Tūrangawaewae of Lost Content

MORE ON MOVING ON

In a recent article, I touched on the problems that the Ethnic English have to face in re-shaping their identity to the modern world. This is an identity that has for some become stuck in mythical time-warped lands like Heartbeat Country and Midsomer County – places where, once upon a time, either nothing too nasty ever happened, or, if it did, it was at least framed by crunchy, graveled drives, dormer windows and exposed beams.

As Housman so wistfully versified:

‘What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content’.

So, as I am now a member of an at least nominally bi-cultural society, it is interesting to observe how Maori are coping with the need for the next ‘Cultural Refresh’ here in New Zealand.

And they have some great words that bear on the adjustment process, like rangatiratanga (tribal identity), tangata whenuatanga (collective affinity to a locale), mana (pride of stance), taonga (tribal treasures) and turangawaewae.

The latter is particularly interesting as it describes something that Europeans find hard to call:

‘Tūrangawaewae are places where Maori feel especially empowered and connected and that they can call “our foundation, our place in the world, our home”. The word is a compound of tūranga (standing place) and waewae (feet), and it is often translated simply as ‘a place to stand’.

Let’s start then with the haka (see story below and the embedded video).

HISTORIC MERE PRESIDES OVER HAKA DEAL – HAKA DEAL BETWEEN NGATI TOA AND NZRU

[by Michelle Duff, Dominion Post, 18/03/2011]

‘Before the first drops of ink had touched the document, the kaumatua (tribal elder) of the Ngati Toa tribe / iwi, Mr Taku Parai gestured to the weapon on the table.

The sleek greenstone mere had belonged to his ancestor, the famed chief Te Rauparaha.

With a grin, Mr Parai told New Zealand Rugby Union chief executive Steve Tew that the weapon would not have to be used on this occasion.

"It does have a few dents, though," he joked, before the pair signed a historic agreement between Ngati Toa and the union, giving the All Blacks the right to continue performing the Ka Mate haka.

The haka, which has been performed with varying degrees of success by All Black teams since 1905, has been widely used since the 1980s and featured heavily in NZRU advertising. It is said to have been first performed by Te Rauparaha.

Ngati Toa has filed an application with the Intellectual Property Office to trademark phrases in Ka Mate, to prevent its misuse.

It has previously been reprised by the Spice Girls, and appeared in a Japanese Coca-Cola advertisement and on tourist merchandise.

It has taken the NZRU and Ngati Toa months to come to the agreement, of which the exact details are still confidential.

At Porirua's Takapuwahia Marae yesterday, Mr Parai said it was a step forward for both parties.

"We look forward to future dialogue we know we've come a long way since 1905 when the haka was first performed, with little Tinkerbell fingers and one foot."

He issued a challenge to the All Blacks to attend Ngati Toa haka training, saying afterwards it would give them a chance to "see what the spirit of the haka means to us as a people, and carry it for the nation".

There was no financial aspect to the contract, but Mr Parai said this would be discussed in the future.

‘Mr Tew said it would be a privilege to perform Ka Mate with Ngati Toa's formal blessing, and did not rule out attending a practice session. "Signing this agreement confirms an understanding that has been in place for some time ... what we've done is captured it in a document that will outlive the people who are standing here now."



ANOTHER LOST WORLD

Reviewing a new exhibition at the Pataka Museum that covers ‘The Pa [Maori stockade settlements] of Porirua’, (on the western coast of the Wellington conurbation), Dominion journalist Bronwen Torrie reminds us of the end game of ‘The lost world of Te Rauparaha’ (Te Rauparaha is the Maori chief who is the reputed author of the Ka Mate haka).

Te Rauparaha (1760s-1849) was a Maori chief and war leader of the Ngāti Toa tribe who took a leading part in the pre-European Musket Wars in Aotearoa – New Zealand. For the 20 years prior to the onset of European colonization in 1840, his coalition of tribal forces, armed with muskets purchased from British traders, dominated both shores of the Cook Strait. He was known then as the Napoleon of the South Pacific.

However, Te Rauparaha’s political power and influence ebbed away after he was arrested by the British in 1846. His chief settlement the Taupo Pa was then forsaken and its wooden palisades rotted away. It has therefore been entirely appropriate for the agreement between Ngati Toa and the NZ Rugby Union on the future use of Te Rauparaha’s haka to be signed at the modern replacement for the Taupo Pa, the Takapuwahia Marae in Porirua.

But if we want to study cultural change and adjustment, it is hard to find more abrupt shifts than those faced by Maori like Te Rauparaha. What lands of lost content must he have mused of in his confinement?

And there is also an Island Bay connection here (known as Tapu-te-Ranga to Maori).

At some time around 1800, a high-born Maori princess named Tamairangi (reputedly of strong character and great beauty) crossed Cook Strait to marry into the Ngati Ira iwi which then controlled Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington Harbour) and the Porirua area. There were at least two children from her marriage to the chief Whanake, one of whom was a son Te Kekerengu.

In the early 1800s Tamairangi queened her way around Cook Strait, as a local celebutante. Apparently, when she travelled she was carried on a litter by male attendants and on public occasions she wore the finest of new cloaks and carried a carved taiaha (battle mace).

All this came to an abrupt halt in the 1820s when the area was encroached on by the Ngati Toa from Taranaki and their allies the Ngati Tama and the Ngati Mutunga. Te Rauparaha and his nephew Te Rangihaeata were the master minds of this coercive colonisation.

For the first few years an uneasy peace prevailed, broken by occasional skirmishes and squabbles over food resources and living areas. However, about 1824, the Ngati Mutunga chief Te Poki, uneasy about the future security of his people, put forward the idea of a pre-emptive attack on the Ngati Ira.

Eventually, the Ngati Ira were overwhelmed and Tamairangi, her children, and a remnant of their people took refuge on the small, rocky island called Tapu-te-ranga in present day Island Bay, Wellington. A stone-walled pa had been built on the island, to the east of the main rock.

However, when Ngati Mutunga arrived to attack the pa, Tamairangi's people put her and her children in a canoe, and they escaped westward by way of Rimurapa (Sinclair Head) to Ohariu. There they were captured by a party of Ngati Mutunga.

Thinking that she was about to be killed, Tamairangi asked permission of her captors to make a formal farewell to her lands and her people. She sang a waiata (song, prayer or poem) she had composed, of such beauty and pathos that Te Rangihaeata, who was visiting Ngati Mutunga, was moved to offer Tamairangi and her family his protection. He took them with him to Kapiti Island.

But Tamairangi's handsome and headstrong son Te Kekerengu seduced one of Te Rangihaeata's wives and they had to flee again, crossing Cook Strait to Arapawa Island, Tamairangi's old family home. When rumours reached them of Ngati Toa attacks south of Cook Strait they fled further southwards and took refuge with the large South Island Ngai Tahu iwi.

Tragically for Ngai Tahu, granting asylum to Te Kekerangu's coincided with Te Rauparaha's plans to attack them to wrest away control of the trade in greenstone (used for war clubs and jewellery). In a creative PR exercise, Te Rauparaha was therefore able to claim that avenging the slight to Te Rangihaeata's honour justified his aggression.

Late in the year 1829 a large Ngati Toa war party headed by Te Rauparaha attacked the northern Ngaitahu stronghold at Kaikoura and massacred large numbers of the garrison. It seems that the Ngai Tahu regarded Te Kekerangu as the main cause of their misfortune and subsequently executed him.

WHAT NOW FOR THE WARRIORS?

Now all these events are not really that distant. New Zealand is a young country.

Earlier in the year, my young son Sam was fossicking in a rock pool along the Island Bay shoreline and he found a piece of stone that looked to my eye to be a Maori club or ‘mere' (see photo below).



I took it dutifully to our national museum Te Papa and had it assessed by the Curator of Maori Taonga. She was unable to confirm that it was man-made and let me keep it.

I do think though that its resting place just across the inlet to Tapu-te-Ranga makes it a possible witness to Tamairangi’s defeat and flight in 1824. And something a woman curator perhaps would not understand so well – it feels just right in balance and weight if you are seeking to use it to break open someone’s skull.

The adjustments then that have been forced on Maori since 1840 have been huge.

Not long after I settled in New Zealand in the early 1990s, my employer, the NZ Ministry of Energy, funded me to undertake a 2-day residential course on Maori culture and the Treaty of Waitangi. This was held at the Raukawa Marae (meeting house)in Otaki. The campus included the adjoining and beautifully crafted Rangiatea Church that had been built in the period 1849-1850, under the direction of an Anglican missionary the Reverend Octavius Hadfield.

And it was the great Te Rauparaha, no less, lately released from his captivity on a British warship, who sponsored the construction of the church, believing that European cultural influences were becoming irresistible - though he himself remained sturdily pagan.

The course that I attended was led by Professor Whatarangi Winiata, who has Ngati Toa affiliations and who subsequently became the founding Tumuaki (Vice-Chancellor) of the Maori university at Otaki, Te Wānanga-o-Raukawa. A kindly and wise man, during his presentation, he made what I thought at the time was a rather too obvious statement.

He pointed out that on a recent visit to England, he had again been struck by the one-to-one correspondences between English culture and New Zealand culture – everything from tea and scones to driving on the left hand side of the road.

But in the tradition of great Maori chiefs he was speaking softly, expecting that those who were prepared to listen would hear beyond the words. In essence, he was drawing attention to European indifference at the degree to which Maori culture had been casually supplanted by banal and mundane Englishness - in essence, a process of Midsomer-ization.

So what of those who complain about the erosion of Englishness in The Shires?

Perhaps they could do worse than recognize the plight and fight-back of indigenous cultures like that of the New Zealand Maori which were initially overwhelmed by colonization and that now face further threats from globalization and the sameness of modernity.

It’s great to see the haka performed at Twickenham – and just maybe we may see a version licensed for use by England one day!

Let’s all get then on with saving the best from the past and making the best of the future.

The boy can grow old but you struggle to take the pastiche out of the country

GOOD OLD DAYS OF THE DARLING BUDS

The old saying about genre de vie nostalgia was that ‘You could take the boy out of the country – but you couldn't take the country out of the boy’. Well nowadays, given the reconstruction and continuity possible on TV soft soaps, the country can be set in amber and the boy can avoid growing up altogether.

Back in 1969, I had a Zen moment that has always stayed with me. I was out riding a stock horse on Montejinni Cattle Station in the Northern Territory of Australia, in a brief foray with the station stockmen and jackeroos to hunt some cattle out of the home bush.

If this sounds impossibly romantic, I have to add that I was a barely competent horseman and that this was a brief interlude, indulged by a kindly station (i.e. ranch) manager, in data gathering for my PhD on the economics of transporting beef cattle by road.

While doing my best not to make a complete fool of myself, I chatted to an aboriginal (or Koori, if that is preferred) stockman as we rode along. ‘What tribe you from boss?” he asked, “New South Wales tribe or Victoria tribe?” “Ah”, I said, “I’m from England – the old tribe”.

His approach to unraveling my background has always stuck with me and I have often described myself half-jokingly in Australia and New Zealand as ‘ethnic English’ or an ‘English aboriginal’.

So I easily warm to evaluate TV dramatizations of my tribe in its native state. And to responding now on the ongoing spate of comments about the soft soap ‘Heartbeat’ (set in the North Yorkshire Moors) and the mock-gothic, mini-film series ‘Midsomer Murders’ (set somewhere rural between Slough and Ipswich).

For starters with respect to Heartbeat, although I am (as Jane Clifton describes below) someone who was ‘a young adult in the 1960s – in other words, at the older end of the baby boomers’, I left rural Cheshire in 1962 and have only lived there subsequently for short periods of time.

I have some sympathy though with the nostalgia invoked and the winning over of the rest of the audience ‘by the inevitably eccentric characters of the inevitably cosy little English village’. And I can answer Jane’s question: ‘Did the 1960s really passed as slowly as this?’ in the affirmative.

Let’s not get too carried away though. There was real poverty among the families of farm workers (with some reputedly reduced to filling their ‘snap tins’ / lunch boxes with Kit-e-Kat sandwiches). There were also higher levels of child mortality with diseases like polio, tetanus and meningitis being much feared.

And the possibility of a ‘4 Minute Warning’ of a nuclear attack on the UK by the Soviet Union was a day-to-day fact of life.

Turning to Midsomer Murders, the rules of the game are interesting:

What's allowed:-
‘Hidden vices provide the opportunity for blackmail and a motive for bumping people off. Simple adultery is too suburban so it must be spiced up with incest and illicit lesbianism. S&M is also practiced behind those generous drives. Drug addiction is acceptable, usually practiced by spoilt little rich girls - Midsomer has also fought off an outbreak of witchcraft, sorcery and pagan rituals’.

What's not:-
‘Swearing is clearly not acceptable along with non-S&M sex scenes – that would be weird. Despite the no-ethnic-minorities rule, Midsomer did once show its contempt for a group of New Age travellers’.

So how does all this stack up with the reality of 1960s rural life?

Apart from the drugs and murders, there is a fairly reasonable fit. There were gruff, tweed-clad ladies of indeterminate sexual preferences, odd male couples who hid together in small cottages behind the smithy, and much feared visits by gypsies who would leave mysterious marks on the farm gate to record their displeasure at harsh words or a refusal to buy their clothes pegs.

As for racial diversity (see second story below) – well there wasn’t any - though one little orphan boy from Liverpool who was adopted by cottagers was held to be somewhat brown-skinned.

However things have changed in the country as a whole over the last 50 years and you can’t have late model cars, cell phones, conservatories and pop stars without widening the overall social context.

Returning to the days when strangers were absent and cars were restricted to the middling sort and above (so that traffic didn’t disturb the scenery) would also mean, among other things, re-winding some important advances in medicine and social tolerance.

And the English are not alone in struggling with modernizing their tribal affinities.

Here in New Zealand, Maori leaders flounder in taking into account the one in five of NZ Maori who have lost their tribal affiliations and who are characterized as urban Maori ‘from the four winds’ (Ngā Hau e Whā) and the tens of thousands of Maori who have crossed The Ditch to settle in Australia as ‘Ngati Kangaru’.

The problem then with associating ‘Englishness’ or another form of romantic nationalism (try the Serbs if you want an eye-opener here) with a particular time and type of place is that nothing is permanent. Those who love the decorative, monochrome misfits who populate Midsomer had better be sure that - if they are not simply seeking evening chuddy for the mind - they haven’t still got some growing up to do.

[For further posts in this Blog on related issues see, for example: 2nd March 2010 'The Anthropology of the Indigenous English', and 11th February 2010 'Heart's Ease and Solastalgia]

HANKERING FOR OLD HEARTBEAT INNOCENCE

[by Jane Clifton, The Dominion Post, 16/03/2011]

‘Nostalgia is all very well but in the UKTV’s “new” Monday series ‘Heartbeat’, it’s been 1965 for 18 years now, which is a long time for frosted, shell-pink lippy and boxy Anglias to endure.

The channel has billed the show as back by popular demand, which suggests there are a lot of ageing baby boomers out there.

The 1960’s-set light police drama is one of Britain’s longest-running TV programmes, having begun in 1992 and being technically still in production – though its maker ITV says it is currently ‘resting’ the last series having finished filming last year. It has toyed with axing it but viewer backlash in Britain would apparently be too strong.

The return of heartbeat here (in NZ) starting this week with its 10th series made in 2001, is a fascinating snapshot of how TV programming has changed. In the 1990’s this was one of TV One’s top shows and got prime time scheduling. In recent years, it’s had a run on Saturday afternoons when one but the beadiest-eyed viewer will have even registered its existence.

So how is it standing up? About as well as a comfy, holey old jersey that you’re fond of but that you wouldn’t be seen wearing other than for gardening.

Its appeal always relied heavily on nostalgia among those who were young adults in the 1960s – in other words, the older end of the baby boomers. The rest of us, if not won over by the inevitably eccentric characters of the inevitably cosy little English village, were tempted to wonder if the 1960s really passed as slowly as this.

It is also startling how many police officers – suspiciously many of them young, male and nice-looking – were deployed in such a peaceful little territory. There seem to be about six, but it’s the wise, old retired copper (Derek Fowlds) who seems to do most of the heavy lifting whenever there’s ‘trubble at t’mill’.

And if there is anything he can’t sort out, the district nurse (Kazia Pelka) generally can, so this is shameful over-manning at the cop shop.

And how, in just a few years from here, we arrived at Gene Hunt in ‘Life on Mars’ or even the ancient Carter and Regan on ‘The Sweeney’, doesn’t bear careful examination.

Perhaps though the show’s innocence and gentleness is the secret of its longevity – the notion that once upon a time, nothing too nasty ever happened. Gangsters, bikies, fraudsters and the like did crop up in the dear old 1960s, but were easily brought to book, and often turned out to be misunderstood / nice underneath / more sinned against than sinning.

They were no match for canny folk in an English village, where assorted busy-body aunts, rascally poachers and keen young coppers were all happy to be part of a caring community, to an eternal sound track of The Hollies, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Petula Clark.


MIDSOMER MURDERS PRODUCER BRIAN TRUE-MAY SUSPENDED OVER MINORITIES COMMENT

[by Anthony Barnes, Press Association – UK Independent, 16/03/2011]

The producer of long-running TV hit Midsomer Murders, Brian True-May has been suspended by TV production company All3Media, after sparking a row when he claimed part of the show's appeal was an absence of ethnic minorities.

He told Radio Times the ITV1 programmes - which have run for 14 series - "wouldn't work" if there was any racial diversity in the village life.

True-May, the drama's co-creator who has been with it since day one, said: "We just don't have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work.

"Suddenly we might be in Slough. Ironically, Causton (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Slough. And if you went into Slough you wouldn't see a white face there.

"We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added.
An ITV spokesman said: "We are shocked and appalled at these personal comments by Brian True-May which are absolutely not shared by anyone at ITV.

"We are in urgent discussions with All3Media, the producer of Midsomer Murders, who have informed us that they have launched an immediate investigation into the matter and have suspended Mr True-May pending the outcome."

Midsomer Murders, based on the books by Caroline Graham, was launched in 1997 and has featured 251 deaths, 222 of which were murders.

But True-May said he has not previously been tackled about the programme's failure to reflect "cosmopolitan" society.

"It's not British, it's very English. We are a cosmopolitan society in this country, but if you watch Midsomer you wouldn't think so.

"I've never been picked up on that, but quite honestly I wouldn't want to change it," he said.

True-May has also banned swearing, violence and sex scenes from the show but his idyllic formula does not stop challenging storylines, or other elements of diversity which do not involve ethnicity.

"If it's incest, blackmail, lesbianism, homosexuality... terrific, put it in, because people can believe that people can murder for any of those reasons," he told Radio Times.

The series returns this week with a new star, Neil Dudgeon, who has joined the cast as DCI John Barnaby, replacing actor John Nettles (DCI Tom Barnaby) as the central character.

Mirroring the way the programme, which is broadcast to 231 territories around the world, avoids portraying racial variation, so ethnic minorities apparently avoid the show. A study in 2006 found to be "strikingly unpopular" with minorities'.

Plus ça change - 'Genre de Vie'

Paul Vidal de la Blache, 1845 - 1918

Paul Vidal de la Blache was a 19th Century French human geographer, who melded his interests in archaeology, history and geography.

He was the dominant figure in Human Geography in France at the turn of the twentieth century, and was still widely quoted when I read Geography at Cambridge 1962-65.

He suggested that a deep but mutual relationship could develop over time between the natural environment and man's activities. In that sense, Vidal would have had some sympathy with the concept of solastalgia. But he was also emphatic that our responses to the environment were optional and dynamic.

His views were shaped largely by dissatisfaction with the environmental Determinism that dominated nineteenth-century geography, particularly as argued by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel.

For Ratzel, for example, the 'mediteranean' climates of southern Europe, California, Chile, the Cape and southern Australia would impose shared responses to land-use - and that in turn would shape culture. Well - he was right about one thing - they all produce good wine.

In contrast, Vidal de la Blache proposed the doctrine of Possibilism, which holds that a set of environmental conditions can give rise to different cultural responses.

This, he argued, necessitated much closer attention to history and a narrower focus on 'places' than was usual in the human geography of the day, which often drew its comparisons across countries and major regions.

He conceived the concept of genre de vie, which is the belief that the lifestyle of a particular region reflects the economic, social, ideological and psychological identities imprinted on the landscape.

This led to studies of natural regions and their matching rural cultures, as distinct 'pays' from which, I was once kindly reminded by a French friend in Manila, one can all too easily become 'depaysané'.

La Blache received his doctorate in 1872 and began working at the Nancy-Université. Vidal de la Blache returned to the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1877 as a full Professor of Geography and taught there the next twenty-one years. He transferred to the Université de Paris, where he continued teaching until he retired in 1909 at the age of sixty-four.

Vidal de la Blache's interests strongly marked the next generation of French geographers, who not only inherited many of the theoretical and methodological preoccupations of his work but also finished projects that he had sketched or left incomplete at his death.

Vidal de la Blache's major works include Etats et nations de l'Europe ( 1889 ), Tableau de la géographie de la France ( 1903 ), and La France de l'est ( 1917 ).

Hearts Ease and Solastalgia

TANGATA WHENUA - THE LAND WHERE THE AFTERBIRTHS ARE BURIED

As I mentioned in my previous posting, the issue of motive in the pursuit of Family History raises another issue which touches on my commitment as an immigrant to New Zealand.

The relevant Wikipedia entry notes that the question of social identity lies at the core of identifying as Maori - the original and founding inhabitants.

While ‘European’ New Zealanders often mock the appearance of blond, blue-eyed children in Maori ceremonies and dance troupes (and the receipt of government compensation by like-complexioned adults) Maori are adamant that it is not the way you look that determines your affinity – it is your genealogy or ‘whakapapa’.

It follows that:

‘Family history needs little justification in such communitarian societies, where one's identity is defined as much by one's kin network as by individual achievement, and the question "Who are you?" would be answered by a description of father, mother, and tribe.

The recitation of whakapapa is a critical element in establishing identity - and the phrase 'Ko [enter name] au' (I am [enter name]') is in fact the personal statement that incorporates (by implication) over 25 generations of heritage.

Experts in whakapapa are able to trace and recite a lineage not only through the many generations in a linear sense, but also between such generations in a lateral sense.

Many physiological terms are also genealogical in 'nature'. For example the terms 'iwi', 'hapu', and 'whanau' (as noted above) can also be translated in order as 'bones', 'pregnant', and 'give birth'.

The prize winning Māori author, Keri Hulme, named her best known novel as The Bone People: a title linked directly to the dual meaning of the word 'iwi as both 'bone' and '[tribal] people'.

Most formal orations (or whaikorero) begin with the "nasal" expression - Tihei Mauriora! This is translated as the 'Sneeze of Life'. In effect, the orator (whose 'sneeze' reminds us of a newborn clearing his or her airways to take the first breath of life) is announcing that 'his' speech has now begun, and that his 'airways' are clear enough to give a suitable oration.

Hence, whakapapa also implies a deep connection to land and the roots of one’s ancestry. In order to trace one’s whakapapa, it is essential to identify the location where one’s ancestral heritage began, until "you can’t trace it back any further."

In this way "Whakapapa links all people back to the land and sea and sky and outer universe, therefore, the obligations of whanaungatanga extend to the physical world and all being in it."

Correspondingly, the Maori words for the lands of the people of this locality, ‘tangata whenua’, celebrate the fact that the afterbirth or placentas (whenua) of the children of the tribe are buried there – that is there is a complete identity between land and people.

IS THEIR AN ECOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS?

This raises the issue of what we can learn from Maori in respect of the seamlessness and continuity of people and landscape – an issue that bears on an emerging preoccupation with ‘solastalgia’.

Drawing on Daniel B. Smith’s article in the New York Times of January 27, 2010:

The term solastagia was coined nearly a decade ago by Canadian psychologist Glenn Albrecht who notes that “People have heart’s ease when they’re on their own country. If you force them off that country, if you take them away from their land, they feel the loss of heart’s ease as a kind of vertigo, a disintegration of their whole life.”

Australian aborigines, Navajos, Maori and any number of indigenous peoples have reported this sense of mournful disorientation after being displaced from their land.

And let us pause here to recognise the terrible challenges and dreadful losses that were experienced by indigenous people to the inroads of western colonisation. It is clear that, in accepting money for ‘land purchases’ the Maori chiefs had no concept of its subsequent alienation to individuals, or of the inexorable stream of immigrants that would follow, armed with more advanced technology and access to capital.

But Albrecht claims that “place pathology isn’t limited to native peoples. He has worked with the rural ‘settler’ communities of the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia, who have reacted to widespread open cast coal mining and the destruction of a distinctive landscape by becoming anxious, unsettled, despairing, and depressed - just as if they had been forcibly removed from the valley. Only they hadn’t; the valley changed around them – they were suffering collectively from solastalgia.

In contrast, the communities of the Cape Region of South Western Australia have been judged to be in a state of idyllic ‘solastaphilia’ by Albrecht – at one both with their environment and themselves.

However, solastalgia in Albrecht’s estimation, is a global condition, felt to a greater or lesser degree by different people in different locations but felt increasingly, given the ongoing degradation of the environment. As our environment continues to change around us, the question Albrecht would like answered is, how deeply are our minds suffering in return?

The basic question asked is ‘even if we can establish that as we move further into an urban, technological future, we move further away from the elemental forces that shaped our minds, how do we get back in touch with them?’

As Smith notes:

‘That question preoccupied Gregory Bateson, a major influence on eco¬-psychologists and something of a lost giant of 20th-century intellectual history who published a thought-provoking book “Steps to an Ecology of Mind” in 1972.

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. This “epistemological fallacy” led us to believe, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other.

Bateson went on to argue that nature was a recursive, mind-like system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We need to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.”

SANITY AND LANDSCAPE

But if I remember right, Bateson demonstrated very clearly from his work among different tribes in Papua New Guinea that there were extraordinarily wide variations in the cultures of different tribes in similar ecological settings.

He also postulated that the cultures, which ranged from compassionate and sane to brutal and indifferent, resulted from the influence of the personalities of dominant founding or leading individuals.

And some of the worst excesses of western societies were perpetrated during periods that we can only view in retrospect as eras of comparative social stability and ecological sustainability.

While the destruction of landscape and locality can drive people crazy, there are plenty of historical figures from unspoilt environments who were quite crazy enough to begin with (Genghis Khan is a case in point).

So it worries me that solastalgia may provide an excuse for selfishness and bigotry. And that it may be used to mask inherent conservatism that could in turn foster exclusivity and paranoia – a kind of global ‘not-in-my-back-yard’ movement which could easily lead on to an intolerance of outsiders.

And it is all too possible that the strengths of the Maori link between land and people – which have been so vital in preserving their identity – can also entrench cultural divisions and political separation – and hold back innovation and adaptation within Maori society itself.

As for me, I will always be a Cheshire Lad at heart – as they say ‘you can take the boy out of the country, you can’t take the country out of the boy’.

But I also feel affinities with a number of different landscapes, from the sugarcane fields of Cavite to the dusty plains of Outback Australia and the barren hills of central Otago. And maybe I have to become a bit more committed to safeguarding the sanity of my special 'pays'.

But perhaps there is room for a footnote: Nostalgia and Solastalgia are strange twin children.

The Cheshire of my boyhood no longer exists - except as a landscape lost to all but memory.

As Housman has it for the neighbouring county of Shropshire:

'That is the land of lost content'
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again'.

The Past then is another Country that has its own place pathology.