(Download) "Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Writing." by JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Towards a Prehistory of the Gothic Mode in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Writing.
- Author : JNZL: Journal of New Zealand Literature
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 217 KB
Description
In a long passage in his 1986 novel Symmes Hole, Ian Wedde describes the thoughts of pilot and Pakeha-Maori James Heberley on coming ashore near Waitara with a New Zealand Company detachment in November 1839. As the party inspects the shoreline with a view to settlement, Heberley remembers why the land seemed empty and available for Pakeha appropriation: 'the whole Taranaki coast from Mokau to Patea' had been depopulated and abandoned years earlier, during the musket wars. (2) While other members of the party sniff the soil and undertake preliminary surveys, Heberley himself remembers his own first encounter with a New Zealand shoreline. Timber-cutting in the Marlborough Sounds on his first full day in the country, he had gone into the scrubland, stepped on a body, and then realized that the whole inland area and the beach beyond were covered in human corpses, victims of a Ngati Toa taua (war party): Heberley's visceral encounter with the land's recent human history allows him to see the New Zealand landscape in ways the Wakefield's cannot. The soil that the surveyors pick over is 'steeped in human blood', its apparent suitability for Pakeha settlement predicated on the events of the early 1830s, which had removed or scattered the land's prior occupants (p. 192).