posted by on
I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.
To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I'm using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:
- New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado[1]
- Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado[2]
- Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado[3]
- Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR[4]
Throughout the trip's downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a little more context than we were getting from tours and museums and talking to folks. I figured that to understand the history of a place, it was good to understand who had lived there previously and how they had interacted with each other. The Māori people sailed to the islands and settled there in the 1300s, and while there were Dutch explorers mapping the islands in the 1600s, European colonists didn't arrive until the 1700s, the English colony of New South Whales wasn't formed until 1788, and New Zealand's declaration of independence wasn't signed until 1835.
A huge part of New Zealand history was The Treaty of Waitangi, which was a bilingual, written agreement between the Māori and the British that ostensibly sought to make both parties happy. As is often the case with British treaties with indigenous peoples historically, this wound up with the British largely getting what they wanted, and everyone else being unhappy, to put it lightly.
As some words in the English treaty did not translate directly into the written Māori language of the time, the Māori text is not an exact translation of the English text, particularly in relation to the meaning of having and ceding sovereignty. These differences created disagreements in the decades following the signing, eventually contributing to the New Zealand Wars of 1845 to 1872 and continuing through to the Treaty of Waitangi settlements starting in the early 1990s.
This treaty is also what led to Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke ripping up a proposed bill while performing the haka in Parliament in Wellington during my trip, which I loved as a means of protest. I cannot imagine an equivalent thing happening at the federal level in the US for a number of reasons, but maybe a state-level protest from indigenous tribes might happen here some day in my lifetime.
A major throughline I found as I read the timeline was that there are unconscious assumptions I tended to make as a USAmerican that don't necessarily have historical parallels in New Zealand, despite both countries being former colonies of England and all that that implies. There are parts where the difference in histories is obvious:
- The piecemeal way that the US added states to the union over centuries compared to NZ being the collection of islands on the singular continental shelf
- 9/11 happening in the US and not NZ[5] and how that colored the last few decades of military history
And then there are parts where I was really surprised at first when I learned of the differences:
- Laws granting universal suffrage[6] and minimum wage in NZ well before the US
- Anti-nuclear legislation in NZ rather than the development and use of nuclear arms and nuclear power in the US
Besides the human-centric historical overview, I also learned that New Zealand has a lot of bird species that aren't found anywhere else. For that reason, my plan is to include a photo of a bird that's endemic to NZ in each blog post I do. Here's a black-billed gull near Avon River / Ōtākaro in Christchurch.
I plan to do a handful more posts about parts of my trip over the next few days, now that I'm home and can spend time organizing my photos and thoughts. Various topics include but are not limited to: the organization and layout of art galleries, pre-human history of Aotearoa New Zealand, the razor's edge of rightsholders who want to do a theme park but don't own the theme, birding as a means to interact with sound during hikes, the littlest penguins in the world, and the only royal family in the world that I care about.
New Zealand 5.223 million (2023) | Colorado 5.878 million (2023) ↩︎
New Zealand 103,483 mi² | Colorado 104,185 mi² ↩︎
Colorado's southern edge is 37°N ↩︎
Portland is 45.5152°N, which is a little further, but a coastal city I had been to that was pretty close felt good enough. Apologies that it couldn't be related to Colorado in some way. ↩︎
And not just because in NZ it'd be 11/9 because it's DD/MM/YYYY format like in Europe. ↩︎
New Zealand passed universal suffrage in 1893, nearly 27 years before the Ninteenth Amendment in the US. That means there were likely NZ children born after 1893 who grew old enough to vote before suffragates in the US (who had been fighting prior to 1893) were granted the same right. ↩︎