Face of Nature

"Bounded by the wild waves of the Pacific on the east, and the more sheltered harbour on the west, the Otago Peninsula is a remarkable landscape that has undergone dramatic changes since it first attracted human settlement. In The Face of Nature: An environmental history of the Otago Peninsula Jonathan West explores what people and place made of one another from the arrival of the first Polynesians until the end of the nineteenth century. The peninsula has always been one of the places in Otago most important to Maori. In 1844 they reluctantly agreed to split it with the British, but the land Maori retained has remained at the core of their history of the region. The British settlers divided their part of the peninsula into small farms whose owners transformed it from native forest into cow country that fed a booming Dunedin, at that point New Zealand's leading commercial city. This local history documents the rapid environmental change that ensued. It incorporates a rich array of maps, paintings and photographs to illustrate the making, and unmaking, of this unique landscape. In doing so it illustrates with the Otago Peninsula is an ideal location through which to understand the larger environmental history of the islands"--Jacket.