Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua

Geoff Park’s classic of New Zealand environmental writing, Ngā Uruora, has been reprinted regularly since its 1995 publication.

Theatre Country is a collection of essays that covers subjects as diverse as the ecology of the ordinary inhabited landscape, Polynesian environmental management, the ecological visions of the early Pākehā settlers, and Colin McCahon in the Urewera.

‘I turned National Radio on one morning recently to enthusiastic talk about New Zealand by an American tourist operator at a New Zealand Tourism Board mission to Los Angeles. We were not just a beautiful country, “100% Pure”, far across the Pacific and remote from the troubles in which his country has become so embedded. We were, he declared, the only country in the world in which “nature and the environment are an integral part of the culture”.’

‘Park is a great researcher and a powerful writer.’ —Geoff Chapple, Dominion Post

‘A beautiful, provocative book.’ —David Larsen, NZ Listener

‘A book of brilliant and illuminating essays.’ —Steve Braunias, Sunday Star-Times

Dr. Geoff Park (1946–2009) grew up at a quintessential edge of the Empire – between the primeval forest and the antipodean suburb. A passionate childhood curiosity with the former led to university training in ecology and a career as a Crown research scientist, and then Concept Leader Natural History at The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, before becoming an independent ecologist and writer. His second book, Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and Whenua, was published in 2006. Constantly underwriting his ecology was the realisation that while New Zealanders are blessed with national parks and wild mountains, few have any idea of what happened to our nature in the lowlands. He left us a legacy of deeper appreciation of our unique ecology, and the value of these last remaining wild fragments.