While not written specifically for urban designers or landscape architects, Matt Vance’s innerland: a journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand – published by Potton & Burton in the last quarter of 2024 – offers thoughtfully surprising insights aplenty for both.
In its neatly threaded and accessibly understated scholarly aspects, it’s a book that belongs next to those of Geoff Park (eg. Theatre Country) and the prolific Jacky Bowring (eg. A Field Guide to Melancholy).
Given innerland’s additional enthusiasm for down-to-earth story-telling it’s a hard book to subdivide. Considering his career choices (see also landscapearchitecture.nz) it’s no surprise either that Vance chose not to launch innerland by way of a reading to the converted in an independent bookstore on a Tuesday evening. Instead it’s a mark of the man that he literally welcomed it into the world by launching it from the side of an expedition ship into the Arafura Sea followed by a glug of rum.
Vance is what might be called a ‘landscape whisperer’; filtering a nuanced understanding of an intertwined series of place-marks we take for granted into 55 immersively linked short-form pieces of finely turned writing.
Between the everyday and the extra-ordinary very little escapes his notice, and nor should his book escape yours.
Take this passage from the section titled ‘Landscape as edge’ which sits perfectly with this time of year:
The beach is a place where the normal rules of society don’t apply. It is a place where it is acceptable to not wear shoes, to stop hiding under the cover of too many clothes; you can even talk to yourself here and no one will take much notice. Everyone from dogs to grandparents sense there is something different about this place. It is a place that makes even the oldest of us young, yet it is not on any map, nor is it within any legal boundary.
Or this about the way that the horizon cuts the sky and the sea in half:
Each does impersonations of blue, the sea adding a little green while the sky mixes in a little white.
From earlier writing – his last book was published in 2015 – Vance has earnt a reputation for being in his element writing about the sea and Antarctica.
In writing he has done for publications like the Griffith Review he has expressed the view that New Zealand’s relationship with Antarctica is never far away, including the way it has imbued “our concept of landscape, weather and history”.
In innerland he refers to the impact of the Roaring Forties of the Southern Ocean and writes that “any rules of landscape you think you know don’t apply out there”.
He evokes the Ross Ice Shelf as a landscape of absence. No mountains, no forests, no rivers. A surface bereft of water or soil and thus “more like deep space than any earthly habitat”.
Throughout its 254 pages innerland serves to surface a further lexicography of landscape from the near-away to the closer to home.
Writing on New Zealand’s overabundance of wind for instance, Vance writes that as well as infusing our language and our architecture, wind shapes our perceptions of landscape and that “while other nations talk of weather as rain or sunshine, we talk in wind”.
Wellington is a pronounced example of that, and from lived experience Vance has strong memories of ways the vast space of the Canterbury Plains shrank or expanded according to the wind; its signature “everywhere from the tortured trees to the grand nor-west arch”, and the degree of its presence marking out what you could or couldn’t do with your day.
Like a wind, Vance opens his writing up in the second half of innerland to critiques of urban space, car-scapes and lawn-strewn suburbia, delivering a sharp mix of dry humour and acute observation.
With the declaration that “New Zealand has never been good at cities”, his dissection of the urban form is especially acute.
Recalling his time as a landscape architecture student at Lincoln University Vance acknowledges the lasting impression made on him by the work of American urbanist and people-watcher William Whyte.
He expresses disappointment that Whyte’s ideas “like those of many a quiet genius, are ignored in favour of the more fruitful interests of prestige, politics and symbols of power”.
On Christchurch’s Cathedral Square he zeroes in on the decades where a lack of focus on how humans behave marred efforts to fix its shortcomings. Instead they tended to centre on the “ineffective detail of cars, paving stones and steps”, contributing little to making effective urban space.
On the tide of houses that constitute suburbia, Vance writes of the “two-car garages, houses the size of sections with indoor-outdoor flow, and places where landscape is used as a verb” – places that look like “fortifications designed to keep the world out”.
And in his closing epilogue Vance notes that our obsessive labour to “form rules about how to live in a landscape together” can, at times, border on being “as nonsensical as suburbia itself”.
For some years Vance lived in Sumner and revelled in a morning walk he calls in innerland “an automatic response to some deep, quiet need in me”.
With permission, here is an excerpt from innerland’s ‘I See the Sea’:
From the low concrete sea wall, I would take in the unfolding vista. My thoughts would slow and expand as I dedicated myself to watching, observing, and seeing the sea. A wafting sea breeze might ruffle the water that is twelve kinds of blue. The tide might be on the ebb, leaving telltale signs of the paths it has dug in the dark sand. Out beyond the beach, there might be a white sail hard on the wind. I would perch on the wall while I took in the feast of language offered by the sea.
Within seconds of gaining the wall the phrase ‘I see the sea and the sea sees me’ would begin repeating softly in my head, the words recalling an old childhood game that my sister and I played in the back seat of the car on the way to our favourite bay. My face would be pressed to the car window and thoughts of anything else would be banished by a glimpse of the sea. When we arrived at the bayside bach we rented each year, I would make a beeline straight for the water, despite the pleas of my mother to help unpack the car first. The anticipation of seeing the sea and going down to its immediate edge has held its grip on me for as long as I can remember. This edge of the shore and of the more distant horizon seemed to emerge larger than all the other kinds of landscape in my childhood, as if it was distorted out of proportion by some mirror. It was perhaps through this childhood mirror that I have viewed all landscapes since.
Highly recommended.
Titles from the essays in innerland: Landschop: How landscape crawled out of the sea; Mud; Naming the void; Kurow plank; In my head; The horror; A delicate idea; The Claude Glass; Joe’s TV; Temperature; Speedy; Mackenzie’s Country; The Window Seat; Lines of desire; The path; Drawing sound; On the road; Prospect refuge and ablutions; Kowhai’s lament; The crucifix tree; A symbol instead of a place; Roll Cage Mary; Speed is your friend; This realm of death; The island; Monks who arrange rocks; How do we remember; The landscape of fear; Bunkered; Erebus; Monument; Wind as landscape; Making sense of the shadows; The view from the tree; Emperors all; The fence; The lawn; The Noah psychosis; Pavlova paradise; Million-dollar view; Civic anatomy; Rush hour; Urban dementia; The mall; The landscape of numbers; A trick of the light; Arizona; Calenture; Aquamarina; Tide; Brighton line; Stones of a new temple; I see the sea; The edge; Return to Innerland
