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 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
Read more https://theconversation.com/mowing-the-lawn-the-colonial-ghosts-haunting-our-suburban-ritual-283270
