Reading the landscape #1

I've often wondered just how much of Lyttelton Harbour was covered in bush, pre-settlement. It's relatively easy to visualise the bush cover in Akaroa harbour or in the eastern peninsula bays. There are still the dead trunks of a ghost forest to remind us. But Lyttelton, with its rock-hard clay pans? Was there scrubby bush to the water? Larger, more luxuriant cover in the damp gullies? What did it look like? sound like, smell like? Is the planting of Otamahua/Quail Island a planting or a re-planting? I would like to know what a landscape we regard as 'iconic' looked like before human presence.