I have driven through Tairāwhiti, along the ‘cape’ a few times. Me and some friends even cycled the coastline once, from Gisborne to Ōpōtiki. Always just passing through, camping.
Recently I read Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone by Aaron Smale and now feel like Ive passed through a forth time, only this time for real. My favourite kind of books are ones that connect the dots between ecology and culture and how these connections esentially create the landscapes and vistas we see today. Geoff Parks Ngā Uruora: The Groves of Life did it with lowlands in Aotearoa. Bruce Pascoe did similar things with the Australian landscape in his book, Dark Emu. Tairāwhiti did the same.
I learnt heaaaaaaps, for want of a more eloquent phrase. Specifically how colonial legacies, environmental mismanagement and geology can combine to create fucking chaos. Aaron weaves these threads together with personal stories in a way that is both engaging and enraging.
I was introduced to scientific terms such as ‘badass gullies’ and ‘earthflows’. I learnt how pine plantations in NZ are propping up the governments carbon credits regime and therefore subsidising agriculture. How the NZ taxpayer is effectively being billed for the Cyclone Gabrielle clean up (200 million) caused by overseas companies who own most of the pine plantations that caused all the ‘slash’. For a little book it packs a punch. One that drives home that the biggest influence on Tairāwhiti landscape in the last 200 years has not been the weather but in fact, politics.