In the late nineteenth century, the floodplains of the Waikato and Waipā rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand became battlefields of the nose. Pākehā settlers (New Zealanders of European descent) wrinkled their noses at the musky reek of the wetlands – the rotten-egg smell of sulphurous mud and decaying vegetation – and feared that these foul miasmas portended disease and death. At the same time, they sniffed the sharp, medicinal fragrance of freshly imported eucalyptus leaves and found hope. In their quest to tame an unfamiliar land, Pākehā colonists literally followed their noses, using olfactory cues to identify “unhealthy” spaces and justify drastic interventions in the environment. The result was a campaign of drainage, displacement, and ecological transformation along the great rivers of Waikato – all carried out under the banner of health, civilization, and the “sweet smell” of progress.
When Pākehā (European) settlers moved into the Waikato basin after the British military invasion of the Waikato and the subsequent war (1863-64), it was a landscape of extensive rivers and wetlands. To Māori iwi (tribes) like Waikato-Tainui and Ngāti Maniapoto, these swamps and floodplains had long been valuable mahinga kai (food-gathering places) rich in eels, fish, flax, and birdlife. But to the newcomers’ noses, the Waikato and Waipā delta smelled like a wasteland. Settlers complained of a ‘dreadful stench’ rising from the waterlogged ground and rotting plants.To settlers, a ‘bad smell’ was more than unpleasant — under the popular miasma theory (disease from rotting vapours), bad smells meant bad air, and bad air meant sickness.
Settler writings from this period reveal how smell and health became intertwined in the colonial mind. Settlers essentially equated ‘odorous’ with ‘odious’ — whatever smelled bad was bad. The rank odour of mud and microbes was itself treated as a form of contamination. A typhoid outbreak in the Waikato in 1876 fuelled calls in the local press to drain the bogs. Across the colony, wetlands were increasingly seen as nuisances to be eliminated. The government even passed legislation (e.g. the Napier Swamp Nuisance Act 1875) empowering local authorities to drain stagnant swamps deemed hazardous to public health. Pākehā in the Waikato spoke of certain districts as if they were cursed by their scent. Low-lying, damp areas were described as “unhealthy” and “uninhabitable” until nature’s smells could be brought under control. This mindset set the stage for a vigorous sanitary offensive. By the late 1870s, drainage schemes were underway to exorcise this “demon of stench”, replacing the wetlands’ “musky odours” with the clean smell of dry earth and pasture. Physical engineering was only part of the plan; equally important was a scented solution from overseas: the eucalyptus tree.
Around the world in the late 19th century, eucalyptus gained fame as a “fever tree” believed to purify malarial air. Scientists and doctors claimed that groves of eucalyptus acted as living disinfectants. In 1874, one medical commentator claimed a large grove of eucalyptus could fill the air with a camphoraceous odour that ‘neutralise[s] marshy miasmas’ and improve a district’s health. Eucalypts were also prized for their thirst – their ‘enormous suction power’ could help dry out swamps almost as well as any drain. By the 1870s, acclimatisation societies were sending eucalyptus seeds across the world—from Australia to New Zealand, Algeria to California—planting tens of thousands in malarial marshes in hopes that their aroma would counteract the fetid wetland air.
Aotearoa New Zealand was no exception to this trend. By the mid-1870s, Waikato nurseries and landowners were planting blue gums everywhere: lining rural roads, ringing homesteads, and dotting low-lying farms. One Waikato Times writer in 1876 praised eucalyptus as a “vital preventive health tool” for a region defined by swampy land and “dangerous miasmas”. Without gum trees to cleanse the air, he warned, the Waikato’s geography would keep its inhabitants unhealthy.
Contemporary accounts reveal a near reverence for the smell of eucalyptus. Its strong menthol-like scent was associated with medicinal cleanliness – the polar opposite of the swamp’s decay. By lining a swamp’s edge with gum trees or surrounding a house with aromatic plantings, colonists felt they were quite literally building a wall of fragrance against disease. Contemporary advice columns even urged those in marshy districts to surround their homes with ‘the most odorous’ plants — sunflowers, lavender, heliotrope, and of course eucalyptus — to generate health-giving ozone and sweeten the air. Thus, colonial sanitary practice merged with gardening and acclimatisation: to plant a tree or a flower was to plant a “weapon” against stench and sickness. Gum trees soon became ubiquitous in the landscape, emblematic of settler optimism that science could transform swamp into a pastural paradise.
Yet, even as they battled nature’s odours, settlers turned to another target: the smells of Māori life. Settlers recoiled at the smells of Māori foods and living spaces, interpreting unfamiliar or strong odours as signs of primitiveness, poor hygiene, or even moral failing. Indigenous practices that had sustained Māori for centuries—like preserving foods by fermentation, or living communally in wharepuni (traditional houses)—were suddenly condemned as unhealthy once viewed through European noses. The discourse of the day was rife with olfactory disgust directed at Māori, revealing how smell was weaponized as a tool of racial bias.
In an official 1885 government report, a colonial health officer in Rotorua listed the “putrid potatoes (kotero), putrid corn (kaangawai), and stinking shark” that local Māori supposedly relished. To his mind, this “Native liking” for “half-putrid” food was not only distasteful – it was dangerous. He believed such diets led directly to ill health. In the same breath, he condemned Māori for their living conditions: crowding into poorly ventilated whares, sleeping together in the warmth of a single room with every window shut. In his view, these habits created a “close fetid air” and “hot-beds of disease”, sapping the vitality of the people. He went so far as to declare this communal living custom an “evil” and “one of the chief factors in the decadence of the race”.
Victorian racial theorists seized on such ideas to suggest that non-Europeans were somehow inured to foul odours, or even perversely fond of them, whereas civilized Europeans were more refined and sensitive. In New Zealand, this logic provided a convenient explanation (or excuse) for Māori depopulation: it wasn’t colonization or land loss killing Māori (so the argument went), but their own unsanitary, smelly habits. Dr. Alfred Newman, a settler physician and politician, infamously argued in 1881 that Māori were “dying out” due to their refusal to adopt proper hygiene and their “evil habit of pitching their dwellings on low-lying swampy ground,” which caused deaths from rheumatism and fevers. In short, settlers argued Māori “lived in stink and therefore died in droves” – a clear case of blaming the victim under the guise of science.
The Pākehā crusade against bad smells had very tangible outcomes. As settlers drained the bogs and planted eucalyptus trees, they were not just altering the landscape – they were also consolidating their hold on Māori land and society. The late 19th-century push to “improve” the Waikato environment cannot be separated from the settler-colonial project of dispossession. After invading the Māori King’s Waikato territory in the 1863–64 war, the colonial government confiscated over a million acres of Māori land — including the swampy river plains. Now, under the guise of public health and progress, settlers set about transforming these “waste” lands into productive farmland.
The language of the time made drainage a heroic masculine enterprise. Newspapers even cast swamp-draining as a heroic enterprise. In 1887 one writer claimed only a special breed of man — a “swamper” — could tame the Waikato bogs. Such a man, he wrote, had to brave daily wading through “stinking water” and cutting through “masses of dripping peat”, enduring noxious gases that would fell ordinary folk. By day’s end the swamper was exhausted and black with mud; over years of such labour, many were wracked by rheumatism and sciatica supposedly tied to their years of exposure to miasmas. These swamp-clearers essentially sacrificed their own health for the supposed betterment of the district, a martyrdom that settlers framed as a noble and necessary struggle. Casting the drainers as selfless martyrs conveniently painted the whole colonial environmental transformation as an act for the “greater good”.
Absent from these triumphant stories was the fate of Māori in the newly ‘sanitized’ land. As drains cut through flax and raupō (bulrush) groves and as gum trees cast new shade on once-open wetlands, Māori communities often found their old food-gathering grounds irreversibly changed. Traditional food sources suffered as freshwater eel (tuna) wetlands dried up and wildfowl vanished; even the pā kura (red ochre mud used in sacred paint) hardened and became unusable. Māori who had lived alongside the wetlands (often derided as ‘unhealthy’ settlements by Europeans) now had to move or adapt as swamps turned to pasture. Some communities were actively relocated under ‘public health’ pretexts or pressured to abandon villages for drier, ‘healthier’ sites; elsewhere, the environmental changes simply made traditional living impossible. Displacement did not always happen at gunpoint; sometimes it seeped in, as quiet as the water draining from a bog. By the turn of the century, large stretches of the Waikato and Waipā floodplains had been claimed, surveyed, drained, and fenced – their once-overpowering smells now subdued to the mild odour of cattle dung and grass.
Despite settler self-congratulation, Māori did not passively accept these changes — they petitioned the government, fought court battles, and adapted in strategic ways to preserve their communities. Yet settler narratives insisted that Māori were being ‘saved’ from their own malodorous environment by the “benevolent” interventions of colonial science and enterprise. Settlers took the end of the swamp’s stench as proof that New Zealand was progressing—toward modern sanitation, economic productivity, and even racial ‘uplift’ (a common euphemism for replacing Māori with Pākehā/Europeans). In sum, the olfactory battle was largely won by the colonisers – and the victory smelled like eucalyptus.