A changed attitude to globalisation emerged out of the aura of crisis: now there was a growing trend to manage it. The Australasian colonies resolved to seize opportunities to develop new commodities for export, yet manage the social outcomes by building an edifice of progressive liberal ‘state experiments’. Led by Premiers John Ballance until 1893, Richard Seddon until 1906, and Sir Joseph Ward – all of whom were immigrants – a series of Liberal governments from 1891 to 1912 set out to create New Zealand as a democratic social laboratory. In doing so, they enacted an Australasian model of state development.

Political scientists have shown how Australian institutions have mediated globalisation through a colonial, democratic citizenship. The ‘Australian Settlement’, supposedly established at federation, had as its five planks a white Australia, and associated restricted immigration; arbitration; protection; ‘state paternalism’; and ‘imperial benevolence’. In reality it was Australasian: a distinctive Australian and New Zealand settler colonial response to guarantee ‘domestic defence’ against a range of shared perceived and actual external threats.

If the Governor's decision to wage war in Taranaki over Waitara in 1860 was heavy-handed and aggressive, the invasion of the Waikato launched by Sir George Grey in July 1863 amounted to a blatant lunge for power. Indeed – as a narrow victory of numbers – it presaged the takeover by settler New Zealand that deluged Maori. From the 1860s the scales of power tipped to the settler society. Within a generation, Maori shrank from being the majority of the population to a small minority. The amount of land in Maori ownership, already much diminished, halved between 1860 and 1891. But pockets of Maori resistance nurtured a proud legacy that would recalibrate relations a century and more later.

New Zealand wars

Thanks to James Belich's revisionist scholarship, the New Zealand wars have come to be seen as instances of British ‘small wars’ of imperial conquest that invaded autonomous Maori sovereignty, played a significant part in defining Pakeha and Maori as ‘us’ and ‘them’, and created the national debt. Maori resistance was effective rather than futile until numbers overwhelmed them. ‘New Zealand wars’ can be used to include a first phase of significant battles in the Bay of Islands through 1845 into 1846 – the northern war – as well as clashes on both sides of Cook Strait from 1843 to 1847, notably at Wairau in Marlborough. But the wars proper raged from 1860 to 1872 across the central North Island, after a decade of peace. There is vigorous debate about the nature and legacy of these conflicts, fought over land and sovereignty and begun by the government. Power, propinquity and possession decreed that war would flare in the North Island, where tribes still owned most of the land in the 1860s. Most Maori lived in the North Island, which remained under tribal control outside the isolated coastal towns. By contrast, the South Island was, legally, already in settler hands. That left Ngai Tahu the long task of fighting their claim on paper and later in parliament.

Struggles for land have swirled around the Treaty of Waitangi of 6 February 1840, an instrument unique less in its making than in what it has become – for indigenous rights and as a mission statement for a single country – with grand goals achieved at minimal cost. Beforehand, Captain Hobson read three announcements at the Anglican Church at Kororareka (Russell) on 30 January. The first extended the boundaries of New South Wales to include New Zealand; the second declared him Lieutenant-Governor; and the third established that land titles would derive from the Crown. To secure annexation by consent Hobson next drafted a treaty as instructed by the Colonial Office. Busby redrafted the treaty to include a promise that Britain would guarantee Maori possession of their lands and other properties, for which British humanitarianism provided precedents in North America and West Africa. Without this assurance Busby knew the chiefs would not sign. Overnight, the missionary Henry Williams and his son Edward translated the text into Maori so that chiefs could discuss it, which they did all day at Busby's house on 5 February, until Hobson, several English residents and about 45 Maori chiefs signed the Maori translation of the Treaty of Waitangi on 6 February. This initial signing was done in haste; Hobson barely had time to grab his plumed hat from HMS Herald.

If for Hobson a treaty offered chiefs protection, for missionaries it was a covenant between Maori and the Queen as head of the English church and state. For rangatira, though, their chieftainship demanded equality in rank and power to the new Governor, as Tareha declared: ‘We chiefs are the rulers and we won't be ruled over. If we were all to have a rank equal to you that might be acceptable. But if we are going to be subordinate to you, then I say get back to your ship and sail away’. Only a few welcomed Hobson as a harbinger of peace and new laws to manage the impact of disease, cultural and social disturbance, and firepower. It remained for Ngapuhi chief Tamati Waka Nene to turn debate in favour of the treaty with his argument that it was too late to reject Hobson; settlers were already arriving; the Governor would be a friend, a judge and a peacemaker. Such a ‘battle of words’ did ‘justice to the cause’, clearing the air before a leader's address ended debate.

The Anzac spirit underwent another resurgence in 2010 and 2011, the qualities of mateship, solidarity and family bonds enshrined in legend reinforced by a sequence of calamities. It was as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were seeking vengeance. Deadly bushfires in Victoria; a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in Christchurch on 4 September in which, miraculously, no one died; an explosion at the Pike River Mine on the South Island's West Coast that killed 29 miners in November; followed by massive floods in the Australian eastern states ended 2010 on a sombre note. An even more devastating earthquake in Christchurch on 22 February 2011, measuring less – 6.3 – on the Richter scale, but far more extreme in its ground acceleration and destructive fury, ripped and shook the land, buildings and people apart, killing about 200 and destroying 10,000 homes. Australians and New Zealanders helped one another, forging deeper mutual regard, while specialist search and rescue teams, police, firefighters and medical personnel raced from one disaster zone to the next.

Across the stretches of geological time, the brief span of New Zealand's history seemed insignificant to people standing on that shaky ground. Beneath the sediments of the Canterbury plains, two hitherto unknown faults ruptured into life after, perhaps, 10,000 years of inactivity. The people of Christchurch and its hinterland found they were living in a momentous geological moment, through two major tremors – the second an aftershock from the first – plus swarms of aftershocks. In Canterbury the land had to be resurveyed because of ground displacement of between one and five m after the September earthquake, while the February shock beneath the Port Hills south of the city thrust the hills 40 cm higher; and in the eastern suburbs susceptible to liquefaction the ground sank.

Expanding citizenship composed the second part of the greatest rupture in New Zealand history since colonisation, the New Zealand wars, and World War I. Rupture in the very meaning of New Zealandness obliged people to adapt to new ideas about who belonged. The country reshaped its political institutions to reflect that its people and culture had grown more diverse and connected to the world, and to accommodate the concept of biculturalism.

The treaty comes alive

Internally the Treaty of Waitangi's return to public life drove these changes. The wairua (spirit) of the treaty makes it unique in the world, determined its place in history and, in turn, shaped national myth-making in the late twentieth century. Gradually the Maori narrative of the treaty began to seep into public awareness. Maori had consistently called for the Crown to honour the treaty; pronounced a ‘simple nullity’ by the courts in 1877, its spirit stirred 100 years later not just in Maoridom but in the body politic, changing assumptions entrenched since 1840 about the importance of land to Maori and decision-making about paths ahead.

Wartime controls only ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of post-war growth and change. The 1950s and 1960s are often recalled as a ‘golden age’. In many respects they were, for the baby boomers (born from 1945 to 1961) who enjoyed a childhood unburdened by depression and war, and for the parents responsible for their upbringing. Broadly, however, the internal dynamics of the Pacific region were in flux. Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather, his solo dramatic performance about a summer in a boy's childhood. At adolescence, he explained:

So it was for New Zealanders in the 1950s and 1960s. The unsettling of settler society had already begun, first for Maori, then for future Pacific Island migrants and lastly for Pakeha.

These were years of full employment for men – until 1967 – in an economy that increasingly needed married women in the workforce. The significant gap in life expectancy between Maori and Pakeha narrowed rapidly. A new round of culture contact began with a major movement of Maori to the cities. A generation gap opened between baby boomers and their parents, who wanted their children to better themselves through expanding educational opportunities. Sustained growth made possible the consumer society and accompanying changes in etiquette and social norms, from hats and gloves to miniskirts and informality. Communications were transformed, linking New Zealand more strongly to the world. This was an era of social change and new interdependencies.

So deep was Aotearoa in the watery world of the Pacific that it remained for long unknown to Europeans, other than as an imagined part of the mythical great southern land, Terra Australis. Surely there had to be a continent in the South Pacific to balance the weight of land in the Northern Hemisphere? As it proved, there was not. New Zealand is immersed in the Pacific, surrounded for 2000 km by ocean, a fact that is reflected in Maori waka traditions. Only in the late eighteenth century did its full outline register in European consciousness through the process of physical discovery.

In 1500 no European had seen the world's largest ocean. Once they ventured into the Pacific, European sailors had great difficulty navigating its expanse, devoid of landmarks other than scattered islands and numerous uncharted reefs, and unpredictable in its treacherous currents, winds and weather. Geography and navigation remained uncertain. There were no reliable sea routes, other than within the narrow limits of latitude used by Spanish fleets from Acapulco in the Americas to Manila in Southeast Asia. For two centuries Europeans criss-crossed the Pacific Ocean along this track without charting the southern continent that they assumed awaited their discovery.

How and when did New Zealand begin? Geologically the archipelago dates back 80 million years when it separated from Gondwana. Other than Antarctica, New Zealand was the last major landmass settled by humans. The first settlers, ancestors of the indigenous people, the Maori, are now thought to have arrived in the thirteenth century, whereas people inhabited the rest of the Pacific Rim from 12,000 to an estimated 60,000 years ago. Europeans arrived very late indeed, with planned settlements only from 1840. The two waves of people from Polynesia and Europe in a flash of time transformed the land and remade the landscapes. These simple facts of place and time explain why the environment is so much associated with the nation's culture and identity.

Time before humans

Geographically, New Zealand is an archipelago of many islands, from Raoul in the Kermadec group to Campbell Island, although the three main islands account for almost 99 per cent of the land area of 270,000 square km. Its comparable size to the British Isles is important in a once dominant version of the country's history. Ancestral New Zealand, so scientists tell us, was once part of the great southern continent of Gondwana, its rocks forming a mountainous area stretching along Gondwana's eastern margin, 100 million years ago. Then what is known as the Rangitata landmass broke away and headed eastwards into the Pacific. Ancestral New Zealand was on its own. Flora and fauna have not migrated overland for the last 80 million years, and movement and sea floor spreading ceased about 55 million years ago when the Tasman Sea reached its full width, separating the New Zealand landmass from south-eastern Australia.

Waka across a watery world

The palaeontologists are Trevor Worthy and Richard Holdaway; mental maps of the Polynesian world are in O’Regan, ‘Ngai Tahu and the Crown’, 2–3. ‘Ancestral genetic trail’ from Howe, The Quest for Origins, 82. The new model for late colonisation of East Polynesia is in J. M. Wilmshurst et al., ‘High-precision Radiocarbon Dating Shows Recent and Rapid Initial Human Colonization of East Polynesia’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, published online before print 27 December 2010 <http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/12/22/1015876108>; ‘in one major pulse’, ibid., 1.

Ben Finney refuted Andrew Sharp's thesis of accidental voyaging in The Origins of the First New Zealanders, ed. Sutton, ch. 2; as did Evans in his record of the voyage by Greg (Matahi) Brightwell and Francis Cowan. The story of the Te Arawa canoe is from Evans, The Discovery of Aotearoa, 47. Peter H. Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) relayed the Kupe story in Vikings of the Sunrise, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1938, 268. Atholl Anderson noted the absence of New Zealand implements at East Polynesian sites in ‘Origins, Settlement and Society of Pre-European South Polynesia’, in The New Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Byrnes, 28. Judith Binney's caution about Maori oral history is from Binney, ‘Maori Oral Narratives, Pakeha Written Texts’, 27.

It is a pleasure to introduce this history to readers who may know little about New Zealand other than that it is located in the Southern Hemisphere, somewhere near Australia. Often people are surprised to find how far New Zealand is from Australia. They may know the country from film, sometimes from art, music or novels, or sport, or business that takes them there; or travel. Some are familiar with national brands, such as Anchor butter and the All Blacks.

Local readers have their own expectations of how the country's history is, or ought to be, written. The basic narrative that they require is of equal relevance to the visitor. I wrote this concise history for my students, so that I could comprehend the story of New Zealand, and explain its significance to them; I also kept in mind friends overseas, and people I have met while travelling. The revisions and updates for the second edition continue this pattern. Emphases reflect my understanding and interests; but they also indicate where gaps exist in existing histories of New Zealand. Certain themes, such as literature, are already expertly covered elsewhere. This is not an alternative history, but a broadening of the histories that have already been written.

‘In New Zealand more than in any country in the world we find justification for the words of the Bible, “All flesh is as [sic] grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field.”’ So began the issue on pasture land of the Making New Zealand pictorial survey to mark New Zealand's centenary in 1940. This biblical phrase had multiple meanings for New Zealanders, in relation to ‘ecological imperialism’, feeding Britain, and the sacrifice of its best young men in war.

English grasses were imported to New Zealand, to be re-exported as frozen meat and dairy products, in an imperial food chain. The biblical reference suggests that New Zealand was indeed a land of milk and honey. This reference also became an anthem, sung at Anzac Day services. New Zealand not only processed imperial grass seed into flesh and blood, but the flesh of the flower of its manhood died for king and country at Gallipoli and on the Western Front in World War I.