Visual narratives of environmental change: collective memory and identity at New Zealand heritage sites.

This article examines historical photographs displayed at public heritage sites managed by New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) to analyze how they construct national identity through visual storytelling of 19th-century environmental change. It finds that these images portray European settlers as heroic figures who transformed a “howling wilderness” into productive land, framing nature as an adversary and resource to be exploited, thus reinforcing an instrumentalist view that separates humans from the natural environment. Using a socio-semiotic framework, the article highlights the importance of multimodal analysis of photographs in their broader discursive and cultural contexts and argues that such visual narratives contribute to collective memory that continues to influence contemporary environmental attitudes. The study also acknowledges that this settler-focused narrative marginalizes Māori perspectives, who often view environmental change as a story of decline and loss.