The Hansen family and workers, circa 1898. The author’s great-great grandparents are Mary Ann, seated on the left, and Lars seated second from right, who settled in Aotearoa from Ireland and Denmark.

Many who colonised Aotearoa ended up perpetuating the sort of oppression they themselves had fled, writes environmental historian Catherine Knight.

In 2020, I embarked on my sixth book, An Uncommon Land. At that time, I wasn’t quite sure what it would evolve into, but I knew it would be centred on my ancestral history.

Secretly, I was hoping that somewhere in the dusty archives of ancestry, I would find an as yet undiscovered sliver of Māori ancestry, in defiance of my pale complexion and stumbling te reo, so that I could claim some deeper connection to this land.

That was not to be. There was no evidence in the DNA or the ever-expanding family trees that I was anything other than Pākehā. But what I did discover was a multi-textured tapestry of ancestral, environmental, social and economic history, which helped me better understand my relationship with this land and those who lived here long before my ancestors.

More broadly, I was able to use my family history as a way to explore the history of the commons — the lands and associated resources over which unlanded “commoners” had rights of access — and their enclosure as private property, as capitalism and the ideology of “progress” gained ascendancy. This happened first in the British Isles and Europe, and then the lands colonised by the imperial powers, before finally engulfing much of the world.

My great-great-grandparents — Lars Hansen from Denmark, and Mary Ann Hastie from Ireland — had settled in the Waikato in the 1880s, to the west of the great Whangamarino wetland (or “swamp”, as it was known then).

Mary Ann’s newly married parents had left Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine, which led to the death of around a million people, and to the migration of between one and two million more. This famine was a direct result of the land tenure system in Ireland, itself the product of hundreds of years of conquest, subjugation, and land enclosure. Wealthy landlords (mainly of Anglo-Irish descent) owned most of the land, while the Irish were confined to the poor-quality land, over which they had no security. Over generations, the small parcels of land on which they subsisted were divided into increasingly smaller lots, forcing the peasant farmer to become almost wholly reliant on the calorie-rich potato, with catastrophic results.

Lars and Mary Ann made their home on land that had been confiscated from Waikato hapū. The raupatu or confiscations were supposedly made to punish hapū for their involvement in the Waikato War, which they were blamed for instigating. In fact, the war was waged against the Waikato people for the express purpose of confiscating their land. As Vincent O’Malley has documented, plans for confiscation, including the recruitment of military settlers, were already in place before war was declared.

Why was the land so desperately needed?

The Auckland province was burgeoning, but it lacked good grassland, and settlers could only look with envy at Canterbury, Otago, Wairarapa and other provinces, which were cashing in on the riches of sheep farming. Auckland colonists coveted the vast swathe of lush lands to the south, which, to their eyes, lay “unproductive” and “under-utilised” by Māori owners. It was, in the parlance of the day, “wasteland”.

A question I wanted to answer was how much my ancestors knew about how the land came into their hands. Lars arrived in Dunedin in 1863, the year the conflict raged, while Mary Ann was just nine years old at the time of the war. If they understood anything of the context, or recognised any parallel with enclosure in Ireland and its tragic consequences, this understanding would no doubt have been coloured by the prevailing justification at the time — that the Waikato tribes posed a threat to Auckland’s settlers, a threat that needed to be quelled.

In this sense, they were unwitting participants in the violence of colonisation, imperialism and capitalism, just as we, their descendants, continue to be today.

The Waikato land on Paddy Road where the Hansen family farmed in the late 1800s. The land used to be covered in extensive wetland and forest, and was confiscated from Waikato hapū. (Photo supplied)

As I learned more about their lives, it struck me that there are striking parallels with the circumstances in which we find ourselves today. We too are complicit, and quite willing participants in a socioeconomic system that perpetrates untold harm on the planet while continuing to entrench and exacerbate inequity and injustice.

Now, though,  it is a system of exploitation more complex and dynamic than the unidirectional imperialism of the British and other imperial powers imposed on Indigenous peoples.

Today, through the tentacles of our economic system, all high-income nations, New Zealand among them, enclose, exploit and extract from the ancestral lands of others — generally in the Global South — to sustain our first-world lifestyles.

In New Zealand, agriculture, the so-called backbone of our economy, has thrived off the almost complete destruction of the Pacific Island of Nauru, mined to ruins for its phosphate-rich guano. When the guano ran out, we became one of only a small handful of countries to import phosphate from Western Sahara, in flagrant disregard of the human rights violations suffered by its Indigenous peoples at the hands of its Moroccan rulers.

And then there’s “green imperialism”, the destruction of other peoples’ lands and waters to extract the rare earth metals we need for our electric vehicles and wind turbines.

Because we’re so distant from the destruction of resource extraction and other environmental harm, few of us reflect on how our own over-consumption is fuelling the climate and biodiversity crisis, and destroying the lands, health and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples around the world.

Nevertheless, there is hope.

As I argue in the book, while the commons were almost entirely enclosed and turned to the project of private wealth creation for those on the winning side of history, the potency of the idea of the commons has nevertheless lingered, both in our collective memories and in our landscapes.

Of the approximately 50 percent of common land that once existed in the British Isles in medieval times, only about three percent survives today. And in New Zealand, land under communal Māori stewardship was almost entirely enclosed through land sales, confiscation, and Native Land Court processes.

Some might yet argue that our national parks remain our commons. But they are a poor substitute for the wetlands, estuaries, and lowland forests — all but decimated — that were the food basket and hardware stores of Māori in pre-colonial times. (For a fuller discussion of the role of conservation land as commons, see No, national parks are not commons.)

But if we think about the notion of commons in a sense broader than land and associated resources, there is rich potential for the continued application of an ethos of commons to our world. I see this potential in the spheres of housing, food systems, land use, liveable cities and nature space.

The title of my book, An Uncommon Land, refers to the almost total absence of commons in the colonial and contemporary social landscape in New Zealand. It goes without saying that the commons have no place in a system focused on private property as the basis for wealth accumulation.

But the title has a dual meaning, and also signals potential.

I believe if any country can reinvent itself to put wellbeing and sufficiency at the centre of the economic system, Aotearoa New Zealand can.

However, first there needs to be much wider recognition that our socioeconomic system is a product of colonisation and, more broadly, imperialism —the enclosure of land, nature and people. The inequity, social harm and environmental destruction this system perpetuates will continue without a fundamental change in the way we live and organise our economy.

Catherine Knight. (Photo supplied)

Dr Catherine Knight is an environmental historian and author of several books including New Zealand’s Rivers: An environmental history, Beyond Manapouri: 50 years of environmental politics in New Zealand and Ravaged Beauty: An environmental history of the Manawatu. She writes on post-growth and a wellbeing economy in Newsroom, The Spinoff and on Substack. Catherine works in public policy and is an Honorary Research Associate at Massey University. Find out more about An Uncommon Land on Catherine’s website. 

E-Tangata, 2025