With theodolites and Maori guides, nineteenth-century land surveyors travelled over New Zealand renaming peaks and rivers, cutting survey lines through the bush and across Maori cultivations. They placed grids for new settlements over improbable landscapes, and ‘discovered’ territory known to Maori for generations.

The surveyors saw themselves as taming the wilderness, travelling through uncharted country, and claiming commercial opportunities. But they depended heavily on Maori navigational and mapping methods, and they acknowledged Maori assistance and hospitality – while documenting also the fierce resistance of Maori to the surveys.

The land surveyors stood at a particular point in New Zealand’s colonisation, implementing its principles on the ground and acting as mediators between cultures. For the Crown, surveying was an essential part of the process of converting Maori customary tenure into Crown-derived grants. It was a means by which the British began to make the country their own.

It is through the activities and words of the land surveyors themselves that Boundary Markers examines the complexities and inherent contradictions of colonisation. This is groundbreaking scholarship for post-colonial New Zealand.


Contents                                                       

Acknowledgements
List of illustrations

1. Texts, contexts and special history
2. The cutting edge of colonisation: land surveying in 
    colonial New Zealand
3. ‘As far as the eye can reach’: reading landscapes

4. The calligraphy of colonisation: writing the country
5. ‘Creating boundaries in the unoccupied wilderness’: 
    the boundaries of cultural space

Conclusion: Cultural space complete?

List of abbreviations
Notes
Select bibliography
Index