Signposts - a blog about Te Ara the Encyclopedia of New Zealand

Before you folks in Auckland and Wellington get your pens poised to continue slugging it out as to who has more galleries and plays and general sophistication, let me say that this post is not about your fair cities but about Hawke’s Bay.  And it is not only about high culture either – it is rather drawing on the original meaning of the word which as the OED says means ‘cultivation or husbandry’. Culture in this sense is opposed to wild or uncultivated, and is found in such words as ‘agriculture’, ‘horticulture’ and ‘viticulture’.

After reading Kerryn Pollock’s wonderful new entries on Hawke’s Bay and attending the launch in Napier on Thursday, the overwhelming impression of the region is of a land radically transformed by human beings. Kerryn points out that only 6% of the land is now indigenous forest, the smallest proportion of any region in the country. The process began early – just look at our map of forest loss, and you will see that Māori settlers had cleared or burnt nearly all the forest of the region down to Dannevirke before Pākehā set foot in the area.

Once the Pākehā landed they set about transforming it further. Tussock was replaced by imported grasses, and large areas were fenced for sheep. Hawkes Bay, along with Canterbury, became the centre of large-scale pastoral farming. The best evidence of this today are the huge homesteads still to be found there. Other cultures quickly sprang up - as Kerryn explains, horticulture began with J. N. Williams’s  orchard in 1892. Twelve years later the first canning factory opened, the forerunner of James Wattie’s ‘tin can alley’. It’s worth clicking the interactive in Te Ara’s stonefruit entry to see how far Hawkes Bay still dominates the acreage of those fruits. Viticulture began very early with French Catholic missionaries bottling the first vintage in 1851 and it still has the second highest area in vines of any New Zealand region.

Other forms of cultivation also took place. The region is noted for its innovative architecture – not only the splendid art deco style which was the response to the destruction of the 1931 earthquake, but the James Chapman-Taylor Tudor-style houses before the quake and the John Scott churches and houses after the quake. And Hawke’s Bay is proud to have two amateur scientists, each in their way unique personalities, who were able to document the transformation of the land – Joan Wiffen who discovered dinosaur bones in the Mangahouanga Stream in the north of the Bay; and Herbert Guthrie-Smith whose Tutira, the story of his farm and the way it was transformed by the impact of European plants and animals has become a New Zealand classic.

So if you really want to look at how human beings have cultivated the land and erected a civilisation upon it, take a virtual visit to our two new entries on Hawke’s Bay – and then perhaps you might want to go to our cultural capital for real.