Settler Gothic: Jamie Ashworth, ‘”A peculiar lustre”: The Gothic mode, settler colonialism and the environment, Wairarapa, New Zealand, 1841–53’, International Review of Environmental History, 11, 1, 2025, pp. 71-91 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler Gothic: Jamie Ashworth, ‘”A peculiar lustre”: The Gothic mode, settler colonialism and the environment, Wairarapa, New Zealand, 1841–53’, International Review of Environmental History, 11, 1, 2025, pp. 71-91

09Dec25

Abstract: This article gathers texts from missionaries and surveyors from the first phase of European colonisation in Wairarapa, New Zealand, from 1841 to 1853, and critically analyses them as part of a wider corpus of settlers’ writings. Diaries, maps and reports are used to examine colonists’ attitudes toward the environment of the district; based on these, the argument is made that settlers viewed Wairarapa through the Gothic mode, a tendency that portrayed the environment as simultaneously beautiful, alien and hostile. Throughout this analysis, it is further argued that this current of attitudes contributed to colonial desires to exploit ‘waste land’ throughout the district, wherein the extraction of natural resources became justified as an act of familiarisation and accesibility. These attitudes appeared throughout formal documents, alongside memoirs and personal texts, encompassing themes of religion, expansionism and capitalism. It is concluded that the methods of literary description used by these settlers reveals that settler capitalism, among other ideologies of colonisation, deeply permeated European outlooks on the environment, affecting the public and private literary works produced by colonists as a reflection thereof.

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