Augustus Earle’s Pedestrian Tour in New Zealand: or, Get off the Beach

CECS Research Seminar

although educated as an artist, ‘a love of roving and adventure’ tempted him

British-American artist Augustus Earle’s Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand(1832) begins with a standard beach scene. His textual account of arrival fits neatly into Greg Dening’s still influential argument for the beach scene as potent and complex zone of cultural encounter, particularly in writings about the Pacific. Earle’s text also features that other key trope of imperial travel writing, the prospect view, which in his case is frequently underscored by accompanying visual depictions. However, much of Earle’s text is actually taken up by what he calls, drawing on a new trope and enabling form popular in British writing by the 1820s, a ‘pedestrian tour’. This paper looks at Earle’s text as he sets off inland, walking from the Hokianga on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand to Kerikeri on the east coast. A scholarly focus on arrival and prospects, I propose, still leans toward producing readings that highlight the emergence of a magisterial European eye in travel writing. Using a mobilities studies lens, I ask here what happens when, instead, we approach texts such as Earle’s by paying attention to the mundane movements within these works such as walking, and to tracking the movements of both the European traveller and of Indigenous Māori. This approach is influenced by the way in which the mobility studies framework encourages us to apply greater scrutiny to movement itself, and to the new understandings that might emerge from such an approach.

Ingrid Horrocks is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at Massey University, Wellington. She has a Masters in Representations and Contexts, 1750-1850, from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at York and a PhD from Princeton. Her publications include Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814(Cambridge UP, 2017), scholarly editions of works by Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith, and articles and book chapters on contemporary and historical New Zealand nonfiction. She is also a travel writer and poet. Her most recently published creative project is ‘Gone Swimming’, a travel essay on swimming in New Zealand’s polluted rivers.