Oral Presentation

^{Figure 1 Jo Dalgety, A wonder-waking project, river mud and watercolour on paper, 2025}

The loss and devastation inflicted on land, flora, and fauna - and the social impact on people - when decisions are made purely for profit, underscores my practice. Choices made without regard for long-term consequences, where financial gain eclipses respect for the natural world.

I have been focusing on the Hauraki Plains in Piako, once home to a vast kahikatea forest that has now completely disappeared. Piako means ‘the emptying waters’.[1]

Once the country’s largest wetland, the Piako area held immense significance for Māori - valued as a source of food, resources, and as a highly productive, carefully managed taonga. In contrast, Pākehā colonists and settlers dismissed wetlands as wastelands, to be drained and turned into farmland.

Ecologist Geoff Park observed of the Hauraki Plains that “the recognisable combination of trees, pasture and human structures makes it seem perhaps as if they are all that was there.”[2]

That struck me deeply - because I didn’t know what was there before.

^{Figure 2 Jo Dalgety, research image  Hauraki Pains from Back Miranda Road, November 2024}

Growing up on the Hauraki Plains, I was never told - nor did I ever ask - what existed before dairy farming.

I was shocked, not only by the scale of what had been lost, but by how little I knew. 

Drainage and mud and cattle - those were constants in our lives.

But I never questioned the deeper history of this place, or the people.

^{Figure 3 Cliffs near the road between Lake Karāpiro and the settlements of Piarere and Hinuera mark the course of the Waikato River 20,000 years ago. Photograph by Whakatane Beacon, NZ Geographic, https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/4664/.}

Donna Haraway, a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology, reminds us that planetary change has always been shaped by forces beyond humans – seed-dispersing plants, for example, reshaped Earth long before agriculture.[3]

The Piako was a land transformed by ecological upheaval after the Taupo eruption 20,000 years ago.

Natural forces of sedimentation and erosion redirected the Waikato River, which once flowed through the Piako to the Hauraki Gulf, westward to its current path into the Tasman Sea.

This created the Piako and Waihou Rivers, shaping the wetland’s unique ecology.[4]

It was into this transformed environment that Polynesian navigators - and later, European settlers - arrived.

Figure 4 Craig Potton, Author Geoff Park at Kahurangi National Park in best-pressed colonial linen suit, 1995.

In 1769, on his first visit to New Zealand, Captain James Cook travelled inland up the Waihou River. Oblivious to the fact it already had a name, he renamed it The Thames.[5]

Cook and the botanist Joseph Banks were struck by what they saw. Banks described swamps that “might doubtless easily be drained,” their soils rich and fertile, and timber trees “the largest I have ever seen.”

This photo is of a kahikatea forest on the West Coast of the South Island – to give you an idea of what Cook and Banks saw travelling up the Waihou River.

For European explorers, indigenous land use went unseen. They applied the doctrine of Terra Nullius - land belonging to no one. “Wild, wilderness, waste” - that was how they described land without obvious cultivation, or without people they considered equals.[6]

This mindset justified both conquest and appropriation of Māori land.

The swamps themselves were abundant. Rushes, reeds, flax, and towering kahikatea. When the kahikatea fruited, the forests came alive - birds filled the canopy, people gathered.

Beneath their roots, eels and mudfish hibernated through dry summers, a delicacy for feasts. The estuaries and lagoons teemed with fish and eels, weaving through the waters.

This richness - all of it - was lost under Crown law as the swamps were drained, as Joseph Banks had suggested.

Settlement began in earnest just 70 years later.

Thames historian Alistair Isdale wrote of the region, “It lay sleeping, awaiting the magic kiss of a golden prince. It awoke to the warm breath of a cow licking its face.”[7]

For the new colony intent on rapid development, this landscape became a showcase to generate wealth - while also revealing the heavy cost such progress exacted on natural systems and habitats.

^{Figure 7 A sure sign of progress. The first cattle sale on the Hauraki Plains, Thames District, Auckland, Auckland Weekly News 2/05/1912, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries.}

By the early 1900s, the Piako was being drained and transformed into dairy farmland.

The new English-based government celebrated this as progress.

As author Paul Monin wrote, “It was the stuff of triumphalist settler narratives.”[8]

To distance the region from the negativity of the word swamp, the area of the Piako directly below the Hauraki Gulf was renamed the Hauraki Plains. Renaming plays a role in forgetting.[9]

This photograph shows the first cattle sale there.

Both of my great-grandfathers captured in this image, had been allocated neighbouring farms in the first land ballot.

^{Figure 8 Jo Dalgety, research image Dalgety Road, 2024}

And like Cook and his cohorts, the Dalgety family lent their name to a road and a corner on their new home, on the Hauraki Plains.

^{Figure 9 Photographer unknown, Ploughing on the Dalgety farm, date unknown.}

My great-grandparents had immigrated from Britain, hoping for a better life for their large families.

They continued to clear the land, created farms, and we grew up proud of that hard work.

I assumed the landscape I saw was all there ever was.

^{Figure 10 Photographer unknown, My grandmother and my father making a path, date unknown.}

How do I acknowledge my Pākehā family’s role with care? On one hand, I want to tell the story of ecological devastation. On the other hand, I need to honour my family’s search for a better life. These stories are intertwined.

^{Figure 11 THE GREAT PIAKO SWAMP, NOW BEING RECLAIMED BY THE NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT, Auckland Weekly News,  1908-10-22,  Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections.}

Within decades of European settlement, the “noble” kahikatea had vanished, and drainage was well underway.

Environmental transformation often becomes invisible - forgotten, normalised. Forgetting can serve as a tool of power - erasing the past helps preserve the status quo and allows dominant narratives to remain unchallenged.

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit explores how societies remember, or deliberately forget events marked by violence, injustice, and trauma.

She contends that memory is inherently political, not merely personal, and is often constructed by those in positions of power.

The choices societies make about what to commemorate and what to erase reflect the interests and influence of dominant narratives.

As Solnit writes, “Ruins represent the physical decay of what preceded them, but their removal erases meaning and memory.”[10]

^{Figure 12 Hauraki Plains, NZ Farmers Weekly, 2025}

Today, the Hauraki are farmland and settlements - few clues remain of the ancient forest that once stood.

Geoff Park mentions American ecologist Daniel Janzen’s words “what escapes the eye is the most insidious kind of extinction – the extinction of interactions.”

Park expands this for us:

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.[11]

French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour writes about interconnectedness, reminding us that humans and non-humans exist within a web of relationships - where care extends not only to people, but also to the land and all living things.[12]

Latour challenges the old divide between nature and culture, instead proposing that every being is part of a complex network of interactions. From this perspective, issues like climate change or technological breakdowns can only be understood through an inclusive lens that recognises these entanglements.

Indigenous people recognise the deep, intrinsic connection between people, whenua (land), and the natural world. For Māori, the swamp was a taonga - sustainably managed, rich with food and resources.

For settlers, it was a wasteland, harbouring disease. Something to be conquered.

A 1909 newspaper summed up the European pride:

“Man’s conquest over nature was probably never more active… In the transformation of the Piako, there are all the elements of a romance of modern times.”

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 is a photo of young Kahikatea – taken by photographer Kate van der Drift as part of an ongoing investigation into the fragile ecology and transformation of the Hauraki Plains.

^{Figure 13 Kate van der Drift, Young Kahikatea, Northern Large Pond, 2018, archival pigment print on matte photo rag, edition of 5, 1220mm x 814mm}

Anthropologist Anna Tsing states that “the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity.”[13]

The transformation of the Piako area has been so extensive that reversing it seems impossible.

In my practice, I ask: can the Hauraki Plains still be considered a place of refuge?

Haraway poses a critical question: are we at an inflection point of such consequence that it threatens the continuation of life on Earth for all beings - human and nonhuman alike?

She argues that we are confronting “extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, and vast genocides of people and other critters.”[14]

These interlinked processes, driven by capitalism and domination, are accelerating towards potential ecological, social, and geological collapses, from which recovery may no longer be possible.

Tsing suggests the true crisis may be the elimination of refugia - those last places from which life might re-emerge after catastrophe.[15]

^{Figure 14 Anselm Keifer, Brennstäbe (Fuel Rods), 1984–87, Oil, acrylic, emulsion, and shellac on canvas with ceramic, iron, copper wire, straw, and lead.}