The land and the squatter, Wairarapa, 1843-1853: an essay in human ecology

Abstract

One of the great world movements of the last few centuries has been the colonisation of the New World by people of predominantly West European origin and tradition. Beginning in the sixteenth century waves of settlers spread out from the European core area. First colonised were the forest lands of the eastern seaboard of North America where settlers long remained until the technological and conceptual advances described by Walter Prescott Webb Webb (1931) and Ralph Brown Brown (1948) enabled the colonisation of the prairies to proceed. Australia and New Zealand shared several waves of migration, and conceptual changes similar to those of North America were necessary before settlement moved beyond the limits of forest and forest land thinking and out into savana, grassland or scrubland. One symptom of these changes was the swing from village-dwelling to homesteading. Although homesteads appeared in early times, it was probably not until the settlement of the New World that they made their appearance on a large scale See Redfield (1955): 3. However, isolated homesteads are a symbol of a more fundamental cleavage than that between the settlement forms of homestead and village. With each are associated distinctive ways of life, modes of thought, economies and perhaps even physical environments. It is significant that in the New World, the agricultural village, when and where it existed, was often based on forest-land agriculture, but the isolated homestead was often associated with the pastoral economy of the unforested lands There are, of course, many exceptions to this generalisation. The Mormon villages of Utah or the Canterbury settlement of New Zealand may be cited as examples. The homestead was just as "natural" to its place and period as the village, which Tocqueville considered "the only association ..... so perfectly natural that wherever a number of men are collected it seems to constitute itself" Quoted in Redfield (1955): 3. In New; Zealand, the village at least of the type envisaged by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, failed to constitute itself successfully and its stay was brief See note 11 below. For a discussion of the non-agricultural New Zealand village see Franklin 1960: 143-182.