Accumulation

2024
Charcoal, pansy dyes, paint, acetone transfer, archival photographs and metal thread on fabric

150 x 150cm

North Pennine lead was once an essential, entangled aspect of the British Imperial project. Buildings across this landscape still bear the insignias of the New Zealand Company, as many of the workshops and smelting houses were constructed in the nineteenth century in order to supply pipe work and bullets to the British colony of Dunedin, a coastal city settled in Ōtepoti, Aotearoa.⁷

The bay at Ōtepoti was first sighted in 1770 by the HMS Endeavour, the vessel of Middlesborough-born Captain Cook, whose hagiographic museum now lingers on the plains below the Nenthead mine.⁸ British occupation of Aotearoa began permanently from 1848 onward,⁹ instigated by the New Zealand Company, an imperial-business entity focused on Aotearoa’s systemic colonization and funded by John Lambton, one of the wealthiest mine owners in the North of England.¹⁰

Sailors stood upon lead-lined vessels and peered through telescope fitted with lenses of flint glass. Ōtepoti’s distant coast presented itself without explicit markings of permanent settlement or agriculture. The land was thus claimed by the navy for the British Crown via terra nullius, an all-too-familiar expression of Indigenous erasure creating voids of land ownership and occupation through which concurrent colonial usurping was legitimized.¹¹

This juridical assertion, undercutting even Cook’s own earlier accounts, elided the presence of Māori populations that had settled the cove several hundred years prior to its ‘discovery’ by Pennine interlopers.¹² The Māori iwi had developed sophisticated means of inhabiting Ōtepoti’s highly complex ecosystems, charged with surface moisture, densities of swamp repo raupo (wetlands) and temporal food sources.¹³ Existence within this watery continuum was brought into violent encounter with the landscape conceptions and capital impetus of the British Empire.¹⁴ The very nature of this abundant landscape—its dense woodlands, thick bogs and seemingly itinerant cultivation were supported by a unique productive absence of land ownership that lay beyond and challenged the thin value judgements of the Northern settlers.¹⁵

The bay, a place of important spiritual, bodily and more-than-human nourishment, was imperially reconstructed as a place full of danger, disease, and darkness, cartographically impenetrable to the imperial government and, importantly, void of profitable enterprise.¹⁶ Moreover, entwined in this categorization, the social worlds at Ōtepoti were deemed backward and primitive, in comparison to their supposedly advanced subjugators.^{17, 18}

Such an imagination, almost certainly in bad faith, sought to legitimize the displacement of these ecologies for permanent settlement, a toxic contortion of supposed care, of so-called civilizing. Repo raupo were deliberately desiccated, forming a dryness into which the Dunedin grid was overlaid, with an attendant infrastructure of roads.¹⁹ Moreover, year-round irrigated plantations, monocultures of British potatoes, extended beyond the city into iwi foraging grounds.²⁰ Indigenous and morethan- human lives were separated from their means of subsistence, spirituality, reservoirs of knowledge and spaces of community. Māori were thus largely only able to access water from restricted infrastructures and food with capital sought from newly formed labor hierarchies, often working as barely waged laborers in the fields of potatoes.²¹ Ōtepoti and its inhabitants were mined for profit.

These systemic processes of segregation, that simplified complex mutualities into a profit-making-apparatus, were sustained by the extraction of metal in Nenthead’s hills. Shot ammunition, transported down the granite massif, across channelized rivers and out of Newcastle’s port, both enforced the new social stratification and was
used to suppress acts of Indigenous resistance. Lead ducts cast in Nenthead’s expansive foundry were used in the drainage infrastructure that destroyed sustaining pools and marshlands in Ōtepoti.²² Those waters were channeled away in order to irrigate New Zealand Company plantations. The profits from those plantations flowed back, through imperial networks, to the company mine, maintaining the asymmetric worlds of extraction and capital and motivating further extraction in Nenthead.

As one territory expanded, so did the other.

Notes

7 - Mark Kincey, Chris Gerrard and Jeff Warburton, “Metals, Mines and Moorland: The Changing Lead Mining Landscapes of the North Pennines, UK, 1700–1948,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 56:1 (January 2, 2022): 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/007 94236.2022.2058221.

8 - Nigel Rigby and Pieter Van Der Merwe, Captain Cook in the Pacific (London, UK: National Maritime Museum, 2002), 25.

9 - Malcolm McKinnon, “Otago Region,” Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand—, April 11, 2022, https://teara.govt.nz/en/otago-region.

10 - Edward Gibbon Wakefield to E. G. Wakefield, Lord Glenelg, I. Crawford, Directors of New Zealand Company, “Outward Correspondence” (Wellington, NZ: Alexander Turnbull Library, 1837).

11 - “Hobson Proclaims British Sovereignty over New Zealand,” RSS, October 8, 2021, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/hobsonproclaims-sovereignty-over-all-of-new-zealand.

12 - Ashley Reid, “Māori Cultural Landscapes in Otago; Acknowledgement, Recognition and Preservation” (dissertation, University of Otago, 2016), 12, https://ourarchive.otago.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10523/6386/ ReidAshleyJ2016MPlan/pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.

13 - Reid, “Māori Cultural Landscapes,” 13.

14 - “The Importance of Awa to Māori,” LEARNZ, February 2001, https://www.learnz.org.nz/rivers211/discover/importanceof-awa-to-m%C4%81ori#:~:text=For%20M%C4%81ori%2C%20water%20is%20the,a%20 priority%20for%20many%20Iwi.

15 - Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, “Traditional Wharerau Being Built” Toitū Otago Settlers Museum, May22, 2014, https://www.toituosm.com/whats-on/news/traditional-wharerau-being-built

16 - Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London, UK: Routledge, 2006), 57.

17 - James C. Scott, Seeing like the State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 15.

18 - Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 277.

19 - Reid, “Māori Cultural Landscapes,” 15.

20 - Charles Royal and Jenny Kaka-Scott, “Foods Introduced by Europeans,” Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, September 5, 2015, https://teara.govt.nz/en/maori-foods-kai-maori/page-4.

21 - Karl Marx, “Part Eight: So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” in Capital vol. I (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, Inc., 1990), 873–942.

22 - James Beattie, “Urban Conservation and Conflict in Early Aotearoa: Dunedin Town Belt, 1848-1860s,” The Garden History Research Foundation, February 25, 2022, https://gardenhistoryresearchfoundation.com/2022/02/25/urban-conservation-and-conflict-inearly-aotearoa-dunedin-town-belt- 1848-1860s/.