tahu, who considered that
they still possessed these resources, and outrunning the state’s attempts to regulate fisheries.
To understand why it has proved so hard to avoid depletions of marine animals requires
unpacking relationships between ecology, economics, and law. Above all, it requires
considering the different histories of how Maori and Europeans have framed claims to
possess and protect marine resources. Such histories need a wider audience, if we are to
become stewards of a living ocean.
Keywords: Maritime history, Kai Tahu, imperial expansion
Biography: Dr Jonathan West is a child of the Otago coast, growing up in Port Chalmers and
Purakaunui. He turned to environmental history when writing a PhD thesis on the Otago
Peninsula which, when not working as a historian with the Waitangi Tribunal, he is
developing into a book to be published next year.
Email: [email protected]
__________________________________________________
Ryan Jones
Abstract
This paper examines the impact that changing right whale cultures had on cross-cultural
encounters between British colonists, Aboriginals, and Maori in Australia in New Zealand
during the era of bay whaling, c. 1805 - 1850. I argue that historians must take seriously the
ways that environments (especially living environments) change in order to understand
colonial and indigenous histories, and that comparative histories across the Tasman offers an
ideal way to think through and document this history.
Keywords: Whaling, Tasman world, Maori history, Aboriginal history
Biography
Email: [email protected]
______________________________________________
Launch of new journal: International Review of Environmental History (4.310-
4.45)
Drinks at garden bar
Keynote Address (5.30-7.00)
Tom Brooking
New Zealand Environmental History: A Story of Transformations via Farming and
Gardening
Abstract
This talk will explain the emergence of environmental history in New Zealand in the 1990s
and describe how the local variant differed (and differs) from that developed in Australia,
North America, Britain and Europe. It will move on to discuss how New Zealand’s histories
of farming and gardening (both public and private) have contributed to the special flavour of
environmental history, before concluding with a few suggestions as to how the ongoing
study of farming and gardening might shape future investigations.
Biography
Tom Brooking is Professor of History, University of Otago. He specialises in New Zealand
and comparative rural and environmental history, New Zealand political history and the
historical links between New Zealand and Scotland.This research has focused upon
environmental transformation and the role of colonising peoples in that process, particularly
farming and its economic, environmental and sociological impacts. He has published seven
sole author books, two co-authored books, and three edited volumes.
Dinner (7.30-10.00)
Histories of Science, Environment, Gardens
Symposium, 19 August 2015
Hamilton Gardens, Hungerford Crescent, Gate 1 Cobham Drive, Hamilton, New
Zealand
WEDNESDAY August 19, 2015
8.30-8.50
Registration & coffee and chats
8.50-9.00
Introduction & Welcome
James Beattie
9.00-10.40
10.40-11.10
11.10-12.20
12.20-1.30
1.30-2.45
2.50- 4.10
4.10-4.45
Session 1: Earth 1
Chair: Tom Brooking
James Beattie
Mike Roche
Annette Bainbridge
Morning tea
Session 2: Earth 2
Chair: Ryan Jones
Katrina Ford
Joanna Bishop
Lunch
Session 3: Air
Chair Joanna Bishop
Ross Galbreath
Matt Henry
Session 4: Water
Chair: James Beattie
Jonathon West
Ryan Jones
Launch of new journal: International Review of Environmental History
4.45-5.30
Drinks at garden bar
5.30-7.00
Public keynote:
Chair: James Beattie
Tom Brooking: New Zealand Environmental History: A story of
transformations via farming and gardening
7.30-10.00
Dinner
Three Leg Frog