Under nineteenth-century international law, a European state could legally claim any land not possessed by another state. International law was itself a European construct, designed in part to avert wars between imperial powers by providing an orderly way of divvying up unclaimed lands. To establish a claim that would be recognised by rivals, an imperial power had to maintain an effective presence on the ground. Planting a flag on the beach was only the first step – discovery of territory would have to be followed by permanent occupation, otherwise known as colonisation. Colonized lands might have been uninhabited in law, but in fact they usually supported native populations with their own conceptions of land ownership. Therefore, a colonizing power had to convince Europeans and natives alike of its willingness and ability to settle the territory extensively.

In Boundary Markers, Giselle Byrnes documents the role played by British surveyors in the colonization of New Zealand. Byrnes, a lecturer in New Zealand history at Victoria University of Wellington, addresses the way in which those surveyors prepared the land both physically and psychologically for British settlement. Such preparation included clearing New Zealand’s vast forestland, demarcating the boundaries of crown land grants, laying out plans for towns, and determining place names. Along the way, surveyors had frequent contact with Maori, who had ceded sovereignty over New Zealand to Britain in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi. Byrnes points out that the British and Maori understood the terms of the treaty differently, and that at any rate early British guarantees of Maori land rights gave way to pressure from settlers once the white population of New Zealand began to grow. Surveyors, whose work was a prerequisite to property ownership under common law, thus stood at the forefront of British settlement, representing figuratively and literally what Byrnes calls the ‘cutting edge of colonization’.

Rather than being a historical narrative of the colonization of New Zealand, Boundary Markers concerns itself with the way in which colonization transformed the land, a process best exemplified through the imposition of British place names and town grids. As Byrnes points out, British place names did not merely reassure homesick colonists; they were assertions of hegemony, ‘deliberate and provocative statements of power’ (p. 80). Town grids likewise asserted mastery of territory that did not naturally lend itself to right-angle intersections. Yet Byrnes’s most insightful contention lies in her identification of the surveyors’ ‘commercial gaze’ – a view of the land through glasses tinted by the desire for profit. By naming the commercial gaze, Byrnes distinguishes British conceptions of landscape from those of the Maori.

Boundary Markers will no doubt be a must for scholars of colonial New Zealand. It would also serve well as a companion to the study of British colonization elsewhere, especially with respect to cultural interactions between white settlers and native inhabitants. Scholars of colonial North America, South Africa and Australia should familiarise themselves with Byrnes’s framework.

University, for me, has often been about discovering that things I love (like Rudyard Kipling stories) are hopelessly implicated in things I don’t (like colonisation). Giselle Byrnes, who lectures New Zealand history at Victoria, has ensured that I’ll never look at maps in the same way again.

Boundary Markers tells the story of 19th century land surveyors’ attempts to map the New Zealand landscape. Unlike most history books, Boundary Markers is a highly visual book: it is full of landscape sketches, town plans, and photographs, and diary entries describing the landscape. Byrnes argues that these attempts to name, define and order the landscape were not innocent activities. Surveyors were, in fact, the vanguard of colonisation.

But Byrnes disrupts the conventional linear story of colonisation (surveyors ‘discover’, name and map the land, settlers move in converting ‘wasteland’ to ‘productive land’, and eventually a nation develops) by pointing to the contradictions in surveying itself. Byrnes argues that surveyors looked at the land in two mutually inconsistent ways: one gaze saw the material benefits the land could yield, the other saw the land as beautiful in itself. Byrnes also details the contradictory role of Maori, who often disrupted the land surveyors attempts to map the land, but also acted as guides and sources of information.

Boundary Markers shows that ‘postmodern’ and ‘deconstructive’ approaches can provide new insights into history; and Byrnes' analysis of her primary documents are a model for anyone interested in applying these ideas in their own writing. But this book is also enjoyable for the surveyors' accounts themselves, my favourite of which is John Turnbull Thomson’s thoughts on making his home on the margin of ‘Lake Tennyson’:

Some people say it was named after a man in England who used to ‘invent’ poetry. Others say after old Bill Tennyson the Bullock driver…but I should hope not; it would take away the charm of this beautiful place.