Real New Zealanders like mowing their lawns. I certainly do. Until I met my partner I thought everyone did. But she and I have strong views on mowing lawns – and they pull in opposite directions.

I’m from the conventional keep-the-damn-things-under-control school of thought, while she’d rather the grass was left to grow, if not to infinity and beyond, then at least to knee height.

Lawns and I go way back. Mostly, I associate them with Dad. Each Saturday he’d don his lawnmowing gear (stubbies, a daggy old tee-shirt of indeterminate colour, towelling hat) and spend an hour or so running the Masport up and down.

There was a narrow strip between our house and the neighbour’s fence, and when he got to that part he would drop the blade a notch and carve out a passable cricket strip.

As soon as he was done I’d be in, armed with a pile of lemons, and remove an entire World XI of the top international batsmen of the time – Viv Richards, Greg Chappell, David Gower – for next to nothing. Each one of them bowled middle stump or, if I was having an off day, caught behind. None of them ever hit my lemons for six – scratchy singles were all I ever conceded.

But eventually the lemons would disintegrate, or I’d have run through the World XI, the last of them (Imran Khan) out retired hurt, trying to hook a short lemon which got big on him, and I’d wander off looking for something to eat.

After Dad died, I took his shorts, shoes and the Masport down to the bach at Te Whārangi Foxton Beach. The mower was the first to give up the ghost. The shorts went next, more hole than short by the time I reluctantly put them away in a bottom drawer. The shoes were the last to go.

I found that quite hard. Dad had worn them for years, and they were the last of his things in my possession that had been in direct contact with his skin. I should probably biff them, but for now they’re sitting quietly alongside the new Chinese mower out in the shed.

Lately, the relationship between the grass and me has begun to shift. Somehow, the lawn has become caught up in my thinking about the many ways in which the big, nation-building stories of colonisation are entwined with the small ones found in the histories of settler-colonial families like mine.

It seems an odd thing to have happened, but there is no getting away from it: the more I look at it through a settler’s eyes, the more clearly I see Maurice Shadbolt’s “colonist grass”.

The lawn – the “telltale patchwork quilt of European settlement” – arrived in this country with the British. The ones established over here were intended to mimic and to elicit an emotional connection with the ones left behind. In early Pōneke Wellington, an observer noted, “many of the principal........

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