Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
forms to support birds, insects and other plants. In the 'wooden world' of the
colonial project, for which buildings, fences and transport infrastructure (including
bridges, railway sleepers and telegraph poles) were essential, they were a commodity
(Wynn, 2013).
The bush of Banks Peninsula was accessible to the Canterbury Association's main
town of Christchurch and its port of Lyttelton, which were surveyed in 1850. An
assessment at that time was that there was sufficient bush to last 20 Canterbury
colonies for centuries, such was its apparent impenetrability (Petrie, 1963). In fact
most was cut out and burned in the half century to 1900, by sawyers and sawmillers
working from the coastline up the valleys and then into the steep slopes up towards
the ridges (Figure 5.2). Timber was cut on freehold sections to which title had been
granted by the Crown, whereas timber licences were required for cutting on Crown
land. It was the large timber trees that were most sought, such as the rimu of Little
River bush, and totara and matai that were to be found across the Peninsula. These
were valued for building purposes, and would be cut, and then rolled down slopes
or hauled on wooden rails to a saw pit, and later to steam-powered mills. The cut
over-bush was usually burned at the end of the summer, when it was most likely
that a clean, 'white' burn would result. The fires were impossible to confine and
much uncut timber was lost this way: in the 1880s, the Little River district was
described as 'the valley of a thousand fires' (in Petrie 1963: 80).
The M¯ori population of the Peninsula was effectively dispossessed through this
process: the French deed, subsequently subsumed by the Crown, allowed them
only a small number of reserves, amounting to a few hundred hectares in all. Their
original desire to gain the benefits of trade by allowing Europeans to settle in close
proximity was not realized, here as elsewhere (Belich, 1996). There was, however,
some concern from a minority of settlers about bush clearance. On 7 October 1868,
Thomas Potts, the Member of the House of Representatives for Mount Herbert
(the Peninsula constituency in the Wellington lower chamber of Parliament),
moved that government 'ascertain the present condition of the forests of the
Colony, with a view to their better conservation'. He said in an eloquent speech
that he had 'often seen Banks' Peninsula covered, for weeks together, with thick
and lurid smoke' (Potts, 1868: 188-189).
Potts was a local naturalist, but his concern was wider than this. He had read
George Perkins Marsh's topic
Man and Nature
, published in New York in 1864,
and had drawn from it not only an understanding of what he called the 'barbarous
improvidence' of wasted timber resources but also the 'mischievous results' in terms
of 'excessive inundations' (Potts, 1868: 188). His intervention had some impact:
Marsh's topic was discussed by the New Zealand Institute and a few years later
Julius Vogel, then Premier, aware of Potts' contribution, undertook a tour of the
South Island's forests. He then successfully introduced a Forests Bill, an attempt at
improved management of the national timber resource (Wynn, 1979).
The picture of landscape that met with greatest favour by the rapidly growing
European population was, however, strictly productivist. This was keenly expressed
by another Peninsula resident, the journalist H. C. Jacobson. He wrote:
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