Nga Uruora: the groves of life

Forest and Bird, Issue 279, 1 February 1996, Page 45

Nga Uruora: the groves of life

Tim Higham

by Geoff Park (Victoria University Press) 1995, 376pp, $39.95 On first reading, this book seems like a documentation of 101 ways to destroy forest, so

thorough, persistent and ingenious in the enterprise have been our forebears and peers. We are swamp dwellers, says Park, a research scientist with the Department of Conservation in Wellington. Yet within our favoured environment we have obliterated almost every sign of the natural world. So

quickly and sO much so that it is now difficult to comprehend what we have lost. Park starts at the Waihou and Hutt Rivers, paddling his canoe among hoofpocked dairy flats and kicking at the flotsam and jetsam of industry. Descriptions of these densely wooded valleys — the Hauraki Plains and Hutt Valley — by James Cook, William Wakefield and others, prompted the New Zealand Company to sell Aotearoa as a flat country. The taipo or surveyor’s theodolite followed, a threefooted monster that surveyed the flats into a grid, destined square by square to destruction. To understand what was lost, Park returns to tiny patches that escaped the axes, fires and drains: near Mokau, Levin, Whanganui Inlet and Punakaiki. The journey took him ten years. What started as a book about four patches of lowland forest, intended along the lines of Craig Potton and Andy Dennis’s Images from a Limestone Landscape, became much more. Like the forests it is about, the book is rich and diverse, incorporating personal observations, ecological notes, historical and literary references, interpretations of Maori and colonial history, and spiritual insight. It meanders like the lowland rivers before their stop banks were built; sometimes becoming bound up in back eddies, slipping quickly from one channel to another, bringing nourishment to parched soils.

Park says that we have exported the stored soil carbon out of the ecosystem with butter, milk and meat, with little regard to the time it took to amass. He challenges the traditional notions of scenery preservation, national parks and reserves, and modern conservation with "its denigration of people and its preoccupation with species as entities in themselves". "The plains forests have come to within the few final acres of vanishing point," Park writes, "tragic in one sense, yet magic in another. We may no longer feel insignificant in their shade, but as much as they are evidence of our power over nature, they are reminders that every bit of land, agricultural, urban, suburban, is .. . never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. Always restorable." In the end he finds that the remains of nga uruora reveal more about us than about themselves.