'For although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the mind, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock'[1]

Introduction

Interest in historic landscapes—or cultural landscapes as they are often termed overseas—has grown in recent years, stimulated by the World Heritage Convention and, to a lesser extent, an interest in broadening the scope of historic heritage conservation beyond traditional architectural preservation. Although the movement has been driven by landscape architects, in the United States at least, a new wave of politically-inspired preservationists have consciously used the landscape approach to embrace not only vernacular architecture, but also the heritage—built and non-built—of communities such as Puerto Ricans and Asian Americans.[2]

While historic landscapes confer many advantages to heritage practitioners, I would like to highlight (and qualify) two here. The first, and most commonly noted benefit, is that they help to highlight the interconnections between 'natural' and 'human' heritage objects and places and between the tangible and the intangible qualities of place. But this is probably less important in New Zealand where, the Historic Places Act 1993 definitions of, and criteria for, historic places, wahi tapu, wähi tapu areas and historic areas are remarkably comprehensive. While landscapes will help us broaden our views, the belief that we need them owes more to the time lag between legislative enshrinement and practical implementation, resourcing restrictions and disciplinary turf wars, than it does to the inadequacies of existing intellectual frameworks.

The second major benefit is the freedom that landscapes give to think ambitiously about the stories we tell and how we tell them. Landscapes quite literally widen our horizons. Our interpretive shortcomings have been highlighted recently in the report of Jannelle Warren-Findley, Ian Axford New Zealand Fellow in Public Policy, Human Heritage Management in New Zealand in the Year 2000 and Beyond and, at a more commercial level, my book 100 Historic Places in New Zealand and a recent article in the Automobile Association magazine Directions by veteran journalist Gordon McLauchlan. In short, the argument goes, New Zealand heritage people have yet to match the innovative story-telling work of their museological, historical and archaeological colleagues (amongst others).

But have they? Trust regional staff may spend more of their time than they would like to beating back the bulldozers, and DOC staff may spend more time worrying about Old Man's Beard than thinking about old men's memories, but another organisation, the New Zealand Heritage Trails Foundation http://www.heritagetrails.org.nz/ has been creating historic landscapes for over a decade. And fairly successfully, too. Despite being chronically underfunded and somewhat overlooked by RMA and land management-focussed heritage practitioners, the Heritage Trails Foundation, with its 32 working parties and extensive community links, has thrown a web of historic landscapes over the country. Most New Zealand towns or cities of any size have a trail or two, some of them thematic as well as geographic (e.g., the Janet Frame Heritage Trail, Oamaru) as well as wider regional and national trails (e.g., the National Maritime Heritage Trail). True, not all trails equate to landscapes, some link several, but in many cases existing trails may contribute to a landscapes exercise.

Although the NZHTF committees have often hired professional historians, architects and archaeologists to research and write the brochures and signs, these trails are grassroots-created historic landscapes. They merit closer scrutiny before we expensively reinvent the wheel. They also suggest that we may actually be better at interpretation than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. Just as 'professional' public historians need to break down the barriers between 'amateur' historians and themselves, so may 'professional' heritage practitioners benefit from better valuing the work of 'amateur' or community workers.

Terminology

We should be clear about what we are talking about. This is of more than academic concern. American landscape preservationists Alanen and Melnick warn that the language used there, leaden and daunting to the layperson, can also confuse the public, some of whom find the mere concept of 'cultural landscape preservation' oxymoronic.[3]

Internationally the term more commonly favoured is 'cultural landscape'. There are two influential definitions. UNESCO http://whc.unesco.org/heritage.htm says that cultural landscapes represent the 'combined works of nature and of man' designated in Article 1 of the World Heritage Convention. The term 'cultural landscape' embraces a diversity of manifestations of the interaction between humankind and its natural environment'. UNESCO sees three main categories of cultural landscape.

1. Landscape designed and created intentionally by people – gardens, parkland landscapes etc.
2. Organically evolved landscape—which results from an initial social/economic/administrative and/or religious imperative and which has developed its present form by association with an in response to its environment; such landscapes reflect that process of evolution in their form and component features.

It finds 2 sub-categories: a relict landscape, in which the evolutionary process came to an end in the past and a continuing landscape which retains an active social role in contemporary society closely associated with the traditional way of life, and in which the evolutionary process is still in progress

3. Associative Cultural Landscape. Places with powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations with the natural element but where material cultural evidence may be insignificant or non-existent.

US National Park Service definitions

The Park Service http://www.cr.nps.gov/ defines a cultural landscape as:

a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or person or exhibiting other cultural or aesthetic values.

There are four general types of cultural landscapes, not mutually exclusive: historic sites, historic designed landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes.

Historic Designed Landscape--a landscape that was consciously designed or laid out by a landscape architect, master gardener, architect, or horticulturist according to design principles, or an amateur gardener working in a recognized style or tradition. Aesthetic values play a significant role in designed landscapes. Examples include parks, campuses, and estates.

Historic Vernacular Landscape--a landscape that evolved through use by the people whose activities or occupancy shaped that landscape. Through social or cultural attitudes of an individual, family or a community, the landscape reflects the physical, biological, and cultural character of those everyday lives. Function plays a significant role in vernacular landscapes. They can be a single property such as a farm or a collection of properties such as a district of historic farms along a river valley. Examples include rural villages, industrial complexes, and agricultural landscapes.

Historic Site--a landscape significant for its association with a historic event, activity, or person. Examples include battlefields and presidents house properties.

Ethnographic Landscape--a landscape containing a variety of natural and cultural resources that associated people define as heritage resources. Examples are contemporary settlements, religious sacred sites and massive geological structures. Small plant communities, animals, subsistence and ceremonial grounds are often components.

For simplicity's sake, I favour 'historic landscape' because it builds on established, legally-defined terms such as 'historic place' and 'historic area'. Coining a definition is beyond the scope of this short presentation, but I think that the UNESCO three categories are relatively clear, simple and suited to New Zealand conditions. While a future amendment to the Historic Places Act could define historic landscape, we do not need to wait for legislative enshrinement; the Heritage Trails Foundation has provided many suitable models with which we may 'road test' the concept of landscapes.

Points in favour

I like the idea of landscapes. Local historians have long drawn connections between settlement and the landscape—a wetland for a hapu, a navigable river for British settlers—so heritage practitioners are merely clambering aboard a shipshape and tested waka.

Landscapes make public interpretation better and easier: they provide context for what people see, but may also be more accessible than individual historic places. If it is not possible to see inside a private home or the interior of a registered building, interpretation placed elsewhere can illuminate that place's past.

Interpretation can be placed in less culturally-sensitive parts of the landscape; e.g., in road laybys, restaurants, footpaths etc. This may reduce the impact on historic fabric and enable interpretation designers freer reign with messages and media. Traditional signs can be augmented by headsets, the internet or guides.

Although HPA registration criteria do provide for the identification of 'natural' heritage with human significance, landscapes provide a more natural bridge across the 'natural' versus 'cultural' divide that dominates so much of non-Maori thinking.

The landscapes concept can illuminate items that do not readily fit the historic place and historic area ideas. Internationally, there has been interest in routes—pilgrims' routes or the 'underground railroad' in the USA. The Main Trunk Railway is an obvious potential candidate. As are pounamu trails, the Central Otago Goldfields, the New Zealand Wars campaigns etc.

The tourism and education benefits are considerable, generating not only profile for heritage, but also funds for the host communities.

While statutory protection is not guaranteed by the designation of an historic landscape, mere designation and interpretation does provide a degree of 'protection' for the elements included in that landscape. In other words, people are more likely to value what they can see.

Used intelligently, the concept can accommodate what might be termed the heritage of the dispossessed. American preservationist Dolores Haden notes that in traditional, architecture-driven preservation, 'often left unsolved were the problems of renters or the interests of ordinary citizens, especially women of color in seeing their own pasts reflected in designated historical landmarks. As a result, cultural landscape preservation has emerged, led by practitioners with strong interests in environmental, urban and historical questions'.[4] Are New Zealand practitioners up to such brave thinking? Michael Hartfield's work on Newtown residents' attitudes to the WCC Built Heritage Inventory shows that there are layers—non-built items, 'recent' structures, open spaces or the places between structures etc—valued by minority groups that can be recognised alongside iconic architectural features or large public open spaces.

Reservations

Despite the above, I have some reservations about the new-found enthusiasm for historic landscapes.

The first, already alluded to, is that we may not need to invent quite as many wheels as some suspect. The Heritage Trails Foundation has 'been there, done that' already. I would like to see the NZHPT, NZHTF, DOC, ICOMOS and the others working more closely together and building on the achievements of the past.

Second, although I would not dream of telling the agencies what to do, I do caution against 'invading Russia when you haven't finished off Britain yet'. We know that there is much unfinished work in the areas of heritage identification, assessment and interpretation. Take historic places and historic areas. I am not convinced that the Trust or the local authorities have yet solved all the difficulties of selling the concept of these basic building blocks to the public. If the sector has not 'sold' them to the public and funders—and I venture to suggest that it has not, especially in the case of historic areas—it is unlikely to do better with historic landscapes, which as American and New Zealand practitioners concede, are a tricky concept to explain to landowners and regulators.

Third, and just as fundamentally, we should first finish constructing essential tools such as a national thematic framework. Without something similar to that used by the Australians and the Americans [see http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/hisnps/NPSThinking/thematic.htm], we run the risk of blundering off the rails and creating lists of landscapes as relentlessly object and fabric-driven as the Register. My limited reading of the literature warns me that landscapes can more readily fall prey to aestheticising than historic places and historic areas. Or—and no less worrying—they can become threat-driven lists of ad hoc items.

Fourth, there is the question of scale. In the past the Trust board has had difficulty registering large historic areas such as the Palmerston North Square or Queen's Gardens, Dunedin. While I think that the landscape concept can leapfrog problems with non-contiguous elements and so-called 'intrusive' items, we should not underestimate the challenges that we face in defining and mapping what may become very large geographical areas, full of items that people do not consider 'historic' or 'cultural'.

Fifth, experience with historic area nominations shows that flat, unranked categories such as these do not always satisfy nominators (or the public). I think that historic landscapes will have to be added to the present mix of units of place and area, but they cannot replace them. Just as historic landscapes often overlap, we must bear in mind that they will include historic places and historic areas. That is why I favour linked terminology and a systematic approach based on the existing legislative and conceptual building blocks.

[1] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, HarperCollins, London, 1995, p. 7.

[2] See Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 2000.

[3] Alanen and Melnick, p. 3.

[4] Haden, foreword to Alanen and Melnick, p. viii.