Calling the Station Home

Place and Identity in New Zealand's High Country
This text examines the social, spatial and property practices of New Zealand's high country. It combines historical, literary and ethnographic approaches to draw a portrait of families whose many features can be used in the debates about land use in the colonies of the British diaspora.
A challenging addition to the contentious discourse on cultural identity, indigeneity and land ownership,Calling the Station Home examines the social, spatial, and property practices of New Zealand's high country. This engaging study combines historical, literary, and ethnographic approaches to draw a fine-grained portrait of tussock-grassland and mountain land families whose material culture, social arrangements, geographic knowledge, and sociolinguistic features speak directly to debates about land use and sustainability in the white settlement colonies of the British diaspora. In the midst of national and international disputes on authenticity, legitimacy, land rights, and resource management,Calling the Station Home provides a methodology for articulating the specificity of attachment to place. It examines the relation of habitation and identity within the context of competing claims by environment and recreation lobbies, government and conservation agencies, overseas developers, and the indigenous South Island Ngai Tahu. Calling the Station Home is especially timely in its refocusing of attention to settler-descendant expressions of belonging and indigeneity at a moment when precolonial populations are asserting land restitution claims. In doing so, the volume contributes to postcolonial cultural analysis in ways that reverse traditional scholarship, turning the lens on the colonizers rather than the colonized, opening new ways of understanding place, culture and home.