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Cultural Ballast: Stones and meanings flowing in time and space

The Testimony of the Rocks

The Testimony of the Rocks

The settlement of New Zealand took place just as geology and astronomy were being recognised as the sciences which could provide a representation of the actual vastness of space and time and which were repositioning inherited knowledge of the universe as a result. Golder, along with other Scotsmen in Wellington, like William Lyon the publisher and John Coutts Crawford the surveyor, were caught up in the early exploration and description of the geological character and history of New Zealand, and the contribution of that work to the expansion of general geological knowledge. For Golder, writing the history of New Zealand is a matter of reading the landscape as a collection of signs of its origin and its transformations over time, but through travel by connecting the knowledge formulated by Scots like James Hutton, Thomas Playfair and Hugh Miller with the evidence of the new land. 2 Like the inscribed stone images of the Pictish monuments, the shaping of the land’s surface by water and vulcanism signifies a natural and a moral history and purpose which it is the task of the human interpreter alone to bring truly into knowledge by giving language to the natural signs.

For Golder, as for Miller, what human beings add to the material world is intelligence, manifested by voice and inscription, and morality. As Golder writes in ‘The New Zealand Survey’ (1867),

Nature’s interpreters, if Poets be,
While on their souls, as clearly photographed
Her features are,—a real image fair
Reflected, as if in a mirror’s sheen
Men see their likeness chastely shewn, and true,—
For she a language speaks, which none but they
Know how t’unravel, or its sense expound:
A language, though in human words unclad,
Yet may expounded be, and must be heard.10

For Miller, Lunaticus’s three factors are manifested in a mental engagement with the Scottish geological present as a text to be deciphered by informed and imaginative reading, in contrast to a reading which imposes inherited conceptions on the landscape. As the title of one of his books puts it, his task is to interpret correctly ‘the testimony of the rocks’, a kind of work which requires extensive travel around Scotland and detailed local investigation and description in order to discover and constitute as knowledge the themes and patterns in the testimony. A brilliant example of this kind of work is the collaborative book, The Bass Rock: Its Civil and Ecclesiastical History, Geology, Martyrology, Zoology and Botany.11 I have described it as brilliant because its conception of knowledge allows the different specificities of natural, human and divine history to come together as integral aspects of the whole meaning of this particular geological formation, a volcanic remnant in the Firth of Forth near North Berwick. Golder follows precisely this conception in his history of New Zealand.

For Miller and for the other authors contributing to this history, significance and meaning are the product of the enmeshment of natural processes, human purposes, and divine providence. Just as Golder writes poetry to conserve his present for future recollection, so M‘Crie, the writer of the civil history, affirms his purpose as preventing ‘dumb forgetfulness’ and recording the facts confirming ‘the total perversion of justice’ signified by the human occupation of Bass Rock12.

Miller approaches his analysis as a narrative of encounter, both his and, through him, the reader’s. It is set in the present, in the actuality of his visit to Bass Rock for the purpose of writing about it, rational and imaginative in respect of those phases of the rock’s history from which humanity is absent, and informed with his own knowledge and experience. As a preface to his detailed description of the geological history of the area between Edinburgh and North Berwick, Miller’s line of thought over several pages goes as follows:

it occurred to me as not a little curious, that the early geological history of a district should so often seem typical of its subsequent civil history… It is amid these centres of geologic disturbance,--the natural strongholds of the earth,--that the true battles of the race,--the battles of civilization and civil liberty,--have been successfully maintained by handfuls of hardy men, against the despot-led myriads of the plains… While pursuing this idea, a sudden turning of the road brought me in full view of the Bass, looming tall and stately through a faint gray haze, that had dropped its veil of thin gauze over the stern features of the rock. But the Bass, though one of the Plutonic strongholds of the earth … has been strong chiefly on the side of the despot and the tyrant…

In the quarry in which I first became acquainted with severe toil, and an observer of geological phenomena, I used to know when it was time to cease my labour for the day, by marking the evening sun resting over the high-lying farm-house of Brea,--the little patrimony from which one of the captives of the Bass—Fraser—derived his title. And from the grassy knoll above the hollow I could see the parish churches of two of its other more noted captives,-- M‘Gilligan of Alnes and Hog of Kiltearn. Hence many an imagination about the rocky Bass, with its high–lying walks and dizzy precipices, had filled my mind long ere I had seen it…

It is not uninstructive to remark, from facts and feelings such as these,--and the instances on record are very great,--how much more permanently good connects itself with matter, in the associations of the human mind, than evil… It was a greatly worse time than the present in this country, when the dungeons of the rock were crowded with this country’s most conscientious men. And yet how intense the interest with which we look back upon these times; and on the rock itself, as a sort of stepping-stone by which to ascend to their scenes of ready sacrifice, firm endurance, and high resolve …May there not be a time coming when the just made perfect shall look back upon all ill, moral and physical, with a similar feeling; when the tree of the knowledge of good and evil shall grow once more beside the tree of life in the Paradise of God, but when its fruit, rendered wholesome by the transmutative power, shall be the subject of no punitive prohibition; and when the world which we inhabit, wrapped around with holiest associations, as once the dungeon-house and scaffold of a Divine Sufferer, shall be regarded—disreputable as we may now deem its annals—with reverence and respect, as the Bass of the universe, and its history be deemed perhaps the most precious record in the archives of heaven?13

What must appear from a twentieth century scientific perspective as undisciplined speculation and a failure to define the boundaries of enquiry also reciprocally shows what is at stake in the present separation between scientific and moral knowledge. Determining and declaring the facts is necessary; but it is equally necessary to interpret their meaning, which is an expression and consequence of purposeful action. In another place Miller makes a distinction in modes and domains of enquiry which is resonant for our own time:

The geologist, as certainly as the theologian, has a province exclusively his own; and were the theologian ever to remember that the Scriptures could not possibly have ever been given to us as revelations of scientific truth, seeing that a single scientific truth they never yet revealed, and the geologist that it must be in vain to seek in science those truths which lead to salvation, seeing that in science those truths were never yet to be found, there would be little danger even of difference among them, and none of collision.14

The fact of Bass Rock’s use as a prison by a tyrannical government turns into a sign of other facts, human and divine, in a manner similar to the way stones carry meaning in Edgar’s sculptures. It is the very lack of objects marked by their human origin in most of the fossil record15 which proves conclusively for Miller that human creation occurred long after the geological creation of the earth: ‘wherever man has been long a dweller, he has left enduring traces behind him,--indubitable marks of his designing capacity, stamped upon metal or stone, stained into glass or earthenware, or baked into brick.’16 Most particularly for the writers of Bass Rock, its natural and human history provides clear evidence that the cycles of change and new creation are alike destructive but also confirmatory of civil and religious liberty, values deeply embedded in Scottish Protestant culture and institutions and a part of the legacy which Golder and those like him wrote into Pakeha culture 3.

2 [Illus 2 John Edgar, Compass. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]

11 Rev Thomas M‘Crie, Hugh Miller, Rev James Anderson, Professor William Fleming and Professor Balfour, The Bass Rock: Its Civil and Ecclesiastical History, Geology, Martyrology, Zoology and Botany. Edinburgh: John Greig & Son. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co, [1847?]. Miller makes the following observation about another ‘heap of stones’: ‘A pyramid of loose stones,--the work of some of the troops engaged in the great ordnance survey,--occupies the apex of the island. One is sometimes inclined to regret that these conspicuous mementoes of an important national undertaking, which in the remoter and wilder regions of our country furnish so many central resting points, from which the eye,--to employ a phrase of Shenstone’s,--“lets itself out on the surrounding landscape ,” should be of so temporary a character. Placed as most of them are . . .they would form, were they but constructed of stone and run lime, connecting links between the present and remotely future generations, that would be more honourable to the age of their erection than monuments raised to commemorate the ferocities of barbarous clan battles, or the doubtful virtues of convenient statesmen, who got places for their dependents. They might have had their little tablets, too, commemorative, like those of the Roman wall, of the laborious “vexilarii” who had erected them … (The Bass Rock, 106-107).

12 The Bass Rock, 22.

13 The Bass Rock, 58, 61, 62-63

14 The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. Edinburgh: Shepherd & Elliot; London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. (1857), 259.

15 Miller’s collection of fossils is held by the National Museum of Scotland.

16 The Bass Rock, 94.

3 [Illus 3 John Edgar, Flagstone. http://www.johnedgar.co.nz/ballast/ballast.html]