Research Catalog

The face of nature : an environmental history of the Otago Peninsula / Jonathan West.

Title: The face of nature : an environmental history of the Otago Peninsula / Jonathan West.
Author: West, Jonathan (Jonathan Lewis),
Publication: Dunedin, New Zealand : Otago University Press, 2017.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DU436.O8 W47 2017g	Off-site

Details

Description

376 pages : illustrations (chiefly colour), maps (chiefly colour); 24 cm

Summary

"Bounded by the wild waves of the Pacific on the east, and the more sheltered harbour on the west, the Otago Peninsula is a remarkable landscape that has undergone dramatic changes since it first attracted human settlement. In The Face of Nature: An environmental history of the Otago Peninsula Jonathan West explores what people and place made of one another from the arrival of the first Polynesians until the end of the nineteenth century. The peninsula has always been one of the places in Otago most important to Maori. In 1844 they reluctantly agreed to split it with the British, but the land Maori retained has remained at the core of their history of the region. The British settlers divided their part of the peninsula into small farms whose owners transformed it from native forest into cow country that fed a booming Dunedin, at that point New Zealand's leading commercial city. This local history documents the rapid environmental change that ensued. It incorporates a rich array of maps, paintings and photographs to illustrate the making, and unmaking, of this unique landscape. In doing so it illustrates with the Otago Peninsula is an ideal location through which to understand the larger environmental history of the islands"--Jacket.

Subjects

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-368) and index.

Contents

The primordial peninsula and people. He whenua hou: a new land -- Arrival and adaptation -- Continuity and change: making southern Māori -- The world washes ashore. Takata Pora: the people of the ships, European exploration, Māori discovery 1770-1830 -- 'Soon may the Wellerman come': whaling at Ōtākou 1831-48 -- Improving God's creation. 'A desperate struggle': British settlement on the Otago Peninsula 1848-61 -- The axe and the lucifer match: boom-time settlement of the 1860s and 1870s -- 'The whole face of Nature is altered': 1881-1900.

ISBN

1927322383
9781927322383

LCCN

40028907183

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries