“In many ways the adventurers of Kororareka and the Pilgrims of Plymouth could not have been more different, but in one way they were the same. Both were heirs to English traditions of self-government, individual rights, mutual responsibilities, and the rule of law. These small bands of British settlers introduced that heritage to North America and the South Pacific, and the world is much the better for it.”
— Fairness and Freedom by David Hackett Fischer
“If Dunedin is a stolid, wholesome Scots lassie, Christchurch a hockey captain-type of English girl, Wellington a slightly dowdy secretary, modern Auckland is a perky gold-digger, over-talkative but full of ideas, mildly interested in the arts and much in love with life.”
— John Cowie Reid, 1964
“My efforts are aimed at establishing the Kingdom of God upon Earth.”
— New Zealand Prime Minister Michael Savage, 1937
Colonisation
New Zealand’s colonisation was conceived in the fecund mind of one brilliant heiress-abductor, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, while he languished in prison for his misguided jaunt. Seeking to marry labour and untapped lands, his ideas would lead to the colonisation of New Zealand and South Australia, each undertaken via commercial enterprises with strong Christian missionary strictures. These were enterprises in social engineering born of a confident, liberal phase of the British Empire. This Anglo flavour of technocratic competence and liberal temperament have permeated Australian and New Zealand sensibilities since.
In some ways the colonisation of New Zealand resembled more the colonisation of the Americas than of Australia: warrior native tribes armed with powerful new technology and split into allies and rivals in turn, forced to treaty following war; and pockets of concentrated settler ethnic heterogeneity (Otago, like Nova Scotia, was largely Scottish; Britain annexed French settlements in both lands).
In other ways, New Zealand resembled Australia. The colonisation of South Australia sprung from the same mind; they both began life as military regimes; and the waves of immigrants to New Zealand mirrored those to Australia: subsidised settlers, broken by spikes in gold rush prospectors. New Zealand, like Australia, unquestioningly stood by Britain in her global wars, and never broke from the motherland in the way of the American Revolution. At the Federation of Australia’s colonies, there was even a provision for New Zealand in the Australian constitution which remains to this day. But ultimately, New Zealand stuck its own course. Its particular native population and particular strands of settler communities set the tone for its particular national character.
It was Sir James Stephen who actually made the decision to settle New Zealand. As permanent undersecretary of the Colonial Office from 1836 to 1847, he oversaw the British Empire over this period. This was not the British Empire that had thrust itself upon the Americas. It was an empire well into its idealistic phase. Ruling from 14 Downing Street, Stephen was a powerful man who, Fischer wrote, “did not wish to add New Zealand to the empire mainly because he believed that it rightfully belonged to its Māori inhabitants, whom he regarded as an admirable people.”
But then he changed his mind, writing in 1839:
The colonisation of New Zealand is if not an expedient, at least an inevitable measure. It is, in fact, colonised already by British subjects of the worst possible character, who are doing the greatest possible amount of evil with the least possible amount of good.
He had a clear purpose:
The two Cardinal points to be kept in view in establishing a regular colony in New Zealand are, first, the protection of the aborigines, and secondly the introduction among the colonists of the principle of self-government, to the utmost extent in which that principle can be reconciled with allegiance to the crown.
The timing of this was critical. After America’s rebellion, Britain would never again tax its colonies primarily for revenue to London. And the sweep of Enlightenment led to the abolition of slavery across its empire in 1833, and the establishment of all sorts of societies for the protection of aborigines. New Zealand would be one of the few colonies in any empire established with no slavery, no penal colony, no serfdom of any kind. New Zealand “was a deliberate act of moral choice by British statesmen”, writes Fischer.
The seeds of Australia were established just prior to this wave of noblesse across the empire. It too was in part a reaction to the American revolution — Britain needed a new place far away to dump its excess convicts. Nevertheless, as Australian convicts earned their freedom, Australia too would be seeded with the moral zeitgeist of these times — of utilitarian instincts, ideas of ‘a fair go’, social justice, and equality.
Settlement: Christian utopias, pirates, and speculators
In 1838, just prior to sanctioned settlement, there were some two thousand English-speaking peoples on the islands. They were mainly dregs — escaped convicts, sealers, whalers, and other ne’er-do-wells, including traders benefitting from the Māori Musket Wars raging since 1806. A French adventurer even arrived with colonists in 1837 claiming to be the Feudal Proprietor of New Zealand.
The largest English-speaking settlement before 1830 was Kororareka, now Russell in the Bay of Islands. Fischer writes:
Mariners throughout the South Seas knew it as “the Beach.” Missionaries called it the “hellhole of the Pacific” and the “cesspool of the islands.” Kororareka was crowded with grog shops, brothels, ship chandlers, and as many as five hundred European and Polynesian inhabitants, all chasing the main chance. In 1836, a traveller reckoned that it had “a greater number of rogues than any other spot of equal size in the universe.
Kororareka was a rough town, but not without order. Its English-speaking inhabitants drew up a covenant called the Kororareka Association of 1838, which was remarkably similar to the Mayflower Compact of 1620. They agreed to elect a president and council, to live under “equal laws” enacted by their own consent, and to be judged by their peers in courts of their own creation. They also bound themselves to a web of mutual obligations. Every member of the association was required to arm himself with a musket, a bayonet, a brace of pistols, a cutlass, and sixty rounds of ball cartridge. The bearing of arms was a right and a responsibility.
The new settlements that would replace this were less a single colonial project than a sequence of intense, self-conscious migrations — each one a cultural experiment with its own utopian logic. Wakefield provided the blueprint. Discovering in prison the gross injustice of English institutions, he imagined New Zealand as a remedy: a society built on social order and natural justice, in which talent would rise.
Wakefield proposed to found separate colonies in New Zealand for each of moderate Anglicans, Methodists, High Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics, and Jewish Zionists. All but the Catholic and Jewish colonies eventuated.
Wellington was the first proving ground. 1,500 settlers arrived by mid-1840 and the place was rigidly stratified from the start, dominated by a small elite closely tied to the British gentry. They brought with them hierarchy, propriety, and a churchly seriousness. Yet the population was volatile, crime was high, and religion fractious. Wakefield’s vision of an orderly, educated colonial society repeatedly met the messier realities of a raw frontier town.
New Plymouth, by contrast, grew from the “Taranaki Mob,” a network of kin from Devon, Yorkshire, and Cheshire — mostly middling farmers, many Unitarians — who transplanted their tight rural world whole. They prized fairness and justice learned from their own exclusion at home, and they recreated in Taranaki a hard-working, cohesive agricultural colony. But land hunger quickly drove conflict with Māori, and by the 1850s the same families were deeply entangled in the transactions and antagonisms that would ignite the Taranaki Wars.
“Of absolutely idle people we have none, and the settlement has the appearance of a thriving and industrious community. It will be a beautiful villagy sort of country, wherein the population will be principally farmers and well-doing peasants, with a sprinkling of large landowners, professional men, and shopkeepers.”
— Letter to Britain from a resident of New Plymouth in 1843
Canterbury was something else again: an Anglican utopia conceived by John and Charlotte Godley. It may have been inspired by a sermon delivered on 14 July 1833, when churchman John Keble delivered at Oxford a message called National Apostasy. Fischer writes:
He was unhappy about Catholic emancipation in Ireland, deeply distressed by liberalism, troubled by modernity, and sorely vexed by secular reform.
The Anglican utopia they sought to build would be founded on emigrants of the utmost character. The gender ratio was roughly even. Applicants in their twenties and married couples were preferred.
Each emigrant was required to submit a letter of recommendation from his vicar, testifying that “the applicant is sober, industrious and honest, and that he and all his family are amongst the most respectable of their class in the parish.
Godley himself despised the “derivation of power from below” and argued that a colony must be founded on duty, good conduct, and fair social order. Canterbury’s settlers thus arrived as a hand-picked God-fearing community seeking to build the Kingdom of God in their new home. Accordingly, these Canterbury Pilgrims named their capital Christchurch.
I would rather be governed by a Nero on the spot than by a board of angels in London, because we could if worst came to worst, cut off Nero’s head, but we could not get at the board in London at all.
— John Godley, 1851
Then came Otago, a Scottish Presbyterian project under the Burns and Cargill families. In its first decades, more than 80% of its settlers were Scots. Dunedin was, in effect, a transplanted Lowlands town, along with its clan structures. Half were women or girls, and they were more educated and religious than those they left behind. The Kirk — stern, egalitarian, and disciplined — anchored everything. Settlers who did not fit in had a miserable time. Wives were the moral arbiters. This “new Scotland” long kept its distinctly Scottish flavour, from church life to education to politics. This settlement too was to be a “godly experiment”.
It was severe in its moral code, but serious in its intellectual purposes… They were tough, hard, difficult people, but also upright and strong-willed, with a high sense of justice and moral purpose.
Finally, Auckland stood apart: pluralistic, improvised, and commercially driven. Its settlers were mixed — English, Irish, American whalers, Australians, traders — and its growth was haphazard but energetic. Logan Campbell, the city’s patriarch, embodied this openness. He wrote about his city:
The whole and entire object of everyone here is making money, the big fishes eating the little ones.
Reminds me of Sydney.
A Scotsman turned colonial entrepreneur, Campbell bought up real estate with associates and prospered in the subsequent land boom, and profited by owning breweries through the downturn. Years later he remembered that “nearly every one of the young capital’s first merchants came to grief and were blotted out.” He invested his considerable fortune into public works, and had great admiration for the Māori. Auckland never cohered around a single founding ideal except perhaps for the pursuit of wealth.
Together, these settlements formed a mosaic of intentions and contradictions — utopias of class harmony, moral reform, Scottish piety, English hierarchy, and colonial enterprise. Each strove to build a better society, colliding with the realities of the land, with Māori, and with their own imported illusions.