Environmental Matters
Canterbury, as the largest region by area in New Zealand, is geographically and biologically diverse, containing 59 per cent of the country’s braided rivers, a type that is a rarity worldwide. The braided rivers themselves contributed to the formation of the Canterbury Plains, carrying millions of tonnes of alluvial outwash sloughed off the Southern Alps and down the valleys to the east of the mountains 25,000 to 10,000 years ago. This displaced moraine fanned out to form the plains, which at their widest point meet the eroded forms of the two extinct shield volcanoes comprising Banks Peninsula.
Before human settlement the plains were largely forested, although small amounts of native bush can still be found in the present day—notably the intra-urban copse known as Riccarton Bush in the eponymous Christchurch suburb. The majority of what has come to be known as the Canterbury region was purchased in 1848 through the signing by 16 Ngai Tahu chiefs of the historically fraught ‘Kemp’s Deed’, by which some 13,551,400 acres of land passed into Crown ownership for a mere two thousand pounds. Successive waves of agriculture arrived—initially sheep farming, then wheat so that, between 1870 and 1913, Canterbury contained more than half the total area of the country’s wheat land, and through to the rapidly expanding dairy industry during the 1990s as a result of the introduction of large-scale irrigation in the mid-twentieth century.
