Ontology recapitulates Orogeny

To help our overseas readers better understand the intricacies and subtleties of the New Zealand psyche, Riddled brings you a series of posts devoted to our pivotal cultural figures. Last week, you recall, it was the turn of Ron Sharp, inventor of the herringbone milking-shed. This week we turn our attention to Charles Andrew Cotton, pioneer of geomorphology.

After years of rejection by the NZ scientific community for his disturbingly radical ideas about peneplains, Cotton considered throwing it all in and pursuing a career in art instead. However, his drawing "River Piracy" (right) was rejected by the Wellington Salon of 1911, while his "Father and Mother" (below) from the same period was deemed to be obscene and his name was held up to obloquy in church pulpits as a corruptor of the morality of the young.


During a cycling holiday across Europe in 1913, Cotton ran into the poet Rilke and the two of them ended up playing drinking games in an Italian village. Cotton helped his friend overcome his writer's block by convincing him to include geomeorphological imagery in the Third Duino Elegy.

In obscurity, wracked by self-doubt, Cotton wrestled with the first draft of his magisterial work Geomorphology of New Zealand, as depicted here in a famous painting by Colin McCahon. A copy hangs in every NZ classroom and the painting also appears on the 5 Milk-bottle-tops Stamp.

However, his vindication was coming. New Zealand geology had been without a leader since Alexander McKay died in 1917, leaving no heir. Academic infighting gripped the field. Then it became known that McKay's pick-ax was embedded in the wall of the Hairy Mary Creek in Otago. Passing that way in 1925, Cotton pulled it loose, and in accordance with a prophesy he was immediately elected the rightful ruler of the NZ geological fraternity.

In the final months of his life, Cotton fell under the delusion that he was in fact a Miocene-era volcanic massif and that the doctors in attendance were glaciers waiting for him to die so that they could dissect his form and create Akaroa Harbour.

After his death, his ashes were baked into bricks and used to create a scale model of the Seaward Kaikoura Range.