‘Unknown histories’: How to highlight Auckland’s past

Inhabitants of Ta¯ maki Makaurau Auckland are unaware of the stories its landscapes can tell, according to a local historian. She tells she hopes to change that.

Rob Stock

‘‘They are the unknown histories,’’ says Lucy Mackintosh, describing how Aotearoa’s largest city suffers from a chronic case of historical amnesia.

‘‘Ninety-five per cent of

Pa¯ keha¯ Aucklanders wouldn’t know about them.’’

Occasionally these histories explode into sight in protests that should not come as surprise, but always do, like the defiance by Pania Newton at Fletcher Building’s plans to develop intensive housing at Ihuma¯ tao on land confiscated from its owners in an act of what is now acknowledged to have been government skulduggery in 1863.

Mackintosh, a historian of landscape, is the author of Shifting Grounds, a new history of three of the city’s most famous landscape features: Maungakiekie One Tree Hill, Stonefields Ihuma¯ tao and Pukekawa Auckland Domain.

These days Auckland is a super-diverse city. For every 100 residents in the 2018 Census, 42 were born overseas.

Many more moved from the regions in search of jobs, or an education.

Of the 100 people, 53 were

Pa¯ keha¯ , 28 were Asian, 15 were Pasifika, and 11 were Ma¯ ori.

Mackintosh doesn’t blame

Aucklanders for knowing so little of the history of their landscape, maunga and domains.

‘‘I don’t think historians are very good at engaging with the land,’’ she says. ‘‘History tends to have been approached from very high above the landscape. It’s been about the nation, or the city as a whole.’’

Mackintosh, curator of history at Ta¯ maki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, chose instead ‘‘to stick rigorously to the ground, and then look up and out from there’’.

She hopes her book will help Aucklanders understand ‘‘their own place in this place, and how it has become the place that it is today’’.

‘‘If it can do that, and if people get a better sense of place and the history that sits underneath the places we live in, I hope that will help them to understand things like Ihuma¯ tao when they happen, or the protests at O¯ wairaka, or the chopping down of the tree at Maungakiekie,’’ she says.

Mackintosh sees fragility in the city’s historic landscapes, and the threat of bulldozers and developers as the city expands.

She still laments the loss of Britomart Point, the fort on Auckland’s waterfront that no longer exists.

‘‘It was important for both

Ma¯ ori and Pa¯ keha, and it’s been