Canterbury
Waitaha
Planned as an Anglican settlement in 1850 and built on the wheat and wool of the plains. Christchurch was for a long stretch the country's second city.
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10 events in Canterbury between 1830 and 1998
The Elizabeth affair
A British captain hid Te Rauparaha’s war party aboard his brig to capture the Ngāi Tahu chief Te Maiharanui — a scandal that helped convince Britain it needed an official presence.
Akaroa HarbourFrench settlers arrive at Akaroa
Sixty-three French and German settlers landed on Banks Peninsula, days after a British warship had raised the flag to forestall exactly that.
AkaroaThe first four ships reach Lyttelton
The Canterbury Association landed Anglican settlers at Lyttelton, who walked over the Port Hills to found Christchurch on the plains.
LytteltonThe Lyttelton rail tunnel opens
A 2.6 km bore through the rim of an extinct volcano finally joined Christchurch to its port, and was the first tunnel driven through the walls of a volcano anywhere.
LytteltonThe Ōtira tunnel pierces the Southern Alps
An 8.5 km tunnel under Arthur’s Pass completed the transalpine railway between Christchurch and Greymouth, fifteen years after work began.
ŌtiraDepression riots
Relief workers and the unemployed smashed shopfronts down Queen Street. Similar riots hit Dunedin and Wellington within days.
Queen Street, AucklandThe Ballantynes fire
Forty-one staff died in a department store fire in central Christchurch, most of them trapped on the upper floors.
ChristchurchTelevision broadcasting begins
AKTV2 broadcast to a few thousand Auckland sets for two hours a night, opening with a British sitcom.
AucklandBenmore dam and the Cook Strait cable
The largest earth dam in the country was built to feed a high-voltage link under Cook Strait, sending South Island hydro power north.
Waitaki ValleyThe Ngāi Tahu settlement
A claim first lodged in 1849 was finally settled: $170 million, an apology, and the return of Aoraki/Mount Cook, over land covering most of the South Island.
Ōnuku Marae, AkaroaMeanwhile, nationally
34 events that reached Canterbury along with most of the country. They still shade the map and sit on the timeline above, but they are not Canterbury’s own history.
New Zealand Constitution Act
Representative government arrived, divided into six provinces — and the property franchise excluded almost all Māori, who held land communally.
Settlers outnumber Māori
For the first time the European population passed the Māori population — about 59,000 settlers to 56,000 Māori, on a Māori population that had roughly halved since 1800.
Māori Representation Act
Four Māori seats were created as a temporary measure, giving Māori men the vote twelve years before all Pākehā men got it.
Vogel’s public works and immigration scheme
Julius Vogel borrowed £10 million in London to build railways, roads and telegraph lines, and to bring 100,000 assisted migrants.
The provinces are abolished
Nine provincial governments were swept away and replaced by central government plus counties and boroughs — the shape of local government for the next century.
Education Act — free, secular and compulsory
A national primary system, free and compulsory for children aged 7 to 13, and deliberately secular to sidestep sectarian argument.
First refrigerated cargo sails for London
The Dunedin left Port Chalmers with 4,900 frozen carcasses and arrived in London 98 days later with the cargo sound. It changed the country’s economy permanently.
Port ChalmersThe Liberals take power
The world’s first organised political party to hold national office began two decades of reform that made New Zealand a byword for social experiment.
Women win the vote
New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world where women could vote in national elections. Kate Sheppard’s third petition carried nearly 32,000 signatures.
WellingtonOld-age pensions introduced
One of the first state pensions anywhere — means-tested, character-tested, and closed to Chinese and other Asian residents.
New Zealand troops sent to the South African War
The first overseas war New Zealand fought as a country: around 6,500 men and 8,000 horses, and 230 deaths.
Ernest Rutherford wins the Nobel Prize
A farm boy from Brightwater took the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and went on to split the atom and discover the atomic nucleus.
Brightwater, NelsonNew Zealand enters the First World War
About 100,000 served overseas from a population of just over a million. Around 18,000 died and 41,000 were wounded — proportionally among the heaviest losses of any country.
The Gallipoli landing
New Zealand troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25 April. Of about 14,000 who served there, 2,779 died. The date became the country’s day of remembrance.
Passchendaele — the worst day
An attack on Bellevue Spur in Flanders mud, against uncut wire and without effective artillery support, killed around 845 New Zealanders in a few hours.
The influenza pandemic
About 9,000 people died in two months — roughly half as many as died in four years of war. Māori died at more than seven times the Pākehā rate.
The first Labour government
Michael Joseph Savage led Labour to a landslide and built the welfare state: state houses, guaranteed prices, free health care and a 40-hour week.
WellingtonSocial Security Act
Free hospital care, subsidised doctors’ visits and universal benefits from cradle to grave — among the most comprehensive welfare systems in the world at the time.
New Zealand declares war on Germany
‘Where she goes, we go’ — 140,000 served overseas and nearly 12,000 died, from a population of 1.6 million.
The great Māori urban migration
Māori went from about 25 percent urban in 1945 to nearly 80 percent by 1975 — one of the fastest urbanisations recorded anywhere.
Kayforce sent to Korea
About 4,700 New Zealanders served in Korea under the United Nations flag; 45 died. It was the country’s first UN commitment.
The 1951 waterfront dispute
Lockout and strike ran for 151 days. Emergency regulations made it a crime even to give food to a watersider’s children.
Wellington waterfrontEdmund Hillary summits Everest
An Auckland beekeeper and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest, and the news arrived in London on the morning of the Queen’s coronation.
AucklandThe 1953–54 royal tour
Elizabeth II became the first reigning monarch to visit New Zealand. An estimated three in four New Zealanders saw her in person.
Decimal currency day
Pounds, shillings and pence became dollars and cents, promoted by a cartoon character called Mr Dollar and a jingle everyone remembers.
Britain joins the EEC
New Zealand’s guaranteed British market for lamb, butter and cheese began closing after ninety years. The economy has never worked the same way since.
The Erebus disaster
An Air New Zealand sightseeing flight to Antarctica flew into Mount Erebus in whiteout conditions. All 257 people aboard died.
Departed Auckland AirportThe Springbok tour
Fifty-six days that split the country. Protesters occupied the pitch at Hamilton and stopped the game; by the final test, police in riot gear fought crowds outside Eden Park.
Rugby Park, HamiltonRogernomics — the economy is deregulated
A Labour government floated the dollar, removed farm subsidies and tariffs, and sold state assets — the fastest liberalisation in the developed world.
Waitangi Tribunal jurisdiction backdated to 1840
The single amendment that made Treaty settlements possible: the Tribunal could now investigate Crown breaches all the way back to 1840.
The 1987 sharemarket crash
The New Zealand market fell further than almost any other and took years longer to recover, wiping out a generation of small investors.
AucklandNew Zealand votes for MMP
By 54 to 46 percent, voters replaced first-past-the-post with mixed-member proportional representation — largely as a punishment for a decade of unmandated reform.
The first MMP election
The first proportional Parliament took nine weeks of negotiation to produce a government, and looked more like the country than any before it.
Jenny Shipley becomes the first woman Prime Minister
Shipley replaced Jim Bolger in a party-room coup. Two years later Helen Clark won an election outright, and a woman held the office continuously until 2008.
Wellington