End of an Era? Population Geography in New Zealand at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

Research into and teaching on population issues in New Zealand's university geography departments is at a crossroads. A significant cohort of New Zealand population geographers who gained their graduate and post‐graduate training during the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly diminishing as a result of retirements and late career shifts. In the much more competitive university environment of the 1990s staff are either not being replaced, or their positions and programmes are being reshaped as part of radical restructuring of the social sciences and humanities. This paper reflects on recent developments in population geography in New Zealand, highlighting the contributions made by three of the country's most prominent researchers and teachers in what is fast becoming a dying field of discourse in university geography departments. The paper concludes on an ambivalent note about prospects for geographers in the era of sub‐replacement fertility and the heightened attention that will be accorded to migration processes.

Cultural stewardship in urban spaces: Reviving Indigenous knowledge for the restoration of nature

“…Cultural events are at the heart of many Māori communities, and ensure that generational knowledge can be shared and maintained by the tribal group (Wehi et al, 2023). Exposure to this knowledge, however, is often difficult for families who have migrated from rural areas and are now part of the large cohort of Māori living in the city (Gagné, 2013;Kukutai, 2013) and the role of urban spaces in severing ties to Indigenous knowledge systems through assimilation into Western society is notable (Bedford et al, 2004;Haami, 2018;Harris, 2004;Nejad et al, 2020). Similarly, participant data indicating that rural living Māori who had moved as a child tended to gather more resources than urban living Māori who had moved suggests that aspects of mobility as well as the availability of resources in rural and urban areas influence feelings of engagement, connection and confidence in kaitiakitanga.…”

Health geography in New Zealand and Australia: global integration or Antipodean exceptionalism?

“…Indeed, apart from two unpublished theses, there appears to be only one previous excursion into the sphere of medical geography (see Heenan, ; Heenan & McCracken, ). Although there is seldom much difference between the two specialities, Richard Bedford considered Heenan, with his significant contributions to understanding geographical variations in mortality in New Zealand, to be a population geographer rather than a medical/health geographer (Bedford, ). Bedford did, however, acknowledge that ‘one of Heenan's major concerns during the 1970s was to stimulate the interest of New Zealand geographers and health care providers in medical geography, then a little developed area of research in this country’ (p.13).…”

Reflections on a region: New Zealand geographers and the study of Pacific peoples with special reference to the period 1945–1970

“…My observations about the Pacific peoples and places are not intended to be comprehensive – reviews of research carried out by the New Zealand geographers on many key dimensions of human geography in the Pacific Islands (Connell 1999; Bedford 2004), Australia (Hugo 1999) and New Zealand (Bedford & Heenan 1987; Bedford 1999) have already traversed much of the relevant ground. Rather, the focus is on how the geography of the region's peoples was regarded and approached in the 1950s and 1960s with special reference to the ‘Cumberland’ school of regional geography and some of the critiques of the findings from research carried out by Cumberland and his students on land use in Samoa and Fiji.…”