Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: Indian-New Zealand Biological and Landscape Connections, 1830s–1890s

Abstract

Elizabeth Muter (1832–1914) began working on her two-volume Travels and Adventures of an Officer’s Wife in India, China, and New Zealand, while sailing from China to England. She continued drafting the manuscript in New Zealand and completed it ‘on the way from Dunedin to Calcutta’, from where she sent it to be published in London.1 The writing and publication of Travels and Adventures, just as much as its content, speaks volumes to the transitory lives of women like Muter and men like her husband (Figure 10.1) — Colonel Dunbar Douglas Muter (1824–1909) — in the British Empire. The work evinces also the importance of print culture and letter-writing as means of cultivating and giving shape to the imagined space of the British Empire.