“The ghosts of bygone ages rude”:

Ecology and the Gothic in the New Zealand Settler Fable, 1845-1878

Abstract

Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, a network of colonial fabulists operated throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, creating an extensive body of literature wherein the environment itself was used to justify imperialist expansion. These settler-colonial texts consistently employed elements of the Gothic mode, the uncanny, and the exotic in responding to the systematic destruction of Indigenous ecologies, the exploitation of the colony’s natural resources, and overarching ideologies legitimising British hegemony over the archipelago. In appropriating the perspectives of New Zealand’s wildlife, these settler fables presented unique viewpoints on what colonialism meant to their authors, grappling with issues of land clearance and urban development using native fauna as a literary conduit. This paper contextualises mid nineteenth-century settler fables through a post-colonial lens, illustrating how the Gothic and uncanny inextricably defined these works throughout the period from 1845 to 1878. Two main case studies are used. Firstly, The Pigeons’ Parliament by William Golder (1810-1876) is examined with respect to how these conventions were codified by early colonial writers, dissecting how religion, horror, and the environment were intertwined in creating the New Zealand settler fable as a Gothic work. The political and social milieu in which the work was created is also considered. Secondly, “The Bird and the Idol,” an 1878 work by Thomas Bracken (1843-1898), is analysed as the crystallisation of these Gothicised conventions within the settler fable. This fable is compared and contrasted with contemporary works, examining Bracken’s integration of Christian dogma, European non-colonial literature, and ideas of settler exceptionalism in establishing the methods by which this Gothic composition moralised upon New Zealand’s apparently fearful environments. The article concludes that, in producing these Gothicised and highly appropriative nature parables, settler poets engaged with questions of imperialist morality, ecological change, and their own involvement in natural resource exploitation, traits exemplary of the historical environment in which they were produced.