Land and Culture Theme Analysis

In “Journey,” Patricia Grace depicts two very different cultural relationships to land. As the narrator travels into the city from the land where his family has lived for generations, he observes how white New Zealanders treat land: they see it as a resource to exploit for profit. By contrast, informed by his Māori traditions, the narrator sees land as a living entity that has the capacity to care and be cared for. These two cultural traditions clash when the narrator meets with city officials who plan to appropriate his land for a future development project. At the end of this meeting, it is clear that the narrator will not be able to prevent the city from taking the land away from his family. Even the government’s proposal to compensate the narrator by giving him land of “equal value” speaks to this different ethos about land: to the government it is just a resource, while to the narrator there can be no land “equal” to his own land, because his family has built a relationship with that particular piece of land over generations. By depicting the narrator's deep anguish and alienation at the loss of his land, the story speaks to the psychological cost of land dispossession for the Māori people.

As the narrator rides the train into the city, he observes how white New Zealanders exploit land as a resource for profit. As the train passes over an area of land that used to be sea, the narrator remembers that white New Zealanders constructed this land by “[pushing] a hill down over it and [shooting] the railway line across to make more room for cars.” The violence of the words “pushing” and “shooting” suggests the white New Zealanders’ disrespect for the land, as they treat it as an object they can manipulate according to their desires. When the train passes active construction projects, the narrator observes this exploitative relationship with land again. In order to expand development, and therefore bring profit to the area, the white New Zealanders “chop up everything [...] couldn’t go round, only through. Couldn't give life, only death.” In doing so, they hurt the land, causing it to erode and “bleed for miles.” Again, the white New Zealanders treat the land as an object they can manipulate for profit, remaining oblivious to the “death” and “bleeding[]” their exploitation causes.

By contrast, the narrator, informed by his Māori traditions, sees land as a living entity that has the capacity to care and be cared for. In criticizing the white New Zealanders’ relationship with the land, the narrator reveals the Māori philosophy, remarking, “couldn’t talk to a hill or tree these people, couldn’t give the trees or the hills a name and make them special and leave them.” This observation implies that Māori tradition personifies the landscape: far from being an exploited object, the land’s individual hills and trees are unique beings that can be talked to and named. This caring relationship “[gives] life” to the landscape. In return, the landscape sustains the narrator, his family, and their wider community. During the “hard times” of the narrator’s childhood, the family’s garden kept them from starving, as the land was so fertile it supplied “turnips as big as pumpkins, cabbages you could hardly carry, big tomatoes, lettuces, potatoes, everything.” In contrast to the white New Zealanders, who try to make money off the land, the family often took their excess vegetables into town and gave them away. In giving the landscape life by caring for it, the land, in return, keeps the narrator and his wider community alive. In this way, the narrator interacts with land through a relationship of mutual care. He continues to interact with the land in the present day. When the narrator returns home in the taxi, the taxi driver comments that the narrator’s garden is “neat as a pin,” showing that the narrator still puts a lot of work into caring for his land. As a result, the land gives the narrator the same sense of abundance and empowerment as it did when he was a child: he is able to offer vegetables to the taxi driver. In this way, the story shows that the narrator continues to cultivate his family’s caring relationship with their particular parcel of land.

When the narrator travels into the city to meet with the city planner about his land, these two very different cultural traditions clash, revealing the psychological cost of land dispossession for the Māori people. In their plan to turn the narrator’s land into a parking lot and compensate the family with “equivalent land” or money, the city planners reveal that they see land only as a resource to be exploited for profit. Instead of recognizing the narrator’s unique relationship with his land, they assume that that parcel of land can be easily exchanged for one of “equal value,” or even simply substituted with money. In their view, land has no unique qualities—it is only a placeholder for wealth. The narrator sees his land in the exact opposite way, responding that “if it’s your stamping ground and you have your ties there, then there’s no land equal.” To him, his family’s relationship with their specific land can’t be reproduced anywhere else or substituted with money, because it is a relationship of mutual care that has gone back generations. Ultimately, the narrator is unable to convince the city planners to let his family continue to live on the land. He returns home to tell his family not to bury him because “it is not safe in the ground,” as he is afraid the city’s proposed construction project will unearth his bones. Through this statement, the narrator expresses a deep sense of powerlessness, anguish, and loss: the land that has sustained him and his family for generations is no longer safe. In this way, the story reveals the psychological devastation that land loss can cause for the Māori people.