Boundary Markers

Download or read book Boundary Markers written by Giselle Byrnes and published by Bridget Williams Books. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a country where land disputes were the chief cause of conflict between the coloniser and the colonised, surveying could never be a neutral, depoliticised pastime. In a groundbreaking piece of scholarship, Giselle Byrnes examines the way surveyors became figuratively and literally ‘the cutting edge of colonisation’. Clearing New Zealand’s vast forests, laying out town plans and deciding on place names, they were at every moment asserting British power. Boundary Markers also shows how the surveyors’ ‘commercial gaze’, a view of the countryside coloured by the desire for profit, put them at odds with the Māori view of land.