New Zealand was the last major landmass to be settled by humans. The Maori arrived about 1300AD, and the European settlement properly began in the 1840s when nearly 10,000 settlers arrived under company schemes from Britain.
Settlement was carried out efficiently, and Canterbury provides a case study in settler capitalism;...unlike Auckland, which began from Sydney, the southern settlement of Christchurch was to be a transplanted England. It was to have a college and a cathedral. Like other commercial cities in New Zealand, Christchurch had plenty of flat ground and a separate port. The scheme succeeded because of its colonists, geography, timing and planning.
Things were shifting around quite a bit in the early days (from 1840 to 1900) due to constant settler arrivals, Maori irritation at land grabs, an imbalance of male to females (which always seem to bring its own problems) and the discovery of gold. The colony was a minimally organised society between 1850 and 1880, primarily because of the lightning expansion of the frontier. Gold seekers came from California to Victoria in Australia and then to New Zealand, brought boom times, towns and gold fever. I will digress here to tell a little story:
A friend of mine married a large, very blond man named Owen and gave birth to four daughters, also very blonde. Owen has been dead for twenty years or more now, but my friend often used to tell me how his great-grandmother was the half-caste daughter of an American Indian. Investigation proved this to be true. The Indian was a huge specimen of a man who had arrived during the gold rush, stayed, married, and had three huge sons plus a daughter.
Gold brings unusual playmates to a country.
Another planned wave of migrants during 1860-1890 brought 100,000 people. The second half of the nineteenth century had a natural increase (births minus deaths) generated most of the population increase. Families were large, ten and twelve children were not unusual, and families stayed large until the depression.
New Zealand was most dependent on Britain. Seventy five per cent of its exports went to Britain and it bought at least 50 percent of its imports from Britain. New Zealand was the Empire's dairy farm. During the two World Wars exports to the UK kept New Zealand rich. But trouble was appearing in the balance of payments as early as 1925 culminating in 1939 and disappearing with the advent of WWII when Britain needed food from her little dairy farm again..
Women bore the brunt of hardship, as always, the most telling indicator coming from 109 married women who died from septic abortions between 1931 and 1935. If somebody went without, it was the woman. They were useless if they couldn't work like men as well as doing the cooking and cleaning when they were pregnant, which was pretty well constantly.
Abortion was illegal in New Zealand until well into the 1970s. A wealthy woman had no trouble. She could fly to Australia where safe, legal abortion was available. The contraceptive pill was available in 1962, but only given to married women who had one child. I estimate that somewhere in the vicinity of at least 200/300 babies per year were adopted or brought up in foster homes or orphanages during the period 1950/1960. Women were wise to avoid Catholic doctors for delivering babies as doctrine was (and I think still is) the baby's life came first if a choice had to be made between saving either.
There was a baby boom from 1945-1962 (as was to be expected) but assisted migration resumed in 1947 with Dutch and British making up the majority of the new arrivals. New Zealand's intake during this period was another 88,000 people. There were a few Greeks, Italians, Chinese, and Indians, but they lived mainly in Auckland and Wellington. New Zealand in 1970 was still very much a European country.
Britain's turning away from the Commonwealth towards Europe brought Australia and New Zealand closer together. Australians and New Zealanders are pretty much the same British stock, although huge numbers of Germans emigrated to Australia. Australia is a much richer, but much crueller country than New Zealand. It has snakes, huge spiders, huge mosquitoes, crocodiles, and a hot, dry climate. I was told when I was over there to just stamp my feet when walking and the snakes get away from the sound pretty quickly. Sound? Well, they are deaf but extremely sensitive to vibration. They don't want any trouble so they slide away. If you want to catch one, you tiptoe up behind it because the peripheral vision is not too good. You have to grab it behind the head. I was not the slightest bit interested in that sort of exercise, needless to say. When it rains in the 0utback Aussies stand on the verandahs and watch it. They can't get enough of it. Water!
New Zealand, on the other hand, is green and wet and cool with no snakes and only one poisonous spider which is hardly ever seen.
When Australia divided itself into states, it made provision for New Zealand to become a state of Australia because it was obvious even in the 19th century that New Zealand, sitting right out on the edge of the Southern Ocean, with no natural resources, would ultimately need a hand. New Zealand politicians, looking after their own skins, turned down the invitation to join, but I have recently heard it mooted again, twice in this year. So many Kiwis live in Australia already, and so many leave each year to live there and never to return here (about 34,000) and they are replaced with Somalis, Afghanis, Zimbabweans and such like, that the country is hardly likely to pick itself up and get into any sort of international running ever again. It has become a dumping ground for the United Nations leftoevers, courtesy of Helen Clark, PM, who signed up to anything Kofe Annan put forward in the hope that she would be offered a cushy seat in the UN. Didn't happen. Country is stuffed.
The funny thing is, the brown and black imports don't want to stay here either. As soon as they get the Kiwi passport, they're off elsewhere. They don't like the trapped feeling of living in such an isolated country. I may be wrong, but I think I read somewhere recently the net population gain for one year is about 6,000. That is after bringing in 50,000 p.a.
New Zealand's Nuclear Free Policy and the Decline of ANZUS:
June 1984 - Nuclear free New Zealand Bill introduced and passed in Parliament.
1985 - New Zealand refused a request from the United States for a visit from the old USS Buchanan on the grounds that it could carry nuclear weapons.
The US stuck rigidly to its principle of neither confirming nor denying whether its vessels were nuclear powered or armed and NZ stated that US ships were welcome provided they were not nuclear powered or armed.
And that is where it still stands.
I don't care one way or another about nuclear power. I think we will have to have nuclear power stations eventually but whether there will be anyone smart enough left in the country to run one properly is debateable.
Half of Maori marriages have been with a European since 1960. It is common to see blond haired and blue eyed children claiming Maori heritage. This is just the way it goes. If there is money somewhere in it, they go that way. When the money dries up and it is more profitable to claim European heritage, they will go the other way.
I think the new arrivals from Somalia and Afghanistan and elsewhere are frightened of the Maoris. Black people like to play the race card but the Maoris aren't having any of that. New Zealand is their country, always was, always will be, and anyone tries to mess with that comes right up against a big, tattooed, fist. When the imports complain, they are told to behave themselves. Very amusing.
That is a very rough outline of the economic and social history of New Zealand. What happened up until 1970 is gone, finished, kaput. From 1970 onwards (we will call these the 'modern times') New Zealand has been a social laboratory.
Domestic violence, alcoholism and child abuse was endemic in New Zealand. It was the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden - I have seen and experienced some dreadful things) disease of this country. Under the guise of Christianity - priests and pastors and ministers advocated the continuance of the 'Christian' way and turned their heads away from the problems they knew existed. The rates of illegitimate births were off the scale - often to under-age girls from incest, and rape, or blackmail or threats to force consent to sex were common.
Who brought these things into the open?
The Women's Movement.
Have things improved?
Yes, yes, yes!
Is the place now perfect?
Far from it, but it is better.
Will it improve further?
Quien sabe muchacha?
