David Eggleton
Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance (Potton & Burton, 2024), 256pp, $40
‘Landscape oozes out of the picture frames and window and runs down the wall, seeping out under the door, slippery as an eel in the intertidal mud,’ Matt Vance tells us in Innerland, establishing that ‘landscape’ is something in perpetual motion. We learn, too, that it’s mostly ‘a fabrication of our minds’: a kind of anthropomorphism, giving the earth a human or spiritual dimension. The ‘hard’ factual landscape of the geologist and cartographer is suffused by the ‘soft’ and malleable landscape of our emotional responses. The word ‘landscape’ itself derives from the old Dutch term for land shored up against the sea as a barrier against the forces of nature, implicitly suggesting something self-defined, something energetically formed out of the flux of things, and something metamorphic or shape-shifting. Landscape can be changed, and improved or degraded, but our own values determine how we respond—and Vance suggests our vision of landscape is subjective and often blinkered.
Vance lives on Banks Peninsula and works as a university lecturer in landscape architecture. His book is a collection of essays ruminating on landscape appreciation, deriving from his personal experiences. However it’s not a clarion call on behalf of environmental values, rather it verges on a New Age spirituality, and mostly seems to have arisen out of conversations and encounters with ordinary or everyday people who have never stopped to examine their prejudices about the way they look at their surroundings, which is shaped by the bias confirmations of their peer groups.
So Innerland is primarily a mixture of observations and formulations, meant to challenge us, as the author wanders around and points out what is hidden in plain sight, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Using assorted everyday landmarks that might best represent who we are, Vance presents his impressions and anecdotes as a guide to national character and nationhood in Godzone, but in a laconic fashion that mostly avoids knee-jerk and kitsch reactions to the visual embellishments established by traditional calendar photography, or by the complacent assumptions and heavily diluted analysis channelling Alain de Botton and other international visitors, that has been regularly found in magazines such as North and South and the Listener. You have to go all the way back to the waspish columns of architecture and design critic Douglas Lloyd Jenkins in the Listener in the early 2000s to find something compatible in ambition with Innerland’s critiques of our rusted-on aesthetic habits, and D-I-Y default settings.
Innerland is a well-mannered, but gently erudite, rather than emphatically academic guide. And essentially its tone is wry, ironic, knowing, as if these commentaries have been worked up from a psychogeographer’s field notes, along with classroom talks where it’s important to hold the attention of sceptical or distracted students whose way of seeing has been shaped by their phones.
Vance sketches briefly a history of aesthetic responses to British landscapes, since the time of Captain Cook, and then discusses assorted historical frameworks through which the local landscape has been viewed, from the eighteenth century concept of ‘the picturesque’, to colonial tourism and imperial flag-waving, to post-colonial industrialism and land conservation. This is not a book about about cancelling explorers and depedestalling monuments, but the narrative at first does threaten to become overly schematic and weighted in another way, leaning heavily into populism and nostalgia to assert a particular sense of place. Skirting the ecologically transformative vistas that writers such as Geoff Park and Geoff Chapple, among others, have produced, Vance’s talismanic touchstone is Austin Mitchell’s best-selling Anglocentric polemic The Half-Gallon, Quarter-Acre, Pavlova Paradise, published in 1972. In a similar way to that of Mitchell, Vance’s book is landscape as entertainment, offering a witty series of snap judgements about the aesthetics of Kiwiana, only now updated to the age of neo-liberalism and global nomads.
But while the British visitor Mitchell—one of a long line of visiting commentators scoring jokes off the hapless locals—provided an outsider’s anthropological eye-view, Matt Vance’s guru-like journey around assorted landscapes gradually reveals not just a series of tableaux to be amusingly interpreted but a dynamic interplay between the writer and his surroundings: the places where he grew up, or was educated, or visited on school holidays, or more recently where he went on hunting or sailing trips or visited on work conferences. He confirms that memories are obliquely embodied in the places where we live and part of our perception. The intially bland or reticent Vance teases out, for example, his relationship with his seemingly standard middle-class Cantabrian upbringing as actually complex, fraught, ambivalent. This is his ‘innerland’, unearthing personal truths. Beyond the personal associations, he unpacks a series of poetic conceits or poetic metaphors that can be attached to landscape, such as landscape as ‘movement’, landscape as ‘absence’, as ‘fantasy’, as ‘edge’.
Considering landscape as movement, he begins with walking across it as self-reflective performance—and a self-healing activity—before arriving at the seismic convulsions that obliterated much of the central business district of Christchurch during the earthquake season of 2010 and 2011. Going walkabout, Vance tells us, is the best way to bring yourself close to ‘landscape’. He acknowledges the character known as Speedy, a Dunedin identity who in the 1990s and after was well-known for walking rapidly around town all day every day, as if training urgently for an Olympics walking event. There was something both heroic and absurd about this local flaneur hurrying and scurrying hither and thither, and possibly he was later given medication for this condition as he eventually disappeared off the streets. Speedy, though, ‘used his footfalls to pace out his journey and traced out the songlines of the city through his feet’, and therefore counts as a landscape mystic. Vance himself offers a self-portrait as a long-distance walker in the South Island high country, plodding steadily across farmlands: ‘As a lone walker in the Mackenzie Country you feel immersed in a strange elastic geography where scale and distance play tricks on your perceptions … Here, tracks of the long dead could secretly shape the landscape with the living … I followed an old bullock track which surfaced only in the low light of dawn.’ He also does a bit of playful Zen-like rock shifting in a farmer’s paddock, before being being caught doing it by the uncomprehending farmer. He feels validated when after performing similar actions—small interventions in the landscape—on the mudflats of the Otago harbour, he later spots the work of imitators or followers near-by.
But if strolling through a landscape at your own pace helps to mould ‘our perceptions and desires’, the speed of the motor vehicle journey fragments ‘our experience of landscape into a series of destinations’ with ‘an abstract blur’ between. Traversing roads scaled-up into multi-lane motorways intensifies the non-experience of the organic world—that is, the landscape—where figures in cars are mostly solitary and ‘mesmerised by the road’ while also ‘buffered’ from it and lulled into false equivalences of security and superiority, whizzing along rapidly on rubber tyres.
Ultimately, Vance homes in on how we have commodified landscape and homogenised wilderness. Noting that the domestic interiors of our houses are in dialogue with the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape, meaning also the weather and its moods, as revealed in the daylight coming in through windows, verandahs and porches, he goes on to observe that the social hub of the retail shopping mall with its signage and products serves to aestheticise ‘a landscape of fantasy’, as it funnels customers into windowless enclosures and over-lit aisles. Moreover, the retail mall is corporate property where—as happened to him and a group of students on a study tour to a mall in Christchurch—pedestrians are being constantly surveilled by ‘the all-seeing eye of the security camera system’. He and his clump of students standing and observing were summarily ejected by the security manager for not being ‘shoppers’, there to buy and then leave promptly: something the strict time limit on vehicles in shopping mall carparks also insists on. The ‘fantasy’ is a controlled landscape experience, where we are mostly oblivious to the psychological manipulation.
The privatisation of landscape—agribusiness, luxury apartments, security guards, gated communities—where non-conformist behaviour is regarded with suspicion tends to shut down or muffle not just debate and legitimate enquiry around uses of landscape as a concept of social engineering and control but also discussion around memorials and our communal interactions in public spaces—and the capture of those public spaces by special interest groups. Vance sums it up as: ‘We form rules about how to live in a landscape together and some of these are nonsensical.’ We end up not with well-planned cities but with perverse solutions in hock to the greed of developers. He also argues New Zealand’s sense of exceptionalism has manifested itself in ‘a rough collection of small-towns and car-choked wildernesses that we will defend to the death’, as if to spite our own best interests by paying homage to the great New Zealand ugliness.
The nation’s characteristic muddle of poor planning over decades and a knee-jerk rejection of the logic of good design leads to impoverished and third-rate landscape architecture experiences that confirm narrow-minded and provincial expectations, which neo-liberalism has only exacerbated. In the first flush of Rogernomics, much of what was architecturally valuable in central Auckland was torn down willy-nilly by greedy property developers in favour of the gimcrack typified by leaky ceiling syndrome. Misguided attempts at an architectural internationalism in what Vance prefers to call our largest town rather than a true city by any definition, destroyed Auckland’s distinctive urban character in favour of a bland and uniform Anywheresville look.
Though his jeremiad is subdued and indirect, the fate of Central Otago as a zone designated for multiple large-scale open-cast mining ventures in the very near future is implicit in Vance’s discussion of the picturesque tradition as part of the nation’s global branding: ‘the Hawkdun Range covered in snow … reassuring and beautiful’ in a Grahame Sydney painting is juxtaposed with plans for particular excavations at the Macraes Flat mine that are driven by the price of gold on stock exchanges on the other side of the world: as the price of gold goes up so it becomes worthwhile to mine the less ore-bearing areas.
And then there are the carefully manicured and manufactured landscapes of advertising, where ‘the farms depicted are the small-scale sheep and beef farms of the 1950s’, suggesting ‘security, family, reliability’ and used to sell ‘cheese, beer, utes and conservative political myths’ that bear little resemblance to the realities of industrialised agricultural and pastoral practices, involving mass dairy herds, irrigators, processing factories and pollution. Once, landscape was turned picturesque by scenic painters using the framing device of the Claude glass (named after the artist Claude Lorrain), a tinted and convex reflective surface that served to smooth and enhance ‘views’; now influencers on Instagram deploy cellphone photographs ‘to distort landscape in better than real form’.
The past is another country, seen in the rearview mirror. Many of us spend much of our time now in a digital realm, mediated by screen devices we hold up to our faces and with our social interactions dictated to by algorithms calculated by computers. We are made anxious or fearful or status-conscious by the digital content we are immersed in: the virtual geography of the mediascape. And as consumers and commuters we tend to float above the actual landscape in our vehicles and view it mostly at a remove, or we register it as fly-over country, glimpsed from a passenger plane.Vance suggests that our motorways are actually the nearest we get now to New Zealand’s former ‘egalitarian’ ideal, as cars of all social classes are placed in close proximity before taking the off-ramp for ‘the quiet desperation of the suburbs with fences to keep out the world and fast internet connections to invite it in’.
DAVID EGGLETON is a writer, reviewer and poet living in Ōtepoti Dunedin. His books include Respirator: A Poet Laureate Collection 2019–2022, published by Otago University Press.
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