In Shifting Grounds, Lucy Mackintosh explores three places in Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland where she says, “the landscape is an archive,” places the past can still speak and the landscapes she has chosen are among the most eloquent.

We begin our hikoi with Lucy at the entrance to the Ōtuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve, a wooden farm gate, an unprepossessing start to the exploration of one of Tāmaki Makaurau’s oldest and most complex cultural landscapes. The name of the road we have travelled along to get to the entrance tells another conflicted story, Ihumātao Quarry Road. This is Auckland, a place where landscapes set in thousands of years of geological time and hundreds of years of human history have roads named jointly for a Māori deity and the agency of its destruction.

Ihumātao, somewhere I have explored for years, is an obvious place to start. Ihumātao, Te Ihu o Mataaho, ‘The nose of Mataaho,’ carries within its rocky self the whole human history of Tāmaki Makaurau: beginnings, Polynesian adaptation to a new temperate land, gardens, defences, the arrival of Pākehā with new crops and the creation of a new market for the entrepreneurial Māori gardeners of Ihumātao. Then, for Māori, expulsion, war and dispossession. But there is one part missing from the story this landscape tells: the maunga.

While we mourn the destruction of the Baniyan Buddhas by the Taliban and temples at Palmyra by the Islamic State, we look past the destruction of the Ihumātao pā, Maungataketake and Ōtuataua. As geologist Earnie Searle observed at the quarrying of the maunga on nearby Te Motu a Hiaroa in the 1960s to build runways at Auckland airport, “It is perhaps inevitable that twentieth century man should value a flat strip of concrete more than the charming but ‘useless’ hills with which nature so lavishly adorned the city.”

While the Buddhas and temples were destroyed for political and religious reasons, we destroyed Maungataketake (and many other pā and landscapes) in part through ignorance - ignorance of history, ignorance of te ao Māori. This book goes some way to address this.

Auckland, continuous change, the advent of the Tupuna Maunga Authority, the closer examination of our bi-cultural history by schools and others, the events at Ihumātao and a city population many of whom were born elsewhere mean that this is a book for its time.

Then we explore the Auckland Domain, a landscape “…where the boundaries between the past and the present, wild and domestic, nature and culture collapse.” A public space from the beginning of colonial settlement, a public space at times privatised but central to this story, the site of Te Wherowhero’s cottage.

The period described by this chapter is fascinating, a time when Pākehā and Māori relationships were delicately balanced both in population numbers and relative power, the time before the war of 1863 changed everything. It is described well, the presence of Pōtatau Te Wherowhero encouraged by the governor, albeit with a cottage rightfully seen by the future Māori King as a poor equivalent of government house. The presence of Te Wherowhero here, and later of Eruera Maihi Patuone to the north of the new town, recognised the power embodied in these men, a power acknowledged by the Pākehā government.

We then return to Ihumātao and the pivotal point of the history of this city, the eviction of the Māori of the southern part of Tāmaki Makaurau in 1863 as a prelude for invasion of the Waikato and the subsequent land confiscation. One contemporary account describes scenes familiar from World War II; refugees, fleeing with their carts and children and livestock, sharing the road with an invading army. However, this is not Europe in the 1940s; it is Great South Road, Auckland, 1863, and the refugees are Māori. As another contemporary commentator said, “The history of this war will be a dark page in the history of New Zealand.”  So dark it was ignored and forgotten, but only by one of the parties.

The second half of Shifting Grounds moves to the post-1863-war story of Tāmaki Makaurau. We visit Sir John Logan Campbell planting olives and planning an Italianate mansion at Maungakiekie-One Tree Hill, a Scots-Mediterranean fantasy on the side of a pā in an increasingly anglicised Auckland. The Domain is revisited with the mostly unknown history of the Ah Chee market gardens and the beginning of a dynasty which went on to create supermarket giant Foodtown and Georgie Pie. Here the landscape, the history, the archaeology and the Chinese family at its centre are joined.

Then finally what for me was the strongest chapter, the story of Maungakiekie, Campbell again, his summit grave, the access road, the obelisk and the ‘discovery’ of burial caves beneath it all. Mackintosh works with the powerful metaphor of the Pākehā world creating a monument to itself in the form of a giant stone pou whenua on the summit of the region’s largest pā while simultaneously wrestling with the inconvenient truth that below the surface lie the remains of the people who built the landscape they were ‘improving.’

Auckland, continuous change, the advent of the Tupuna Maunga Authority, the closer examination of our bi-cultural history by schools and others, the events at Ihumātao and a city population many of whom were born elsewhere mean that this is a book for its time. Read it and go exploring.

Reviewed by David Veart