“The landscape is a refracted autobiography.” (Iain Sinclair) 

Stephen Stratford described an early manuscript of Innerland as “like being stuck in a confined space with Gordon McLaughlan”. 

The late editor nailed Matt Vance’s latest book with that sentiment. But where McLauchlan dissected the moribund fabric of New Zealand society, Vance has directed his scalpel towards something even more difficult to define. 

The subtitle for Innerland is ‘A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand”.  

Within its pages the author uses a persuasive alloy of essay and memoir to examine the soft landscapes of the imagination. Because the landscape surrounding us isn’t simply physical - to a large degree it’s a “fabrication of our minds”. 

“The whole premise of the book is that for a large part of human experience, landscape is inside the head,” Vance reflects. “I’m sure there is a bit that’s outside, but a lot of it’s happening in our head, so you can’t have a universal theory of landscape - there’s no such thing.” 

This is perhaps not the easiest concept to wrap one's head around. Even in the prologue of Innerland the author describes the confusion and fear he’s often been met with by first year Landscape Architecture students while lecturing at Lincoln University. 

The experience sounds a little painful for both parties. But in the book, Vance can stretch out and illustrate the abstract margins of soft landscape through personal experience. 

Those observations and humorous encounters have been lovingly composted, ultimately producing a harvest that’s rich in deeper meaning.  

“Art is not a democracy,” Vance emphasises. “It is a fascist state, and you have to have a focus. You can collide two things that seem to be very unlikely in a story and, boom, you’re off somewhere else. You get a hybrid. Sometimes you don’t, but when you do it’s magic.” 

The desired result is something that he hopes for when reading a book or watching a movie - to come away from the experience seeing the world differently. The hope for Innerland is that readers will begin to look at the everyday landscape through a new lens. 

Many of the ideas unpicked in the book were arrived at through Vance’s teaching, and were then “backfilled with experience”. 

Those experiences had been gathered indiscriminately from everyday life over years, including the time he spent living in Dunedin. Unsurprisingly walking has been fertile ground - Vance walks almost daily, “so that I can think”.  

He’s also an avid yachtsman, an activity that offers a different perspective on landscape. As the author says, there’s water all through Innerland. 

Antarctica looms large, as Vance has spent a significant amount of time on the ice. He’s worked as an expedition guide there, and his previous book Oceans Notorious was about the Southern Ocean.  

“When it comes to landscape, Antarctica is like the ultimate fullstop,” he says. “The rules of landscape just don’t apply there. There’s no scale, there’s no time, there’s no smell. It’s quite surreal, and what it does to your mind is very strange.” 

Matt Vance spends a lot of time at sea. 

Like that continent, the subject matter of Innerland may seem vast and impenetrable. The reality is quite different, as Vance frames the journey in humour, and humanity. 

As he explains, a lot of that has to do with the absurdity of the human species. 

“That absurdity is everywhere, in every experience,” he says. “So to try to filter it out, I think you miss the humanity in things. And humour and humanity are completely and utterly gripped together. Humour, to me, shows a human touch.” 

• Innerland: A journey through the everyday landscape of New Zealand by Matt Vance is published by Potton & Burton. 

Innerland author Matt Vance.