with its receding land frontier, it was a reality quite familiar to early California.
And a reality that would, in all cases, involve conflict with indigenous popu-
lations. Here, Australasia and the USA did have much in common: frontier
conflicts, even if Australia does not name its settlement conflicts‘wars’. For
the American West, as in New Zealand, treaties were negotiated between
indigenous peoples and colonizers. In New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi
serves as a founding national document. Nevertheless, as in the USA, treaty
observance was often shallow. Frontier conflict was unambiguously‘war’
over land.
The Belich new-west thesis is essentially a boom-bust, commodity-export
growth model. The boom is migrant-driven, and the number one facilitator of
migration is falling transport costs. Malthusian demand for new lands was
ever present, and was prone to erupt, in peacetime, in response to favourable
price signals. Capital followed. Significant busts occurred in New South Wales
(NSW) in the 1840s, New Zealand and South Australia in the 1880s, and
Victoria in the 1890s. Export recoveries tightened the economic bonds within
Greater Britain, especially the bonds between each antipodean new-west and
their parent old-east. New Zealand’s reforged bond to its metropole tightened
most, thanks to a proportionately larger impact of dairy farming and refriger-
ation and, later, to the Panama Canal. Australia and New Zealand became
rivals for Britain’s favours. Back to back, they faced each other.
Though eclipsed by Australia when viewed from London, in its nineteenth-
century political imagination New Zealand relished an exceptionally great
sense of Britishness, carrying the banner ‘Britain of the South’(Belich
1996, p. 302). It was Americans, with a newly-acquired Pacificlens,who
cameanddiscoveredthatNewZealandofferedlessonsin‘progressive’
policy-making (Coleman 1987). In reciprocation, significant influences on
New Zealand thought before the turn of the century included Henry George
(Sinclair [1959] 2001, p. 180) and Edward Bellamy. The PacificOceanwasa
point of New Zealand connection with America, just as the Tasman Sea
connected Australia. And PacificPolynesiawasseenasNewZealand’sspecial
backyard, not an ambiguous part of Australasia (Mein Smith 2009, p. 298).
During its export-recovery phase, from the 1890s to the 1920s, New
Zealanders’ self-image as new southern Britons gave way to a martial
‘better British’(Belich 2001) rivalry with Australia; understated in tone, yet
deep‑seated in the belief that white New Zealanders really were the best of the
best.^3 Much of twentieth-century policy-making—epitomized by the Reform
(^3) In parallel came the conviction that brown New Zealanders were‘better blacks’. For example,
Belich (1997, p. 11) notes:‘People like the Aboriginal Australians were never forgiven for their lack
of interest in Europe; peoples like Maˉori were congratulated for their interest.’Indeed, Maˉori
embraced‘trade’in both its manufacturing and export-import senses (Monin 2009).
Australia and New Zealand