Party governments of 1912 to 1928—was about fostering grasslands’science
and primary produce marketing, to entrench the trade lifeline with Britain.
Sinclair noted ([1959] 2001, p. 248) that‘the premise of [Prime Minister]
Massey’s political philosophy, a cliché of the 1920s, was that New Zealand
was the“Empire’s outlying farm”’. Over the full extent of its export-facilitated
expansion, New Zealand developed a truly exceptional neo-British economy
from 1882 (first successful shipment of frozen meat to London) to 1972
(Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC)), with up to
80 per cent of exports and 60 per cent of imports (Briggs 2003) being shipped
literally from one point on the planet to its geographic opposite.
15.2 Geography as Politics before Australian Federation
New Zealand was always apart from New Holland, NSW, and Van Diemen’s
Land; more a smaller and greener alternate than a one-seventh part of an
embryonic Australian nation. Tasmania, only semi-detached, was a coherent
part of that Australia, by virtue of its geography as part of a continental land-
mass that physically separated after human settlement. Australia, Tasmania,
and New Guinea are of Sahul, a partially drowned continent off South-East Asia.
New Zealand, a part of Polynesia, belongs to a separate largely submerged
continental mass, Zealandia (Campbell 2011, p. 25). Australia was the fabled
southern continent, fantastically different in its geography, botany, and
zoology. New Zealand, a land of birds seemingly waiting to be settled by
British bipeds and quadrupeds,^4 offered a way to be British in a new land.
For the most part, New Zealand was to be settled directly from Britain, with the
principal exception being a reflux from Victoria’s gold rush. Many neo-British
intellectuals were geographic Darwinists (Belich 1997, p. 356). There was a
tendency in New Zealand to see Australia’s climate as too languid to present
properfitness challenges to settler manhood (Macmillan Brown 1933). New
Zealand, though more antipodean than Australia, would be less exceptional,
more British; forged—as the Britons were—by wind and rain, not heat.
Five of New Zealand’s earliest Anglo-settlements were facilitated through
Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s New Zealand Company and (with John Robert
Godley) the Canterbury Association. As inThe New British Province of South
Australia(Wakefield 1834) a few years before,financial reality quickly inter-
vened. Yet the high expectations behind the New Zealand settlements
remained a driving force. Settlers planned their towns and villages through
social lenses polished in England and Scotland. The important Otago
(^4) It seems likely that, about 25 million years ago, Zealandia was close to fully submerged,
resulting in the subsequent creation of a new ecosystem (Campbell 2011, p. 160).
Keith Rankin