George Jobberns and the writing of New Zealand geography: Textbooks from the 1920s to 1940s

Research Articlenzg_1202 90..101

George Jobberns and the writing of New Zealandgeography: Textbooks from the 1920s to 1940s

Michael RocheSchool of People Environment and Planning, Massey University, Private Bag11-222 Palmerston North, New Zealand

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Blaut, Marsdan, and Ploszajska, the text bookswritten by George Jobberns from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s are scrutinised.This reveals that his first texts were influenced by environmental determinism but thathe adopted some of Sauer’s cultural landscapes approach once at the University ofCantabery.

Key words: Jobberns, textbooks, Geography, New Zealand.

I remember the lofty contempt with whichsome of us at Canterbury greeted GeorgeJobbern’s remark that his geography depart-ment existed as a service to school teachers.(Oliver 2002, p. 112)

The context for the above statement was thedisdain felt by some humanities staff at Canter-bury University College in the 1950s aboutwhat would later be termed ‘relevance’ in theuniversity. George Jobberns, the foundationProfessor of Geography in New Zealand, aformer school teacher, and Christchurch Teach-ers’ College lecturer had a different attitude.Indeed, academic geography in New Zealandwas nurtured in the teachers’ training collegesthough Jobberns regarded research as essentialto sustain the discipline at the university. Heconsidered that geographers could contributeto national debates about natural resourcemanagement and land use planning so thatthere was a degree of partiality in his declaredposition of serving school teachers even though90% of geography graduates were employed inteaching in the 1950s (Holland & Johnston1987, p. 7).

While a teachers’ college lecturer, Jobbernshad written several school geography text-books, so that his words reached out to a sec-ondary school pupils and teachers from the late1920s to the mid-1940s. Jobberns’ textbookswere published after Marshall’s Geography ofNew Zealand (1905) and before Cumberlandand Fox’s New Zealand, a Regional View (1958)though both are necessarily drawn into the fol-lowing discussion. Textbooks characteristicallycomprise a body of content, embody a range ofpedagogic principles and processes, and reflectexternal and sometimes imposed sets of socialprocesses (Marsden 2001). This essay examinesJobberns’ three secondary school textbooks:Whitcombe’s Regional Geography of NewZealand (1929), Whitcombe’s IntermediateGeography of New Zealand (seven editions1935 to 1946) and Whitcombe’s World RegionalGeography (six editions 1932 to 1945) all pub-lished by New Zealand firm Whitcombe andTombs and evidence of the type of geographythat Jobberns produced as part of his ‘service toschool teachers’.

Canterbury geography graduate and seniorschool inspector L.J. Hewland (1965, p. 167)

Note about author: Michael Roche is Professor of Geography in the School of People, Environment andPlanning at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.

E-mail: [email protected]

New Zealand Geographer (2011) 67, 90–101

© 2011 The AuthorNew Zealand Geographer © 2011 The New Zealand Geographical Society

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2011.01202.x

positioned Jobberns’ textbooks as ‘the linkbetween Marshall and the now slowly fading“tyranny of the region” ’ (perhaps an obliquereference to Cumberland). In his obituary forJobberns, for his part Cumberland (1975)pointed to the former’s contribution as ateacher, researcher and an advocate for geog-raphy specifically noting his role as a writer oftextbooks.Yet, in his presidential address to thefirst New Zealand geography conference in1955, Cumberland, using textbooks as a markerof progress, had spoken of the slow develop-ment of the discipline after Marshall’s Geogra-phy of New Zealand. Cumberland describedthis as

The period in which the false and misleadingtenets of environmentalism, given scientificrespectability by Ratzel, and transmitted byBritish and American writers of geographytextbooks, reached New Zealand, penetratedthe ‘red books’ that prescribed school sylla-buses, confused the academic issue androuted the simpler, more catholic, but sys-tematic ordering of the phenomena of areasestablished as geography by von Humboldt.(Cumberland 1956, p. 1)

Cumberland (1956, p. 1) regarded Marshallas ‘largely in the Humboldt tradition’, and inclaiming that ‘most practitioners adhere to achorological viewpoint’; he was linking himselfto the Hartshornian interpretation of geogra-phy as the study of areal differentiation.

Much later, Cumberland was forthcomingabout deficiencies in the pre-war secondaryschool geography syllabus,which he regarded asoverly weighted towards mathematical geogra-phy and physiography with some arcane politi-cal geography but ‘no regional geography, nogeography of location or of places’, all of whichwere then of more central concern to Anglo-American university geography (Cumberland2007, p. 64). Cumberland’s drawing of a geneal-ogy of geography from Humboldt directly toregional geography also served to disenfran-chise environmental determinism from anylegitimate place in geography’s past. In his inau-gural lecture at Auckland University College,Cumberland (1946) had strongly criticised envi-ronmental determinism. His silence about Job-berns’ textbooks in 1955 raises the question as to

whether he regarded them as having been tooclose to environmental determinism in theirgeographical outlook. Given that Jobberns hadfirst hired Cumberland, been his mentor andencouraged him to accept the appointment inAuckland, perhaps it was easier to leave somethings unsaid, or at least not said in print.

The production of secondary school geogra-phy textbooks was a task that consumed con-siderable intellectual effort on the part offounding sets of teacher’ college and universitygeographers including Jobberns and Cumber-land in New Zealand and elsewhere, but hasbeen understudied in comparison with otheraspects of disciplinary development. Textbooksmerit critical attention not so much in terms ofthe curriculum, but because of how they usesimplified geographical concepts unavoidablyexposing disciplinary conventions. In addition,these texts were widely used, sometimes formany years and thus come to be ‘actors in theirown right’ (Barnes 2002, p. 493) and a codifica-tion of what the geography was about to gen-erations of school pupils.

US geographer Jim Blaut (1993, p. 46) sawthe geography textbook as a ‘key social docu-ment’ that reinforced the ‘belief system of theopinion-forming elite of the culture’. HisMarxist view was echoed in the UK by Morganwho argued that the use of textbooks in theclassroom was a mechanism whereby the socialand economic status quo was maintained. Inpart, this was because geography textbookswere ‘commonly regarded as scientific, objec-tive and mechanical’, depicting the world ‘as itwas’ through what were actually a series ofhighly contested ‘geographical imaginations’about environment, nation and Britain’s placein the world (Morgan 2003, p. 450).

In a post-structural vein, British geographerTeresa Ploszajka subsequently emphasised thatbroadening of the bounds of geographicalknowledge beyond the scholarly text to includepopular reading material and photographymade it possible to critique ‘the traditional con-viction’ that developments in the elite aca-demic institutions ‘eventually disseminatedwith unproblematic inevitability to teachertraining colleges, and ultimately reachedschools’ in a simplified form (Proszajka 1999,p. 125). The ‘traditional conviction’ aboutdownward simplification of ideas is extended

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here to downward and outward by positioningNew Zealand at the imperial margin andthen critiquing this core-periphery diffusionistmodel of geographical knowledge.

The threefold purpose of this paper is toborrow from Blaut’s ‘key social document’ toexplore the exchanges between Jobberns andhis local Christchurch publisher, to extendPloszajka’s model of downwards diffusion andsimplification of geographical ideas in order toexamine Jobberns’ textbooks and finally todraw on Morgan’s ‘geographical imaginations’to suggest the intellectual framing of Jobberns’textbooks.

‘A vetted social statement’

Blaut (1993, p. 46) portrayed the publisher infairly stark terms as arbitrator of the content oftextbooks as ‘a vetted social statement’ forschool use in order to preserve the social order.The relationship further explored here is thatof between the author and the publisher. Job-berns’ books were published by Whitcombeand Tombs when the company was aggressivelycompeting to expand their share of the localtextbook market and his relationship with hisChristchurch publisher Bertie Whitcombe wasnot without tension. Both men in any caseresided near each other increasing the oppor-tunity for informal conversations about text-book needs.The issue of a fee versus royalty fortextbook writing persisted and later enteredinto departmental ‘lore’ at Canterbury Univer-sity College. For Jobberns, a geography text-book to maintain its authority needed to beboth accurate and factually up to date. In 1935,Whitcombe, in paying over the £75 fee for revi-sions to Whitcombe’s Regional Geography ofthe World observed, ‘although I recognize thevalue of your work I think is it just as well thatit should be clear to you that the fee we paid isout of all proportion’ (Whitcombe to Jobberns,18 February 1935, 83/841, Box 16). Yet to Job-berns’ surprise and frustration several monthslater, Whitcombe remonstrated to him over thethird edition that:

The total fee paid (£150) made the transac-tion commercially unprofitable. I do notgrudge the author his monetary rewards solong as they do not involve us in a loss, but so

far, financially, we would have been better ifwe had not attempted each of these two geo-graphical works. (Whitcombe to Jobberns 16May 1935, 83/841, Box 16)

In 1937 when Jobberns was appointedLecturer in Geography at £500 p.a. textbookfees and royalties represented a considerablesupplement to his annual income. (Registrar toJobberns, 30 November 1936, 234/35, Box 9).

There was also the matter of acknowledgedauthorship to resolve. Whitcombe’s RegionalGeography of the World was clearly labelled onthe fly leaf, though not on the bound cover as,‘by George Jobberns’, but some copies weresold in New Zealand without any such attribu-tion and he queried this decision. Whitcombereminded Jobberns that he had agreed to anAustralian edition being sold under the Whit-combe’s banner to satisfy a parochial market:

We told you at the time there was littlechance of introducing a new book of thiskind in Australia were a New Zealandauthor’s name on it, because local men thinkthey know. We have had a fairly good sale inAustralia therefore we claim it was right touse anonymity in the first place. (Whitcombeto Jobberns, 16 May 1935, 83/841, Box 16)

It transpired that when New Zealand stocksran low in some stores, these were replenishedwith the anonymous Australian editions. Whit-combe defended his actions by stating that ‘Nopublisher issues a new edition until the old one isright out.It is not in the author’s interest to leavethe market bare while it is in his interest for us toclear back stocks as soon as possible’ (Whit-combe to Jobberns, 16 May 1935, 83/841, Box10). In future, however, he agreed that theanonymous Australian stock would be replacedwith an authored version, but only ‘because it isunsatisfactory to have two editions as far as thepublisher in concerned,where it can be avoided’(Whitcombe to Jobberns, 16 May 1935, 83/841,Box 16).

Some sparring continued as subsequent edi-tions were produced. In 1937, for instance,Whitcombe reminded Jobberns that thecompany held the copyright on the work andthat royalties had already been paid to him inconsideration of ‘making necessary revisionsto keep the book up to date whenever a new

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edition is required’ (Whitcombe to Jobberns, 4February 1937, 83/841, Box 16). In reply, Job-berns accepted his obligation to keep the textup to date, but he was emphatic that should asyllabus change require a new book he wouldseek ‘a new agreement altogether’ (Jobbernsto Whitcombe, 8 February 1937, 83/841, Box16). To this, Whitcombe replied ‘I only hope itwill not be necessary to completely rewriteREGIONAL GEOGRAPHY (of the world)as the fees paid already are based on theexpectation of continuous reprints of thework’ (Whitcombe to Jobberns, 10 February1937, 83/841, Box 16). It is a testimony to Job-berns’ persuasiveness, patience and persis-tence that the book went to six editions by1946.

Jobberns’ view of geography placed apremium on scientific accuracy and he wasquick to defend himself when his jointlyauthored Whitcombe’s Intermediate Geographywas reviewed in the STA (Secondary Teachers’Association) Journal where it was praised forthoroughness, comprehensiveness and dia-grams but chastised for ‘occasional looseexpression of scientific facts’ (Anonymous1934, n.p.). Jobberns, who had an MA inGeology, had published several papers in scien-tific journals and as a part-time student hadcompleted a BSc in pure mathematics andphysics, was galled by the latter comment andthrew down the challenge that:

Your reviewer would help me and help thesound teaching of Geography if he wouldtabulate every loose statement or inaccuratestatement he can find and publish them inyour journal, and let us have them discussedopenly and fully. If he cannot do this, hiscomments may fairly be dismissed as frivo-lous. (Jobberns 1935a, p. 23)

He stressed that this was not a ‘personalmatter’, though the criticisms seem to havestruck a nerve, for he claimed that

All I want to ensure is that what we teachshall be sound sensible, and up-to-date.Thereis a good deal of nonsense taught in ourschools in the name of Geography, and Ihoped that the ‘Intermediate Geography’would provide a source of absolutely

reliable material to cover all reasonablerequirements of the Intermediate Syllabus.(Jobberns 1935a, p. 24)

The ‘nonsense’ to which he referred wasdoubtless the version of environmental deter-minism that had been incorporated into a newsyllabus in the late 1920s.

Jobberns’ relationship with Whitcombe wasnot wholly defensive. In 1938, he was in nego-tiations with Whitcombe and Tombs to write anew textbook provisionally entitled ‘PhysicalGeography’. The stumbling block was neitherfees nor royalties, but the existence of an oldercompetitor volume, Charles Cotton’s Geomor-phology of New Zealand. Cotton, Professor ofGeology at Victoria University, was one of theforemost interpreters of landscape evolution inthe style of W.M. Davis (Crozier & Priestley2011). His Geomorphology of New Zealandwas originally published in 1922 and revised in1926 and the company wanted assurances thatit would not to be reprinted. Whitcombe andTombs took the view that ‘It is inadvisable topester the Government Printer as that mayinduce the authorities to believe that thedemand for the book is still strong. We shallhave to find out by more indirect means. Mean-while the best plan is for you to carry on’(Shrimpton to Jobberns, 17 March 1938, 84/842,Box 17). Jobberns’ ‘Physical Geography’ neverappeared. In 1939, he took up a Carnegie Fel-lowship in the USA and then the war inter-vened. Ironically, when a third and enlargededition of Cotton’s book appeared in 1942, itwas published by Whitcombe and Tombs.

Several tensions in the relationship betweenJobberns and Whitcombe are revealed in theircorrespondence. The first of these pertained tothe status of an identifiable author; Jobbernshad published his geomorphological researchin scientific journals. He would have expectedto have been credited with authorship, whereasfor the company, the Whitcombe’s brand andthe firm’s track record as a school textbookpublisher had been the selling point of earliergeographical series such as Pacific Geographies(1915) and Whitcombe’s Human Geography(1928),1 and was further reinforced by the saleof an authorless version of Whitcombe’s’Regional Geography of the World in Australia.Whitcombe’s claims about losing money on



Whitcombe’s Intermediate Geography andWhitcombe’s Regional Geography of the Worldneed to be situated alongside the statement inWaite’s scholarly company history (2008, p. 78)that although profits reached their lowest levelsin the early 1930s, the company never lostmoney overall on its textbooks. Not recording aloss and maximising profits are of course differ-ent matters but Whitcombe sought to keep histextbooks in production for as long as possibleand with minimal revisions. For Jobberns accu-racy, up-to-date content and adjustments forsyllabus changes were the more important con-cerns, whereas for Whitcombe, the cost to thefirm in fees for revisions was always excessive.Jobberns was eventually offered royalty pay-ments; after the 1937 edition of Whitcombe’sWorld Regional Geography was published, thiswas 4d per copy sold after the first 1000 sold butin the long term, he believed that he had notbeen adequately compensated for his effort(Whitcombe to Jobberns, 4 Feb 1937 83/841Box 16). Murray McCaskill, a former studentand later colleague of Jobberns recounted how:

In the 1930s he had taken a lump sum inpayment from Bertie Whitcombe for thepublication rights of his school geographytextbook. He often told us how his friendBertie was a wily bird who had grown pros-perous on the royalties G.J. might have gothad he had more commercial sense. He toldus young lecturers many times ‘never take alump sum payment from a publisher – alwaysinsist on royalties’. (McCaskill to Roche 31January 1995)

Jobberns was an active agent, within the limi-tations imposed by the school geography sylla-bus, in the creation of his three textbooks and intheir revised editions through to 1946.

The downward simplificationof ideas

What Ploszajka referred to as the ‘traditionalconviction of downwards diffusion’ providesanother useful vantage point for examiningJobberns’ textbooks. During his 14-year careerat Christchurch Teachers’ College, Jobbernsauthored three geography textbooks. Until1937, when he was appointed as Lecturer in

Geography at Canterbury University College,there had only been some intermittent univer-sity courses in physical geography taught bygeologists and others in commercial geographyat the various university colleges in NewZealand. This represents a variation of the tra-ditional model of downwards diffusion. Thepoint of origin is the teachers’ training collegefrom which Jobberns subsequently took geog-raphy ‘upwards’ to the university where herefined his understanding of the nature andpurpose of geography through university teach-ing, at the same time as he was preparing neweditions of his textbooks for secondary schools.

These textbooks provided the receivedwisdom from which geography teachers taught,acknowledging that books alone were no sub-stitute for actual classroom instruction. Localauthors had published ‘capes and bays’ booksfor New Zealand schools in the 19th centuryand Whitcombe and Tombs had produced itsfirst geography textbooks in the 1880s. Theirnew ‘Southern Cross’ series included geogra-phy in 1895 and from 1905 incorporated a sub-series of ‘Imperial Geographies’ authored bythe prolific J.W. Gregory, then Professor ofGeology at the University of Melbourne, and a‘Pacific Geography’ series (1915–1927). In1905, Whitcombe and Tombs most impressivegeography textbook to that point, The Geogra-phy of New Zealand appeared, written by Uni-versity of Otago Professor of Geology, and aformer teacher, Patrick Marshall. It remainedin print into the early 1930s (Price 1992, p. 85).

New Zealand, as a distant part of the BritishEmpire, was a border zone for competingBritish and home-grown geography textbooks.The New Zealand Department of Educationlist of approved textbooks for 1928, forexample, included those written by establishedfigures in British Geography: Unstead and Tay-lor’s Essentials of World Geography, Herbert-son, Howarth and Taylor’s The World andAustralasia and Fairgrieve and Young’s HumanGeography for Secondary Schools. The list con-tained only two local editions: Geography ofNew Zealand and Australia by Shrimpton andHight and Geography of the Pacific by Coad(New Zealand Education Gazette, 1928, p. 46).Over time, more New Zealand authorsappeared on the list, but this ought not to beunderstood entirely in terms of some form of

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Dominion educational nationalism. It was alsocentred on the organisation and presentation ofaccurate knowledge about the world.

A reviewer of J. Murray’s textbook TheWorld simply said that ‘the sins of commissionin connection with the chapter on New Zealandare quite unpardonable’ (Reviews of Books,1927, p. 183) and this was not an isolated inci-dent.As Laws (1931, p. 79), in listing geographi-cal literature suitable for schools, observed ofthe Columbus Geographies by L. Brooks andR.J. Finch, ‘the most casual reader who knowsNew Zealand at all will be shocked, however, atthe number of inaccuracies’. If geography wasto be a credible school subject, its textbookshad to provide accurate and reliable knowledgeabout New Zealand that distantly authoredvolumes did not always provide. For local geog-raphy teachers, it must have been particularlygalling to have to make do in the classroomwith textbooks that contained obviously inac-curacies about New Zealand. The ‘authority’ ofthe student geography textbook as a surrogatefor the discipline was undermined wheneverthe teacher had to correct errors about the NewZealand section in British authored books.

It was not, however, just a matter of NewZealand authors being able to produce more‘accurate’ local accounts, they were also betterplaced to produce textbooks tailored to therequirements of the New Zealand syllabus and‘examination prescriptions’ (Aitken 1953,p. 165). A book written for the New Zealandsyllabus could also abbreviate the extensivetreatment of European geography found in theimported British books in favour of local mate-rial. In this situation, it is not difficult to imaginehow Jobberns, as a former teacher and teach-ers’ college lecturer, became involved in writingfor Whitcombe and Tombs.

Jobberns, in writing for the New Zealandcurriculum, did not have complete freedomin content or approach. Thus, Ben Garnier,a recently arrived Cambridge geographygraduate and head of geography at WellingtonTechnical College, before becoming Lecturer-in-Charge of Geography at the University ofOtago in 1946 could comment:

Dr Jobberns’ Regional Geography of theWorld, for example has been expresslywritten for the need of those preparing for

the University Entrance Examination andthe volume lays itself open to the criticismsof that examination voiced in various parts ofthis essay. Little analytical geography can befound in it. But it is hardly fair to censure theauthor for conforming to the requirements ofthe examination for which the book has beenwritten by producing a text in which humangeography consists mainly of a descriptiveaccount of a number of political units.(Garnier 1944, p. 107)

Garnier also attributed ‘the paucity of geo-graphical writings about the country and thevery limited numbers of books written toprovide a geographical outlook on world affairsfrom the New Zealand point of view’ to the‘lack of university geography’ (Garnier 1944,p. 107).Was there a tone of superiority in youngCambridge geography graduate Garnier’s com-ments? Perhaps. Fortunately however, withJobberns as the initial geography appointmentthen foundation professor, the Canterburydepartment at least as it expanded was able toavoid the conflict between expatriate and localstaff that often occurred when the ‘guidinghand was imported from Britain’ (Johnston2001, p. 487).

There is some evidence that Ploszajka’s ‘tra-ditional downwards diffusion’ became strongerin the post-war years once university geogra-phy departments were established at Aucklandand Otago in 1946. Jobberns remained active inrepositioning geography in the new post-warsyllabus by participating in influential teachers’refresher courses in 1947 and 1949 (Fox toRoche 10 October 1994), though his presenta-tion on Oamaru was in the mould of earlieraddresses about towns and their hinterlandsand perhaps more of a disciplinary flag-wavingexercise than a prescription for a new geogra-phy (Jobberns 1948). Cumberland (1950) nowtook the lead in preparing a series of post-primary school bulletins that introduced amore rigorous human regional geography.2

These bulletins were later consolidated andrevised as New Zealand, A Regional View(Cumberland & Fox 1958) and replaced Job-berns’ older Whitcombe’s World RegionalGeography. At the same time, the universitystaff was deeply involved in the UniversityEntrance examinations (e.g. Fox 1954). This



was not always without controversy as Job-berns noted:

It seems to me that Fox through his habit ofchiding the school teachers in his verboseexaminer’s reports and especially in anarticle he wrote on geography teaching forthe New Zealand Geographer, has gottenhimself offside with a lot of the school teach-ers’. (Jobberns to Kedgeley, 23 April 1956,85/843 Box 17)

Cumberland, unlike Jobberns and otherearly geography appointees such as Garnierand Lister at Otago, lacked any secondaryteaching experience so that New Zealand, ARegional View was not as accessible to schoolstudents as some desired. One of Cumberland’scontributing authors, Murray McCaskill, laterconfirmed that the post-primary school bulle-tins were ‘an attempt to exemplify Hart-shorne’s recommended methodology in his1939 magnum opus’ in the light of ‘only verygeneral guidelines’ from the Education Depart-ment. He also observed that they ‘must havebeen influential in attracting or repelling manyhundreds of students to or from geography’(McCaskill to Roche 23 September 1987). The‘ascendancy’ of university geographers in theproduction of school textbooks was shortlived. Although university initiatives continuedthroughout the 1960s, for instance, Cumber-land’s New Zealand topical geography seriespublished in 1967, as the decade unfoldedteachers replaced university staff as the pro-ducers of school textbooks, exemplified by JohnMacaulay’s (1966) Lands of Contrast.

‘Geographical imaginations’ atwork in Jobberns’ textbooks

Morgan (2003) examined ‘geographical imagi-nations’ in post-war UK geography textbooksand two interconnected ‘imaginations’ in Job-berns’ textbooks merit further discussion. Theyrelate to environmental determinism andempire.

A new primary school syllabus in 1927 intro-duced to New Zealand schools some environ-mental determinist ideas from UK and UStextbooks. These infused the secondary schoolsyllabus so that Jobberns’ textbook writing had

to satisfy the demands of curricula and end ofyear examinations, couched in such terms. Theinitial statements of his two major textbooksare illustrative. In Whitcombe’s Regional Geog-raphy of the World, he stated:

Man’s primary objects in life are to providehimself with food and clothes and shelter.These natural conditions are called his envi-ronment, and environment has had much todo with the making of the personal habitsand racial customs of peoples. Some such asEskimos of the frozen north, the nomadicshepherds of inner Asia, the dark-skinnedpeoples of the bountiful Tropics lead asimpler life very close to nature, just as theirancestors did.(Jobberns 1935b, p. 1)

And, in intermediate geography for morejunior pupils, he wrote that:

The best environment is that which makesman work, but at the same time enables himto lead a fairly comfortable life. The peoplesof the temperate zones dominate the earth.Their climate is invigorating; they are ener-getic; indeed their whole environment hasbeen sharpened by the problems whichNature has set them, their bodies have beenkept strong by the necessity for constanteffort, and they have outdistanced the otherpeoples of the world in rising above the lim-iting factors of environment. (Jobberns &Britton 1934, pp. 1–2)

These two statements paraphrase early sec-tions of Ellen Churchill Semple’s Influences ofGeographic Environment (1937) and displaywhat later critics came to regard as theclassic canons of environmental determinism.Marsden (2001, p. 139) observed in equivalentUK writing ‘in geography textbooks, theapproved pedagogic principle of starting withsimple peoples before moving to the morecomplex had the negative side effect of promot-ing stereotyping’ and in this regard Jobbernsconforms.

Reflecting on his career in 1958, Jobbernsoffered the following retrospective comments:

It seems to be fashionable to criticise thesyllabus in geography set out in the well-

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known ‘red book’ because it was ratherhighly coloured by the ‘doctrine of determin-ism’. I criticised it myself in my time in asuperior sort of way. The makers of the syl-labus seem to have been carried away by theideas of Ellen Churchill Semple and her fol-lowers. But I see now that Ellen Semple wasa far more competent geographer than manyof us moderns. Who of us, for example, nur-tured wholly in geography as such, couldhave written her account of the Mediterra-nean world of antiquity, coloured and all as itmay be by what we call determinism? To herit came out of a profound classical scholar-ship. (Jobberns 1959, pp. 4–5)

The nature of his criticisms are not clearalthough he most likely dissented from theview of one school inspector that geographyteaching should emphasise ‘those terrestrialand climatic factors that control and conditionhuman activity’ (Anonymous 1929, p. 200). In1958, Jobberns now gently mocked his formerearnestness about environmental determin-ism, but significantly, I would argue omitted allreference to his own textbooks. He thenexpressed what would have been unfashion-able support of aspects of Semple’s work. Job-berns favoured clear and direct writing and heparticularly admired the clarity of Semple’sprose (McCaskill to Roche 31 January 1995;Johnston 2001). Keighren (2006), revisitingSemple’s Influences of Geographic Environ-ment, noted that while she eschews ‘deter-minism’ for environmental ‘influences’, hervocabulary remained resolutely determinist.Although Jobberns would doubtless havestressed ‘influences’ over ‘determines’, inMarsden’s view this is also immaterial; on hiscriteria, Jobberns’ textbooks had some of thelanguage and reasoning of environmentaldeterminism. I would argue for a more com-plicated situation. Jobberns, in his RegionalGeography of New Zealand, used a mixedvocabulary where humans are active modifiersof environment, for instance, lands shapedby ‘extensive irrigation’, but simultaneously hewrote more deterministically of ‘use ofcountry controlled by nature’ (Jobberns 1929,p. 8). He did not regard the climatic conditionsas preventing human occupation in any part ofNew Zealand and this may have checked any

more expansive and enduring enthusiasm forenvironmental determinism. But, in coming tohuman geography from a background ingeology and physiography, Jobberns remainedsympathetic to the view that the human con-dition had been shaped through time by thephysical setting. Cumberland’s silence on thenature of Jobberns’ textbooks in 1955 is amute testimony to the strand of environmen-tal determinism therein.

What is more significant is not that Jobbernsheld these views in the early 1930s but how theyaltered over time. After joining CanterburyUniversity College and being freed from thedemands and constraints of teacher trainingand the secondary school syllabus, his intellec-tual position began to change, though he con-tinued to revise the school texts within theiroriginal framework. Shortly after his appoint-ment in 1937, he visited J. McDonald Holmes,then the only Professor of Geography in Aus-tralia, in Sydney where he also met the Austra-lian Frank Debenham who was then Professorof Geography at Cambridge. More importantin terms of intellectual development was hisvisit to the USA where he met many leadingUS geographers and attended the 1939 Confer-ence of the Association of American Geogra-phers. Particularly significant was his meetingwith Carl Sauer at Berkeley.

Jobberns found Sauer’s ‘morphology of land-scape’ ideas to his liking. Its influence becameclear in his own work, notably in public presen-tations such as the ‘The making of the SouthCanterbury Landscape’ (Jobberns 2010b).Sauer’s geography rejected environmentaldeterminism (Williams 1983). This point wasreinforced by McCaskill.

To the extent that we are influenced more bythose who we know and like we than bythose unknown to us, the broad humanisedview of geography promoted at Berkeley inthe 1930s came easily to Jobberns. He got onwell with Jan Broek, with John Kesseli, withLeighley. (McCaskill to Roche 31 January1995)

In his third year Asia course at Canterbury inthe 1940s, Jobberns used Owen Lattimore’sdeeply historical and field-based Inner AsianFrontiers as well as the more deterministic The



Pulse of Asia by Ellsworthy Huntingdon astexts to provide two differing viewpoints (W.B.Johnston, pers. comm., 2011). Arguably, thisreveals his evolving ideas about the ‘intricaterelationships between people and naturethrough time’ (Johnston 2001, p. 486).

Sauer’s ideas enabled Jobberns, alreadyinfluenced by the work of geomorphologistW.M. Davis, with Cumberland’s assistance, todevelop the content of geography degree sothat it moved away from the initial Universityof New Zealand geography prescriptionearlier formulated by Otago geologist Profes-sor Noel Benson who had been much influ-enced by the prolific Australian environmentaldeterminist Griffith Taylor (Jobberns 1959,p. 5).

As Professor of Geography, Jobberns, by1942, had shifted away from a narrowly deter-minist perspective to embrace Sauer’s culturallandscapes approach to geography. Was hisreluctance to discard Semple completely in1958 simply harkening back to the past on hispart, or was it a sign of his openness to a rangeof past, present and emerging approaches todeveloping a geographical understanding? Onearlier occasions, where there was supportingevidence, he had been prepared to adopt a non-conformist viewpoint and this was probably thecase in this instance as well.3

Whitcombe’s World Regional Geography, asits title suggested had a global coverage,though it did contain a chapter on ‘the BritishCommonwealth of Nations’ that presentedBritish imperialism in a more positive lightthan, paraphrasing him, the exploitativecontrol of Spain and the absolute control ofFrance. There is rather more informationabout empire in Whitcombe’s IntermediateGeography, which reflected the syllabus of thetimes. By the 1940s, after having travelledoverseas and read widely, Jobberns was dis-playing a more independent stance. In 1942, inhis response to the new draft UniversityEntrance syllabus, he remarked to a seniorEducation Department official that ‘I thoughtit a considerable improvement on its predeces-sor, except that I disliked concentration ofstudy on the British Empire’ (Jobberns to Car-radus, 22 September 1942 85/843 Box 17). Hisconception of geography was framed aroundunderstanding New Zealand.

Geography is not worth teaching unless itcan be used to explain the conditions of lifeand the setting of human life and quiteplainly it ought to begin for New Zealanderswith an intelligent account of their country.(Jobberns, Address to School Committees’Association, undated, 83/841, Box 16)

Here, expressed forcefully, was a plea forlocal knowledge, framed in a regional perspec-tive and hence able to be extended to encom-pass the global as Jobberns had done inWhitcombe’s World Regional Geography.Perhaps development of his internationalistgeography, freed from a British Empire frame-work, had been accelerated by his experiencesin the USA. In mid-1941, when addressing theNew Zealand Education Institute, he pro-claimed that ‘an informed person should knowsomething about the whole world and itspeoples. I should think it well to regard geog-raphy as being international rather thannational in outlook’ (Geography and theSchools NZEI Address 18 July 1941, 85/843,Box 17). The phrase an ‘intelligent account oftheir country’ hides his ‘eye for country’ forJobberns also enjoyed the landscape as scenery.A former staff appointee and later prominentfigure in North American geography, AndrewHill Clark, rated Jobberns most highly as a fieldobserver and an interpreter of landscapes in hispresidential address to the Association ofAmerican Geographers conference in 1962(Clark 1962, p. 237).

Without being anti-British, Jobberns was onoccasions mildly subversive about empire, aswhen he was approached to address theChristchurch Branch of the Society for Impe-rial Culture. Seemingly influenced by Sauer andprefiguring themes developed more fully byClark (1949) and Cumberland (1941) heoffered to

Discuss some of the chief ways which theintroduction of the European culture to thenew country of New Zealand is expressed inthe change of surface appearance of thecountry. We have introduced a new flora andfauna and just about exterminated the indig-enous fauna. In the settling and use of land,we have destroyed a lot of it too, and erectedall sorts of structures on its surface. To

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analyse and present something of a picture ofthis will be the subject of my talk. (Jobbernsto Fitzgerald, 6 June 1939, 84/842, Box 17)

Yet if Jobberns had a blind spot, it relates toMaori. They are absent from his RegionalGeography of New Zealand, which was essen-tially ‘presentist’ and rested on the idea of‘natural regions’ to produce a division of thecountry that was not related to artificialpolitical/administrative boundaries but at thesame time was without any real sense ofhistorico-geographical change over time. Thisapproach is consistent with Herbertson’s(1906) ‘natural regions’. In this respect, thebook contrasted strongly with Marshall’s Geog-raphy of New Zealand. Marshall, under theolder Humboldt tradition included a chapteron Maori (if only one of 15) by ethnologistAugustus Hamilton. Cumberland and Fox’sNew Zealand, A Regional View (1958), whichincluded reference to Maori as a component ofthe population of the regions of New Zealand,albeit in what Stokes (1987) would describe as a‘geography of Maoris’ framed entirely aroundWestern geographical conventions as opposedto a ‘Maori geography’.

In the USA, when World War II wasdeclared, Jobberns recounted later how in late1939 he had struggled to explain himself to hisAmerican hosts:

I lunched daily at the Columbia UniversityFaculty Club. . . . The discussion got aroundto the war . . . Then came the question,‘What will you be fighting for?’ to which theonly reply I could find at such shortnotice was: ‘The British Empire. ’ At this myAmerican friends were rather hilariouslyamused – apparently at the idea of my beingso naive as to think of nothing better to fightfor than the British Empire. . . . I thoughtlittle about it at all, just accepting it as some-thing of a general political fabric of which Iwas part. (Jobberns 2010a, p. 40)

By 1944, he foresaw the end of the Britishcolonial empire in the post-war world, even ifhe expressed that opinion in somewhat conser-vative terms (Jobberns 2010a). McCaskilloffered the following evaluation of Jobberns’position regarding empire and nation:

I don’t think Jobberns would have belongedto the royalist club, had there been one, buthe was not antipathetic to Britain. He simplyliked many Americans, admired their easyinformality and was mightily impressed attheir production capacity. Like many NewZealanders & most Australians the fall ofSingapore & the Japanese attack on Pearlharbour was a sharp awakening to geopoliti-cal realities and awareness of a ‘new PacificOrder’ . . . He would probably not havedescribed himself as a New Zealand nation-alist then but in retrospect he might be seenas one – certainly as one who loved his variedcountrysides, wanted everyone else to enjoyand understand them and wanted good man-agement of their resources. (McCaskill toRoche 31 January 1995)

Conclusion

The structuralist overtone of Blaut and Mor-gan’s work that would portray both Jobbernsand Whitcombe as establishment figures divertsattention from the complexity and subtlety oftheir professional relationship. Jobberns’ text-books affirm Ploszajka’s contention about ques-tioning the traditional downward diffusionistmodel of geographical knowledge. In NewZealand,the flow is from teachers’ college to theuniversity and there is a subsidiary contestwhereby local textbooks gain parity with andeventually largely displace British texts. In thepost-war era, however, as the universitiesexpanded, so the downward diffusionist modelreasserted itself. By the 1960s, however, second-ary school textbook production was largely inthe hands of local teachers.

In terms of geographical imaginations, thedeterminist element in Jobberns’ textbooks isnot surprising. More noteworthy is his capacityto rapidly find a new intellectual basis for hisgeography in Sauer’s writings. Even so, this didnot extend to his textbooks and there is someambiguity in his 1958 remarks. With respect tothe empire, he emerged as neither dogged sup-porter nor opponent. Nevertheless, he favouredan international geography that grew fromknowledge of local environments, thoughagain, his New Zealand was in one respectquite partial compared to earlier and successortexts in that he is silent about Maori.



Jobberns’ textbooks form part of the in-tellectual development of the discipline inNew Zealand. They are particularly revealingthrough their engagement with environmentaldeterminism and regional geography of thewider disciplinary attitudes and conventions inthat their school readership required includinga simplification of language and a starker set ofkey ideas and content. They were more readilyavailable than articles in then scarce academicjournals. From the late 1920s to the mid-1940s,Jobberns’ books carried the weight of authorityin schools and this important pre-universityand ex-university aspect of his career has hith-erto been relatively overlooked compared tohis role as a founding figure of university geog-raphy in New Zealand.

Acknowledgements

Emeritus Professor Barry Johnston providedsome important details and Mr John Macaulaygave generously of his time in addition toloaning some scarce materials. The usual dis-claimer applies.

Endnotes

1 Jobberns’ 1935b application for the Princi-pal’s position at Wellington Teachers’College suggests that he had written one ortwo of Whitcombe’s Human Geographyseries for Standard II to Form I and forwhom no authors are identified (Applica-tion for Principal’s position WellingtonTeachers’ College, January 1936 232/35, Box9). This helps situate his later keenness foracknowledged authorship on his othertextbooks.

2 In his Whitcombe’s Regional Geography ofNew Zealand, Jobberns acknowledged thedifficulty involved in identifying regions and‘fixing their boundaries’ (Jobberns 1929,preface). Although his other textbooks wereorganised around a regional framework, hedid not apply it with the same degree ofrigour as Cumberland.

3 His judgement was not infallible; the threelater school texts that he jointly authoredwith James Ross for junior high school

classes, e.g. The Pacific World (1960) were bythis time out of step syllabus and withteacher aspirations.

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Documents

George Jobberns and the writing of New Zealand geography: Textbooks from the 1920s to 1940s