Bookshelf - In Print November 2008

Wetlands of New Zealand: A bitter-sweet story

by Janet Hunt
Random House, $NZ69.99
Reviewed by Steven Trewick

 

 

 Although I am perhaps not the general reader Hunt had in mind, I am certainly interested in her topic. From my youth in southern England I have always been fascinated by the nature and mechanics of what technically are known as peaty wetlands but most of us know as bogs. Mention bogs to me and I recall the black peat perched paradoxically atop white sand, pools and rivulets the colour of over-stewed tea, insect-snaring plants, dancing damselflies and the faint morbid possibility that somewhere interred within them are the ancient remains of bronze age human sacrifices. Similar bogs exist in New Zealand, and in many ways they are familiar to me: the sundew, damselfly, bladderwort and sphagnum moss are all recognisable relatives of the species I already knew from England.

So as a biologist and a lover of bogs, you would think I would be in accord with the Montana judges. And I am to a point: I too like Wetlands of New Zealand, but not as much as they do.

The problem for me is Hunt’s ambition, for rather than restrict herself to wetlands as they are popularly understood – the “swamps and estuaries” mentioned in the judges’ report – she has chosen to go with all of the wetland types defined by the Ramsar Convention. This embraces all manner of wet places – bogs, swamps, lagoons, saltpans, ponds, rivers, lakes and coastal areas (to a depth of six metres at low tide!) – and Hunt has set out to document the geology, history, social history, and biology of each.

The result is, I think, an eclectic assemblage, a mass of observation, opinion and fact, some of it fascinating and revealing, some of it, at least for me, a distraction. The multitude of digressions – even though they may each have their individual interest – result in more of a montage than a flowing narrative. For example, we are introduced to New Zealand mammal fossils because they formed in a lake (thus a wetland) that existed 16 million years ago. That allusion is merely tenuous, but the description of the animal the fossils represent as a “Jurassic mouse”, even if it has come from other sources, is misleading (it is neither Jurassic nor a mouse).
Hunt, I think, would like us to read this book as a narrative from start to finish, but it is not a bedtime read. It is also not purely a coffee table book as there is so much to be read. As a reference book, it is a little frustrating as there are gaps in the index. For instance, although mentioned in the text, the godwit (one of our most amazing wetland birds) and the limestone (that forms the wetland cave systems) are not among the entries.
So, I suggest the book lives on the coffee table and is equipped with a robust book-mark so you can follow Hunt’s story, because it is worth hearing.

Hunt and I are definitely in agreement when it comes to the importance of New Zealand’s wetland environment and preserving what little we have left. In New Zealand we are often a little smug about the percentage of our landscape protected by national parks and reserves, forgetting that type of land in reserves is dominated by areas that were the least easy or valuable to exploit. Thus, mountainous land is (rightfully) fairly well represented, but lowland forest is not. Similarly, wetlands tend to be underrepresented in our parks and reserves because they have in the past been drained and improved, so they tended to be swiftly modified beyond recognition after European settlement.

Those wetlands that remained were often tracts of infertile, troublesome land such as the West Coast pakihi swamps. Yet today even these are under pressure. Mechanical diggers are now used to smash the buried, impervious mineral pan (a method called flipping) creating land that can be used profitably to graze dairy cattle. This type of ‘improvement’ – which destroys the drainage, vegetation and natural history – is still widely regarded as converting ‘wasteland’ to productive use.

Perhaps the loss of wetlands can be regarded as a proxy for the way humanity makes use of its global environment. Today, with 83 percent of the Earth’s land surface directly influenced by human activity, I and many others believe that the impact mankind is having on the only planet we have is unsustainable. We need to change our behaviour, work towards reducing the global population, and rid ourselves of the anthropocentric assumption that we are the only species that matters.

Steve Trewick is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Natural Resources. Janet Hunt has a BA (Hons) from Massey.

 

 

Sophia Scarlet and Other Pacific Writings

by Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Robert H. B. Hoskins
AUT Media, $25.00

 

This handsomely produced work brings together the outline of a novel-to-be, Sophia Scarlet with the highly accomplished short story The Bottle Imp and a number of what are best termed occasional pieces: addresses to Samoan chiefs and to Samoan students; abbreviated legends; letters and articles that appeared in journals and newspapers of the time. Robert Louis Stephenson’s hold on the popular imagination lies with Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His later works are largely neglected. Sophia Scarlet and other writings is a testament to his engagement with his adopted Samoan home in the years leading up to his death at age 44.

Associate Professor Robert Hoskins, who edited the collection, is a long-time Stevenson aficionado. He is best known as an expert in 18th Century and New Zealand music.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let us hope New Zealand’s economic prospects improve, but if they don’t, it probably will do no harm to the sales of Lindsay Neill’s book The Great New Zealand Pie Cart. As Neill readily admits, the book is trafficking in baby boomer nostalgia; when times are troubled we turn to the comfort of those good old days, that golden summer when life was simpler and sweeter.

Some pie carts themselves trade on this, says Neill. The Alexandra pie cart offers a pea, pie and pud menu in the same way that a retro nostalgia menu is available at the upmarket Antoine’s restaurant in Parnell.

Mind you, you really need to dial up the nostalgia to forgive the practices of yesteryear. Take the proprietor of the Motueka pie cart’s recipe for coffee in the good old days: “I would fill it [the urn] with half a crate of milk, add instant coffee, and let it heat up. At night I would drain the unsold coffee, strain it, and the next day reheat it in the urn. If I made it Tuesday, by Friday we had a beaut brew on the go.”

Although Neill fits the baby boomer demographic, in his younger years he was never a pie cart regular. His interest in pie carts arose much later.

 Neill started out in his working life as a chef, training in San Francisco and working in America and Britain before ending up at AUT as a chef lecturer. AUT was then a polytechnic, but changes were afoot, and Neill thought it would be wise to set about acquiring a new qualification. He enrolled at Massey extramurally, over the course of a decade accumulating the papers he needed one by one for a BA in social anthropology. “Looking back, I should have done it much more quickly. I wish I had done it in five years.” Being older than the run of students meant that Neill had no problem with self motivation, he says, and because none of the papers he elected required block courses, he did not meet a fellow student or a lecturer for the duration of his degree – though he did tailor his essays to what he knew of the biographies of his teachers.

BA completed, he now embarked on an MA, this time with AUT. The subject of pie carts arose when he was casting around for a thesis topic, finally settling on the history of an Auckland pie-cart institution, the White Lady.

The thesis-to-be (to be completed this year) became the basis of the book proposal which became The Great New Zealand Pie Cart that Neill has coauthored with Ted Bell and Claudia Bryant.

Neill has covered the more traditional pie carts; Bell, its more contemporary incarnations (the Ponga Bar in Hahei will serve you macadamia muesli with artisanal organic yoghurt if you ask); and Claudia Bryant has provided the sociological gibb-stopping that holds the publication together.

As with so many other what I suppose you might call microhistories, the Great New Zealand Pie Cart, is a window into the wider surrounding world. Pie carts have been around since the Great Depression, and they can be found literally from Stewart Island to Kawa Kawa.

The book’s construction is quirkily eclectic; there is the odd poem,reminiscences from the likes of Ray Columbus and Georgina Beyer, a recipe for whitebait fritters, and highlights such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s 1950s visit to one of Christchurch’s pie carts.

Ironically, the stock in trade of pie carts is no longer pies, says Neill. “Because of hygiene issues and rehandling and reheating, they are best to stick to burgers.”

These days, Neill, though still with AUT (now a university), no longer teaches cooking and has very little contact with kitchens. “I hardly cook anything. I can burn water.” He likes it that way.
Being a chef has rid him of any illusions about the profession. Popular culture may have become fixated on celebrity chefs and the romance of cooking, but the show ponies of the industry are anything but representative. Think instead, he says, of the person on the line who has to cook 80 meals, he says, or the hard working sous-chef who does the work while someone else takes the glory.

However, he has not renounced his interest in the food and beverage industry. He hosts Easy Mix radio’s ‘Dining Detective’ slot and recently won the New Zealand Guild of Foodwriters’ 2007 Emerging Food Writer of the Year for ‘Comer Con Gusto’ an intimate look at dining in his favourite city, Buenos Aires.

Neill’s own good natured review of his book: “It’s a must-read. Massey should make it a compulsory text.