What underlies New Zealand's relationship with our landscape?

Well, when the first settlers came here not too long ago, it was a dark primordial jungle, with tree ferns and giant kauri trees and the mighty totara and huge canopies that covered the whole country.

Our history is Gondwanaland, it is Huia's and Moas and a people who had been here a thousand years before us. It has never really been our land. I love the paintings of Bill Hammond. He paints these primordial landscapes, populated with lithe bird-men with long nectar drinking beaks like Huia's. They cross the landscape and step over a grown-over highway, and belong in a way we don't.

For Hammond, painting these was like being in "'paradise lost', an archetypal 'birdland', the way it used to be before the European colonisers or even the indigenous Maori got here. "You feel like a time-traveller, as if you have just stumbled upon it... primeval forests, ratas like Walt Disney would make. [a picture of a rata below, one of the most beautiful native trees] It's a beautiful place, but it's also full of ghosts, shipwrecks, death "

Violence is a big part of it, but so are the birds, because they are really the only native fauna, except for snails and bats. We feel very close to our birds, even if they also seem slightly alien to us.

It was completely unlike what the Settlers had known when they arrived. They cut down trees and grew nice ordered English country gardens... but always on the edge of this civilisation, lay the bush. Dark and forbidding and savage. And in the middle there were always mountains, difficult to cross, like an impenetrable wall up the length of the South Island. And in the North, just a thin spur, out in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by rocks, covered with trees. Impossible to traverse, so you were stuck, in the rain, in the middle of all these trees and mud.

The anthropomorphous bird-people in Hammond's paintings look as if they're capable of flight, with their long, almost arm-like wings... but are never actually flying. I think it captures part of this individual-landscape anxiety that seems to be lodged in the NZ psyche. At times in our history we have felt very trapped and very vulnerable, and I think this is tied to the landscape.

One of my favourite bits in The Piano is when Holly Hunter and Sam Neill get their wedding photos taken. They are in the Northland bush, isolated, in the middle of nowhere, nothing but the beach and trees. And they stand in the rain under umbrellas in front of a backdrop of London and have their pictures taken. They wanted to pretend that they weren't even there.

So on top of everything else... even though NZ is about the same size as Britain, it's not like the Continent is right next door. There's no news, no new fashions, nothing but whales and sea birds and little inhospitable islands and Australia. Not that there's anything wrong with Australia, but they wern't much further than we were.

Andrew Nichol, who wrote the Truman Show, said that it was in part inspired by living in New Zealand, a country so small that everyone knows everyone else and what they're doing, and so isolated and surrounded by water that you feel like you can never get anywhere else.

In our minds, despite current technology and travel and globalisation and all that, we will always be a colonial outpost. A small green spine sticking out of all that water, a blip on the horizon, and the longer you stay and stare out at the ocean, the smaller you feel.

Everything was backing away.

Of course, we're more than that now... we have our own culture and some very positive relationships with the landscape. But underlying it all, I think, is this mistrust of where we are, embedded in our psyche.

But it is beautiful. I love this strange alien primeval world that sits just underneath everything I know. As Umberto Eco put it...

"To live in the Antipodes, then, means reconstructing instinct, knowing how to make a marvel nature and nature a marvel, to learn how unstable the world is, which in one half follows certain laws, and in the other half the opposite of those laws."