Past lives and landscapes

Press, 14 August 1976, Page 15

Past lives and landscapes

The Presence ot the Past An Introduction to Landscape History. By Penelope Lively. Collins. 223 pp. N.Z. price $12.30. (Reviewed by John Wilson) “Landscape history” is no more than a new term for the commonplace notion that a landscape can be "read" by an observer who wants to learn about the lives of those who occupied the landscape tn the past. A trained eye, it is true. Is often needed to read a landscape in this way fully and accurately, because much if the evidence of past occupation will have been obliterated by those who occupied the same area later on. But almost ex eryone is, in an amateur and imperfect way, a "landscape historian.” Almost everyone will, at sente time, even in a country with a history as short as New Zealand’s, have looked at some trace of past occupation. and attempted to reconstruct, imaginatively , how the past occupiers lived. A landscape historian. like a geomorphologist, looks at a piece of country and appreciates it not just for its intrinsic beauty but for what it reveals. The temptation in New Zealand, rich : n in tura. beauty, poor (relatively) in archeological and historical sites, is t>- look at landscape for its beauty alone. Although this book is about Britain, and of more interest to British readers, it should stimulate New Zealanuers to resist this temptation, and begin to look more closely at the landscape as a book on which the record of

successive historic! permds has hern written As the author peel- aw«i the overburden of what the last feu years of history have laic over the British countryside, she provides a short course of British history, at first chronologically through prehistoric. Roman. Anglo-Saxon, Mediae'a! and Early Modern Britain, and then thematically through about the last three centuries. But the emphasis is always on the impression the people of each era made on the landscape, and on where and how those ■•( the present era ah u’td ok to d-. . wha: the landscape can reveal A pleasant ske'ch of British his- > is provided: but readers are urged to take a map. walk around, and study the landscape near their homes X true landscape histo ian perhaps specially an amateur one. Penelope Lively suggests, is inspired by a strong sense of local place. Her book will make many New Zealanders conclude regretfully that landscape history is more engrossing and rewarding f>r people in Britain than it can possibly be for those who live where the story of human occupation is so short. But her many suggestions about w hat to look for and how to look for it can be easily applied to the NewZealand landscape They will be valuable to anyone who wants to start looking at the New 21 ’ countryside with the trained exe of the landscape historian, if enough New Zealanders do tins, and record the fruits of their observations and investigations, their country's landscape will begin to have a history