Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand,

BOUNDARY MARKERS IS AN INTERSECTION POINT for a number of different dialogues in contemporary cultural landscape writing. Giselle Byrnes thinks global and acts local in terms of the navigation between overarching theories and their expression within the New Zealand context. The work is part of an emerging discipline of 'spatial history ' following the work of Australian writer and artist, Paul Carter. Byrnes defines spatial history as "a study of how land has been transformed and of how colonisation is and has been expressed through language, drawing on the work of land surveyors as particular example " (p 5). At the same time as it localises general theories, Boundary Markers also offers something back to the broader sphere of thinking on cultural landscape, as there are strong resonances between the New Zealand experience and that of other postcolonial nations, particularly Australia. Byrnes also plots an intersection between the extreme relativism of deconstruction and the uncritical perspectives of older empirical histories. She explicitly charts a path that navigates between the notion of landscape as text, and the realisation that landscapes are also social spaces. Another intersection is between oral and text-based cultures, noting how much of the surveyors ' work i