Why “A Different New Zealand”

I have been interested in New Zealand for over 20 years.  In the fall of 1993, I read a review of Roger Douglas’s book Unfinished Business in The Economist.  I ordered the book, which was not all that easy in the pre-Internet days.  I was fascinated by the book and by how a Labour government, in the 1980s, transformed the New Zealand economy from one of the most state-controlled economies outside of the Soviet bloc to one of the freest.  I began to read more about New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s.  That led me to read even more about New Zealand: histories, biographies, current events, etc.  In the late 1990s, the Internet made it possible to follow New Zealand on a real-time basis.

Once I started to think about retiring, my wife suggested that we should go to New Zealand once I retired.  I retired in the summer of 2013, and we went to New Zealand in late January, February. and March of 2014.

Once we decided to go, we needed to decide what to see.  Most of the tours and the travel websites about New Zealand talk about the natural beauty, all of the things to do outdoors, and the native people, the Maoris.  Those sounded interesting, but by then I was more interested in the New Zealand that went from just beginning to be settled by the British in 1840 to one of the richest countries in the world by the end of the nineteenth century.  I was interested in not just the history of the Maoris, but also the history of these British (and other) people, the Pakehas. 

I was interested in a country that has been a social laboratory over the years.  In 1893, New Zealand was the first country to give women the vote.  Twenty-six years before that, they gave the Maoris the vote.  In the 1890-1900s, and then again in the 1930s, New Zealand passed some of the most progressive social legislation in the world.  Then, a “conservative,” but populist, government imposed broad economic controls on the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  But that was completely changed by a Labour government from 1984 to 1990 and its National successor in 1990.

I also discovered the “New Zealand Wars,” the wars between some of the Maoris on one side and the British and Pakehas (and the rest of the Maoris) on the other side.  The Maoris were incredibly good fighters, and I wanted to learn more about that.  And consider how that fighting ability, or at least the wars they fought, may have been part of the reason for the difference in how the Maoris were, and are, treated in New Zealand, compared to Aborigines in Australia and Native Americans in the United States.

So when it came time to plan a trip, we included Rotorua, the glaciers, and Milford Sound on our list.  But we also included Dunedin, battle sites from the New Zealand Wars, Napier (because we love architecture), and Central Otago, too.

We wound up, perhaps, seeing fewer of the things that most tours focus on, but more of the rest of New Zealand.  The purpose of this blog/website is to talk about these other things, both because we enjoyed them so much and to encourage other people to enjoy them, too.