Out of print – digital edition available through ebook retailers and our BWB Collections platform.
In a country where land disputes were the chief cause of conflict between the coloniser and the colonised, surveying could never be a neutral, depoliticised pastime.
In a groundbreaking piece of scholarship, Giselle Byrnes examines the way surveyors became figuratively and literally ‘the cutting edge of colonisation’. Clearing New Zealand’s vast forests, laying out town plans and deciding on place names, they were at every moment asserting British power. Boundary Markers also shows how the surveyors’ ‘commercial gaze’, a view of the countryside coloured by the desire for profit, put them at odds with the Māori view of land.
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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?