Wayne Barrer

A friend reading in this blog of my curiosity for photography of the Urban Fringe, tipped me off about contemporary New Zealand photographer Wayne Barrer. I have never been interested in photography in this sense before so it is quite a journey of discovery ahead of me looking at our country anew through the lens of an artist.

The book she suggested and that I have found down at the Kilbirnie Library is "Shifting Nature". The photograhs of Wayne Barrer with an introductory essay by the late Geoff Park. The photos are landscapes but not as most of us know them. The picturesque New Zealand is there, tinged by a suggestion of the sublime, behind the camera. The subjects are the edge of our wild spaces, where the tentacles of our culture reach into nature.

Park sums it up well "by looking at the landscape as he does, Barrar lets us slip inside it a little. Integral to that craft is his pulling at our legs, imploring us to come down from The Picturesque Viewing Tower. He doesn't shout because he knows that won't get the message across and considered. But he doesn't want us to stay up there in the bitter colonial wind.

And it is Barrer himself who describes that space which I have crudely refered to as the urban fringe.There is a margin around most of our towns, and along most of our rivers and coasts - a border zone where until recently, few regulations were enforced and little responsibility was taken. At worst a dumping ground for waste or toxic leakage from industrial use, this margin can also be represented by the ordinary landscape of a summer beach community sprawling over the surrounding dunes. This "vernacular landscape" is true marginal land, and as such, carries the responsibility of providing a huge array of uses. It is also where I go to experience the greatest intensity of collision between natural processes and people. Great photos, great book.

Lake Papaitonga

I guess it was a Geoff Park tribute thing. As I have written on my other blog, one of my hero's, Geoff Park died the other day. I am sure history will remember him much more for the great ecologist and nature writer he was, than the mainstream remember him today.

As I wrote: through his "testament" Nga Uruora" I accompanied Geoff Park on his journeys to the last reamining remnants of New Zealand's lowland ecosystems. I learnt to see the enormity of the destruction we have caused by peering out of these remnants with him, through curtains of fern , to witness the "development" of our countryside.

One of the journeys Park took me on was to Lake Papaitonga in the Horowhenua, just a bit south of Levin. We were up there in the weekend for some orienteering in the monoculture just south of the Manawatu river. On the way back we finally took that turn to check this place out.

Its a strange story, back in the day these lands were scenes of fierce inter-tribal fighting and massacres. In 1822 Te Rauparaha with the aid of muskets annihilated the Muaupoko hapu, 600 people dying in one of New Zealand's most bloodiest incidents. Just sixty years later as European colonisation and "development" of the land rolled north from the Wellington settlement the land was purchased by Walter Buller, for use as his own private estate. As the link above explores Buller was not above devious schemes, and to prevent the local Maori population from protesting at the purchase he placed the "demons" Tuatara, of which they were mortally fearful, on an island in the middle of the lake.

I've got to say this is a great story, aye, Tuatara breeding again on the New Zealand mainland in "Zealandia" the Karori Wildlife sanctuary, awesome. But maybe, just maybe, Bullers Tuatara bred (though I guess if it was on an island it doesn't count!!).

Just walking down the hill from the carpark, the difference is amazing, the forest closes in around you, and before you know it you are on boardwalk winding through a swamp, on both sides ancient canopy trees flourish; Kahikatea, Tawa, Titoki and more. Marble leafs jostle on the edges of the swamp. From a distance the Kahikatea appear orange because of their seeding...

The complexity is overwhelming, sometimes every plant in a group of 10 is of a different species. The environment is so rich, such an artwork, you can understand E O Wilson's quote: "Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal. But although it envelops you for a time, this haven is so small! At the furtherest viewpoint you come to a look out over the lake. and you can turnaround to see a small cluster of survivors providing shelter in the middle of a paddock.

This is all there is left of the vast forest that used to cover this coast. It is the genetic pool from which we can pull locally sourced plants. Work is going on now, everywhere in these parts, to replant the streams and waterways and wetlands, walking through this primeval jungle you realise both how important and how long term these projects are.

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The squirm of Lake Papitonga and its forest cloak in the Horowhenua farmland.