« Settlers and their fortress farming: Alexandra Vlachos, ‘Fortress Farming in Western Australia? The Problematic History of Separating Native Wildlife from Agricultural Land through the State Barrier Fence’, Global Environment, 13, 2, 2020, pp. 368-403
Excluding indigenous peoples today (transfer and repressive authenticity today): Andrea Procter, ‘Elsewhere and otherwise: Indigeneity and the politics of exclusion in Labrador’s extractive resource governance’, The Extractive Industries and Society, 2020 »

Fantasies of settler indigenisation through composting: Rebecca Ream, ‘Pākehā Landhome-Making: Composting Arcadia with(in) Wairarapa’, The Journal of New Zealand Studies, 30, 2020, pp. 38-55

23Jun20

Abstract: This article offers the notion of landhome-making as a way to compost arcadia. For my doctoral research, I interviewed Pākehā women from rural Wairarapa. Here I draw on fragments from three participants’ stories to demonstrate how landhome-making can be a fertile way to trouble dominant understandings of arcadia by drawing on Donna Haraway’s composting. Arcadia, which can be understood as a rural paradise, was a key way Europeans settled New Zealand, and is still a formative way in which Pākehā relate to land. Although immersed in colonial mythologizing, in which the arcadian ideal is an intimate part, I suggest participants’ narratives also have the capacity to disrupt this problematic colonial ideal. I found this out by using feminist more-than-human ethnographic methodologies that helped me conclude that landhome-making possesses possibilities for composting dominant understandings of arcadia with(in) Wairarapa.


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