Abstract
The droughts that withered crops, killed cattle, and forced many farmers out of business in North Otago, New Zealand, in 1889–91, 1906–7, and 1909–11 underline the existence of contested interpretations of natural causation in that region. Examining settler rainmaking and prayers-for-rain complicates historical interpretations about religion and rationalism, secularism and science, and colonization and climate. This chapter argues for the need for historians to bring research on religious and scientific interpretations of natural causation beyond the European early modern period and into settler societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 It also sheds light on the fascinating process by which climate was imbricated in settler religious and scientific debates, and specifically how meteorologists used criticism of rain-making experiments to strengthen claims of professional legitimacy.
I thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, as well as Ian Duggan, Joëlle Gergis, Ondine Godtschalk, Emily O’Gorman, the Schaffer family of Windsor, and the North Otago Museum. Aspects of this chapter are based on research that examined the drought of 1907: James Beattie, “Rethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand,” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 29, no. 3 (2004): 82–103. I thank the editors of the journal for permitting me to draw on this research, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Contestable Research Grant, and Environmental Research Institute, University of Waikato, for supporting this project.
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Notes
On the nineteenth-century colonial and non-European world: Georgina H. Endfield and David J. Nash, “Missionaries and Morals: Climatic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Central Southern Africa,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92, no. 4 (December 2002): 727–42; Mark Elvin, “Who Was Responsible for the Weather? Moral Meteorology in Late Imperial China,” Osiris, 2nd Series, no. 13 (1998): 213–37.
On the early modern Europe world: Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (New York, reprint, 1997), 78–150;
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Erik Olssen, A History of Otago (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1984).
Brooking, Lands for the People? The Highland Clearances and the Colonisation of New Zealand: a Biography of John McKenzie (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1996).
Don Garden, Floods, Droughts and Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped our Colonial Past (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009).
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James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21–54.
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The Australasian (TA), March 4, 1882. A lso discussed in Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 292–96.
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OM, July 23, 1907. On wise use, see: Michael Roche, “Wise Use of Forests, Lands, and Water,” in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Pawson and Brooking (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 183–99;
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Ashley L. Schiff, Fire and Water: Scientific Heresy in the Forest Service (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1962);
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Beattie, “Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840–1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservation,” Environment and History 9, no. 4 (2003): 379–92.
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Beattie, J. (2014). Science, Religion, and Drought: Rainmaking Experiments and Prayers in North Otago, 1889–1911. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_8
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