‘One of New Zealand’s few really hearty traditions’: Regional Division in New Zealand, 1840-1876.

Abstract

Regional division has been a dominant characteristic of New Zealand society since European settlement but has been basically ignored in both the heuristic pursuit by historians of the ‘nation’ and in the debate over the character of early community challenged by Miles Fairburn with his concept of an atomised society. This thesis acknowledges the profession’s more recent calls for a better understanding of society ‘under the nation’ where the importances of local and regional perspectives have been subjugated in the pursuit of an overarching model. By examining, at a deeper level than has been attempted in the past, the regional issues of governance, settlement and society in the crown colony and provincial periods it establishes that the early concept of the country as a homogeneous entity is without foundation. From their origin, there was neither the inclination nor incentive for regions to cooperate or combine as a single entity or as a ‘nation’. The regions’ founding aspirations were different, they were independent and isolated from each other and it was necessary for them to compete to attract the essential settlers and resources they required to survive and develop. The competing agenda of the Governors, and some of the decisions they made against a settlements’ interest, aggravated the divide between them as did the competition of the colonising crusade. The competition, the isolation and the autonomy the settlers eventually achieved through their provincial governments, developed a divisive climate of regional division with frequent calls for total independence. The regional divide was supported by the leaders of the settlements and society for their own and, what they judged to be, the regions’ advantage, although the feeling did not resonate as strongly with the less privileged in society. Regions’ divergent perceptions of themselves and of other regions become entrenched in persuasive myths of settlement which, whether they have validity or not, have persisted through to the present.