Story by Jock Phillips

Main image: Settlers on the beach

Last and loneliest

For over 150 years after 1800, most people who emigrated to New Zealand were from Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) or Ireland. Yet for them, New Zealand was the most distant place on earth. The journey by sea took anywhere between three and six months, and voyagers endured rough seas, cramped conditions and illness. Unless they were offered free travel or other rewards, many people were reluctant to emigrate to New Zealand.

Via Australia

Some came because they had already reached Australia as convicts or settlers. Those who went the extra distance across the Tasman Sea included:

• whalers and sealers, New Zealand’s earliest non-Māori settlers
• gold miners, many of whom came from the goldfields of Victoria to Otago and the West Coast in the 1860s
• labourers who arrived in the early 20th century when New Zealand was prospering and Australia was still in depression.

Assisted migrants

Others came because they received assisted or free travel on ships from Britain and Ireland. These included:

• settlers brought out in the 1840s by the New Zealand Company or its offshoots, mainly from England and Scotland, to settle in Wellington, Whanganui, Taranaki, Nelson, Otago and Canterbury
• people given cheap tickets or offered free land by New Zealand provinces in the 1850s and 1860s
• people recruited and given cheap fares by the New Zealand government in the 1870s and early 1880s, and before and after the First World War.

Some also came as a result of war – soldiers brought out to fight in the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, and war brides who came with New Zealand soldiers who had fought overseas.

Non-British

Until the Second World War, most immigrants came from Britain and Ireland. Some other groups were:

• A few French and German people who settled at Akaroa in 1840
• Germans, who came to Nelson in the 1840s
• Chinese, attracted by the South Island gold rushes from the 1860s
• Scandinavians, who settled in Manawatū and Hawke’s Bay in the 1870s
• Dalmatians (Croatians), who worked the northern gumfields.

After the Second World War

In the 1950s and 1960s more people were helped to migrate. They included many Dutch and a larger number of English and Scots.

From the mid-1960s, people began to come to New Zealand from Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands and other Pacific islands, attracted by work opportunities.

In 1975 and again in 1987, New Zealand changed its immigration policies to admit people on the basis of their qualifications and not their race. Since then there has been a large inflow of immigrants from Asia, and some from Africa.

New Zealand has become much more multicultural. In 2006 about 67 out of 100 New Zealanders had an exclusively European background. Most of the others had Māori, Pacific Island or Asian ancestors.