Landscape change and the becoming of place: the significance of decay in the Barbadoes Street Cemetery

Abstract

This thesis examines landscape change and its significance for the conception of sense of place. Sense of place is addressed as an on-going process of experiencing, imagining and shaping the landscape. The Barbadoes Street Cemetery in Christchurch, New Zealand is used as a case study to explore the relationships between tangible landscape change and changes in the intangible images and ideals held about landscape. Change is identified as the outcome of both human actions which are based on attitudes and on the natural processes of change. Change is discussed as a sign of time passing, both in a sense of linear, historical time, and cyclical re-generative time. The perception of time and change is related to the human experience of it, particularly with respect to the knowledge of human mortality. The change and decay which alters this particular cemetery is explored through evidence of physical change in the landscape, obtained from archival documents, photographs, and site survey, and evidence of how this change has been experienced, and incorporated into the meaning of the landscape, from the newspaper record of the cemetery. These sources are used to construct a series of narratives of landscape change, which trace a cycle through establishment and growth, decay, and re-creation of both the physical cemetery landscape and the ideals and image held about it, in relation to individual and civic identity and mortality. The relationship between landscape change and the on-going creation, or 'becoming' of place is discussed, and the significance of decay in the cemetery is addressed in relation to the inevitability of change and the perpetuation of hope. Decay prompts a physical and imaginative re-creation of the cemetery, and is thus intrinsic to the becoming of this place.