Park, Geoff. “Theatre Country.” In Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua, 114-127. Victoria University Press, 2006.
How we view the land, and the devices we use to do so, is never a neutral process - the action is infused with ideology, no matter how every day or commonplace it may be.
As ecologist and research scientist Geoff Park outlines in “Theatre Country”, what we consider untouched New Zealand is itself the result of deeply rooted ideology. The links between the development of the Claude Glass, European concepts of the landscape and British colonial ideology can be clearly seen in Park’s writing, along with their influences on Western thought and legal approaches to land conservation.
Park states that while many may “assume that the way we so readily make nature into scenery has always been the way…[it] is a recent notion of the modern Western mind, arising as a particular culture’s passion and flourishing when it got on its imperialist roll 200 years ago.”[1] Reflecting on a trip to England’s Lake District and his use of a Claude Glass while there, Park describes how the popularity of this looking device influenced the development of landscape tourism, resulting in a shift in viewing “nature-as-scenery [in] the domain of the visitor” rather than “nature-as-homeland.”[2]
To Park, the Claude Glass is a "key piece in imposing the idiom [of] seeing country as landscape… establishing the way of looking that led us into seeing landscape as we might see a framed painting, or the stage of play – as ‘picturesque scene’.[3] Named after the 17th-century artist Claude of Lorraine, who popularised its use in landscape painting, the Claude Glass is a small viewing device comprised of a slightly convex and darkly tinted or obsidian mirror. In essence, the Claude Glass created a miniature picture of an environment that the viewer could hold in the palm of their hand, “allowing one to capture, for a moment, the experience of being in a picturesque place.”[4] Ironically, the Glass only allowed viewers to witness a scene if they turned their back on the environment they had travelled to witness - the image in the glass and its distorted, painterly qualities took precedence over the messiness of reality.
Figure 1: an example of a Claude Glass. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O78676/claude-glass-unknown/
Park outlines that the Claude Glass was popularised in British culture during the 19th century through its appearance in several popular texts, namely: the travel writing of Reverend William Gilpin; Thomas West’s Guide to the Lakes; and the work of poets Thomas Gray, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Regarded as a key figure in the development of landscape tourism, Gilpin frequently described the land he visited as empty waste that could be imparted with value through the act of appreciating their scenery. In turn, West’s Guide to the Lakes - ironically, initially published to encourage landowners in the Lakes District to respect the ecology of the land they were purchasing -, similarly contributed to the rise of landscape tourism through the picturesque scenes it described, and the resulting visits of popular poet Thomas Gray with Claude Glass in hand.[5] Park illustrates that these texts, along with Wordsworth’s poems – ironically, many of them criticisms of the British colonial project and the actions of landscape tourists –, reinforced the concept of landscape-as-scenery and as an object to be viewed.
As Wordsworth’s poems were among popular texts brought to New Zealand by British colonists, “those whose interest it was to ‘aestheticize nature and the natural’ reached far beyond England”, as did the idea of “seeing other people’s country as a picturesque scene.”[6] Park summarises the combined effect that the proliferation of the Claude Glass and these texts had, stating:
For the tourist with a Claude Glass, scenes were quarried that had to be searched out, hunted and pursued… to satisfy his cravings for the ideal, or to drug his craving by the belief that it is being satisfied… It is the expectation of new scenes, perhaps the ideal scene, that sets him off and keeps him going.[7]
As colonial populations spread and grew throughout the British Empire, so too did the increasing idea of landscape as something to be observed, and an increasing demand for scenery by landscape tourists.
This shift in ideology had particularly insidious repercussions for Māori living on land deemed picturesque, as their presence was often painted as a disruption to these ideal landscapes by British colonists. With the rise of landscape-as-scenery, the relationship to land for citizens of industrial Britain was increasingly “no longer as a close [and] reciprocal…but [as viewed] from the outside”; not something associated with a place one was connected to, but somewhere one ventured to for the sole purpose of viewing and framing it.[8] As many of the most picturesque areas of New Zealand were under Māori guardianship during the late 19th century, Park illustrates that seizure under the guise of conservation was often used to justify its acquisition and the removal of Māori residents by the Crown:
Colonial landscapes…are used to extend the coloniser’s power over the indigenous… In order to provide the dramatic or romantic contexts for tourists that enable them to imagine themselves as explorers…New Zealand’s beautiful scenes were emptied of rival human presences and ‘returned…to their old primaeval grandeur.[9]
The introduction of Premier Richard John Seddon’s Scenery Preservation Bill in 1903 allowed this method of land preservation to be codified into law, however Park states that as the bill did not distinguish between Crown, private, or Native land, this led to the increased displacement of Māori under the notion of returning the land to a state of authenticity - “emptied of human inhabitants and…preserved by law as ‘original’ nature.”[10] The removal of indigenous populations was often described to British citizens both in New Zealand and abroad as inevitable, a sign of a dying culture fading away rather than their strategic removal on the part of a colonial project. As Park states, as history is examined and government increasingly pushed to acknowledge the Treaty of Waitangi, these events, systems of power and cultural myths are coming to light in greater detail.
The effect that colonial perceptions of landscape had on Māori and the separation from whenua, culture, and life that they experienced as a result was recognised by some British figures, including poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, who Park references discussing the “theatre” of natural scenery in their correspondence, and the negative impacts of taking “people’s native country…on their psychic, spiritual landscape”.[11] As Park summarises:
Of all the modern state’s tendrils, the conservation estate is where the one-sidedness of the colonial project… has hung on most tenaciously. The good work of saving species and keeping ‘pests’ at bay, always proffered as a morally pure universal, is indeed one of New Zealand’s most Pākehā arenas… [An] aesthetic of nineteenth-century English taste, commandeered by the empire’s desire to separate Māori from their most beautiful country, persuades us that what we see is wild and original New Zealand.[12]
Overall, Park’s “Theatre Country” reflects on the complex history of perception and the wide-reaching impacts that technology, literature, and settler-colonialism have had on the ideologies, land, and populations of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Figure 2: the sculpture Claude Reflected created by designer Sarosh Mulla of Pac Studio, located in Waikereru Ecosanctuary, Gisborne, New Zealand. https://www.pacstudio.nz/project/claude-reflected.
[1] Park, Geoff, “Theatre Country”, in Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua (Victoria University Press, 2006): 114. [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Park, “Theatre Country”, 117. [5] Ibid., 116. [6] Ibid., 117. [7] Ibid. [8] Ibid., 115. [9] Ibid., 126. [10] Ibid., 125. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid., 126.
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