New Zealand

New Zealand The two main islands of New Zealand are larger than the United Kingdom. South Island is rather bigger than North Island, but contains only a quarter of the people. In the mid‐1990s the population was 3 ½ million, most of them living in towns. The capital, Wellington, with 329,000 people, is in North Island: Auckland has nearly 1 million people, and Christchurch 318,000. Mount Cook in the Southern Alps rises to more than 12,000 feet and in North Island there are geysers and hot springs. The economy is still largely based on cattle‐ and sheep‐rearing,but NewZealand wine flourishes, industry increases, and tourism expanded rapidly after the spread of fast air travel.

The first inhabitants were Polynesian people, ancestors of the Maoris, who settled by the 8th cent. Abel Tasman, the Dutch explorer, sighted the west coast of South Island in 1642, but did not land. The Dutch named the country New Zealand but showed no further interest in it.

Not until 1769 was Tasman's initiative followed up when, on his first voyage, Cook circumnavigated both islands. He revisited the country on his second and third voyages, reporting that it would sustain an industrious people. In 1814 a small Christian mission was established, with little success at first. For 50 years, the situation was close to a state of nature. Increased contact brought diseases to which the Maoris were extremely vulnerable and the acquisition of guns allowed them to try to exterminate each other. The native population declined sharply. By 1838 there were some 2,000 Europeans living in New Zealand—the English, in Darwin's opinion, ‘the very refuse of society’. A New Zealand Association in 1837, supported by Lord Durham and E. G. Wakefield, was founded to encourage mass emigration. In 1839 an unenthusiastic British government sent Captain William Hobson to propose annexation to the Maoris to protect them from indiscriminate expropriation and in 1840 the treaty of Waitangi was signed, ceding sovereignty to the British in exchange for promises of security.

The economic development of New Zealand was boosted by the discovery of gold in South Island in the 1850s, and, more enduringly, by the development of refrigeration in the 1880s. Constitutionally it progressed at remarkable speed, despite the protracted Maori wars which continued until 1872. A federal constitution was granted in 1852, and was followed in 1856 by full representative government. The capital was moved from Auckland to Wellington in 1867. In 1907 it became a self‐governing dominion.

The population of New Zealand rose undramatically at first. The Maori population in 1896 was put as low as 42,000 and extinction seemed a possibility. By the 1990s it was more than 400,000. The total population of New Zealand in 1907 was still less than 1 million, grew slowly in the 1920s, partly as a result of high wartime casualties, and had risen to 1.7 million by 1945. After that it rose quickly, reaching more than 3 million by 1975. As in South Africa, sport has been a bond of the emerging nation—the All Blacks' attempts to terrify their opponents with the Maori haka, and the prominence of Maoris in rugby teams.