LIT Review # 1 - “Swamps which might doubtless easily be drained”

Geoff Park. “Swamps which might doubtless easily be drained” In Theatre Country: Essays on landscape and whenua, 179–194. Victoria University Press, 2006.

In this chapter of his book Theatre Country, New Zealand ecologist and research scientist Geoff Park examines the historical thinking that led to the large-scale destruction of wetlands worldwide, with a particular focus on New Zealand. He discusses the consequences of these drainage schemes, highlighting the transformation of my childhood home, the Hauraki Plains swamp, a region first referenced in 1769 by Joseph Banks during Captain Cook’s expedition on the Endeavour. When Cook and Banks travelled inland up the Waihou River, they stayed overnight in the area, remarking on its potential for cultivation. This was the only time in their voyage that the explorers ventured inland.[1]

Eight five percent of New Zealand’s wetland has been drained since European settlement, the highest percentage in the world.[2] In a convergence of imperfect timing, legal frameworks—both old and new—and differing beliefs intertwined, setting the stage for this major ecological transformation.

European explorers and colonists often failed to acknowledge Indigenous land use, adhering to the doctrine of Terra Nullius (land belonging to no one). This international law allowed European nations to claim land by right of discovery. As Park states in the Our Terra Nullius chapter in the same book, Theatre Country: ”‘Wild’, ‘wilderness’, ‘waste’ was how they labelled any land to which their eyes didn’t observe close settlement and well-tended cultivation, or any land that wasn’t occupied by people evidently of their equal.”[3]

This ideology justified the conquest and appropriation of Māori land. As Banks and Cook travelled inland on the Waihou River, Park writes that they found the land “surprisingly void of people.” But as Park tells us, we now know there were many kāinga that the two explorers did not see, and the drainage scheme that followed on the Hauraki Plains is estimated to have destroyed over 70 percent.[4]

Agricultural revolution from the 17th century and the drainage of the fens in England was a major influence in the drainage schemes in New Zealand. Joseph Banks came from Lincolnshire and was a wealthy owner of over 200 farms. Park’s description of the fens prior to any drainage scheme would sound familiar to Hauraki Māori in late 19th century:

Their diversity of oak and alder woodlands, sedge, rush and reed swamps, open water and tide-swept salt marsh sustained a way of life that was luxurious compared with that of similar people elsewhere. The poorest people had common rights of access to fish, wildfowl, timber, peat, thatch, reeds, and hay. But they faced ruin when the fens and marshes were fenced and drained by estate owners such as Joseph Banks.[5]

And Park’s description of the diversity and richness of the life within New Zealand swamps could easily match that:

Dominating the swamps were rushes, reeds, flax, and the kahikatea, or white pine. Mature fruiting kahikatea were a seasonal mecca for birds and people. Waikakā (spring eels, mudfish), a traditional delicacy for presentation at feasts, hibernated during the summer drought beneath kahikatea roots. Myriad indigenous fish species such as inanga, kōaro, and the kōkopu species migrated through the estuaries and lagoons that would be taken by Crown law for swamp-drainage scheme spillways, through into the pools enclosed by flax and raupō in the gaps of the kahikatea swamp forests.[6]

Such a full description of the flora and fauna that would have existed in the former Piako Swamp on the Hauraki Plains, a sustainably managed mahinga kai (food basket) for the many Iwi that lived in settlements on the edges of the swamp. As Park says: “Ecologically, these were landscapes of interconnection and interaction, the antithesis of the boundary lines and the grid subdivision of the country into legally separated units desired by English land laws.”[7]

Those English land laws, with their rigid boundaries and legal frameworks, reinforced a belief in land as something to be owned, controlled, and transformed through laws, grids, and delineations. This contrasted with Māori perspectives, where land rights were deeply tied to resource use, relationships, and responsibilities to the land.[8]

Park succinctly captures the fundamental difference in how the Treaty of Waitangi was perceived by the two signatory parties: Māori understood it as an agreement to share land and resources while maintaining their authority and rights, whereas the British viewed it as a means to assert sovereignty and justify colonial expansion. This disconnect laid the foundation for the large-scale environmental and social transformations that followed, including the drainage of wetlands like the Piako Swamp.

Customary Māori rights to swamps and waterways, those with which the terms 'taonga', fisheries', 'forests', and 'properties' in the second article of the Treaty of Waitangi are concerned, were primarily use rights, from which ownership derives. Under English law the reverse applied; the right to use and manage a resource flowed from ownership of it.[9]

European settlers viewed wetlands, swamps, and stagnant water as wastelands, largely due to the belief that they harboured toxic miasma and bred disease. This perception, transported from Europe, fuelled the drive to drain and transform New Zealand’s landscapes.[10]

The Wakefield close settlement model promoted New Zealand as a land of opportunity, yet much of the advertised farmland was wetlands and forests, requiring extensive modification. In the country to which the settlers were travelling, the flat, fertile plains they had been promised were, in reality, vast swamplands. Swamp drainage schemes originally suggested by Joseph Banks in 1769 became the solution – his journal entry “Swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” is the title of this chapter in Park’s book.

In the three years following the Hauraki Plains Act 1908, almost 2000 acres of Māori land were acquired to carry out drainage works.

Early warnings about deforestation and wetland drainage were largely ignored, but over time, a growing awareness led to conservation efforts. Those connected to the land and nature couldn’t help but notice the dramatic decline in bird populations. Park notes:

As early as the 1930s, ornithologists had tied the national decline in indigenous birds to agriculture's transformation of lowland swamps. In the 1950s, the impact of lowland swamp clearance on indigenous fauna became a conservation issue as, in district after district, once-common wetland birds like the matuku (bittern) became rare. [11]

"The birds suffered," MP for Northern Maori, Hōne Heke Rankin said, "because settlers cut down the bush, not because of hunting."[12]

It wasn't until the 1960s that the Government began to recognise swamps as having intrinsic and indigenous value beyond their potential for agricultural development. But into the 2020s, the conservation of wetlands is balanced finely with calls for higher productivity and continuing housing development.

Park mentions American ecologist Daniel Janzen who said “what escapes the eye is the most insidious kind of extinction – the extinction of interactions.”[13] Park expands for us:

Using the body-as-system analogy, the ecological effect of swamp drainage in New Zealand was as though a major organ like the heart had been ruptured and removed. When the native birds no longer had the premier breeding and feeding zones that the lowland swamps provided, the hill forests, too, went silent.[14]

French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour explores this concept of interconnectedness, emphasising that human and non-human entities exist within a web of relationships, where care extends beyond people to the land and all living things.[15] This idea closely aligns with Māori perspectives, which recognise the deep, intrinsic connection between people, whenua (land), and the natural world. The large-scale destruction of New Zealand’s wetlands has had devastating social and ecological consequences, which are difficult, if not impossible, to repair.

This statement by Park feels deeply personal: “Yet the recognisable combination of trees, pasture and human structures makes it seem perhaps as if they are all that was there.”[16] It's shocking to me, growing up on the Hauraki Plains, that I was not told, nor did I ask, what existed before dairy farming. I knew all about the drainage, it was a constant in our lives. But I never questioned the history or asked about the people. My great-grandparents were settlers from Scotland, focused on creating a good life for their large family, and were allocated a farm in the first Hauraki Plains ballot. We grew up proud of the hard work our great-grandparents did to clear their land and the resulting highly productive farming land. I assumed that what I saw was ‘all that was there’.