Wartime controls ended in 1950, allowing New Zealanders to look forward to an era of postwar 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. Playwright Bruce Mason captured the mood in The End of the Golden Weather (first performed in 1960), his dramatic solo performance about a summer in a boy’s childhood.

The final three decades of the twentieth century bore witness to the most violent ruptures since colonisation and the two world wars. Revolutions in economic, defence, and public policy altered how this small country related to the world, shook the political landscape into new patterns, and unsettled the settler society. New Zealanders found themselves gasping from the change of water in their fishbowl, their ways of life buffeted and transformed. Suddenly – but not inevitably – governments demolished institutions that had been political defining features. It was as if, overnight, everyone lived in another country, so radical were the shifts in values.

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 Māori. From the 1860s the scales of power tipped to the settler society. Within a generation, Māori shrank from being most of the population to a small minority. The amount of land in Māori ownership, already much diminished, halved between 1860 and 1891. But pockets of resistance nurtured a proud legacy that would recalibrate relations a century and more later.

How and when did New Zealand Aotearoa begin? In human history the short answer is recently. New Zealand was the last major landmass settled by people, which is fundamental to understanding New Zealand’s distinctiveness. Before humans arrived, birds and lizards were the dominant land animals. Archaeologists have agreed, after decades of debate, that the first humans arrived from the late thirteenth century, about 750 years ago. These adventurers undertook epic, oceanic voyages in large, double-hulled waka hourua (voyaging canoes) from their legendary homeland of Hawaiki, in East Polynesia, southwards to the temperate region of ‘South Polynesia’, a term coined to encompass both New Zealand’s main islands and its outlying islands. Today, the indigenous people trace their ancestors to over 40 celebrated waka (canoes). South Polynesia as a concept reminds us that New Zealand is a far-flung archipelago that stretches from Raoul Island, in the subtropical Kermadec group, to the subantarctic Auckland Islands, and to the Chatham Islands, which lie 800 kilometres to the east of the South Island.

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 and to manage the social outcomes by building an edifice of progressive liberal ‘state experiments’. Led by Premiers John Ballance (1891-3), Richard Seddon (1893-1906), and Sir Joseph Ward (1906-12) – two of whom were Irish-born and all of whom were immigrants – a series of Liberal governments from 1891 to 1912 set out to transform New Zealand into a democratic social laboratory. In doing so, they enacted an Australasian model of state development.

Globalisation has always shaken the kaleidoscope of connections between people into new patterns. In the greatest global shift of power since the United States assumed Britain’s former role in the world, China and India returned to global supremacy in the twenty-first century. By 2000, China loomed on the horizon as the next global juggernaut. Half a millennium after Europe rose to dominance, the world witnessed a fundamental rebalancing of West and East from the developed countries to the developing powers of North and South Asia. This metamorphosis in economic and power relations reshaped New Zealand’s export economy.

Struggles for land have swirled around the Treaty of Waitangi ever since it was first signed, on 6 February 1840. An instrument unique less in its making than in what it has become, as a constitutional document and guarantee of indigenous rights, it met grand goals at minimal cost. Beforehand, on 30 January, Captain William Hobson, who had landed in the Bay of Islands the previous day, read three announcements at the Anglican Church in Kororāreka (Russell). 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 to the British Empire by consent Hobson next drafted a treaty, as instructed by the Colonial Office.

Uncertainty and disaster lurked despite New Zealand’s remoteness, for danger lay within. In March 2019, mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques shocked the country and the world. New Zealand was supposed to be a peaceful place; it enjoyed a reputation for peace, not violence. Terrorism and mass murder were alien, except for episodes in the colonial New Zealand Wars or the invasion of Parihaka, a forerunner of passive resistance, in 1881.

The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a formative era in nation-building, through the conscious ‘making’ of New Zealand. At the same time, New Zealanders had to ‘make do’ through depression and another world war, and these global onslaughts only intensified the quest for security at home and abroad. Making do and creating a nation moved in symbiosis, because, as often happens with the evolution of a sense of national identity, panic, crisis, anxiety, or rupture produces stories and rituals to soothe and explain. This context saw the rise to power of the first Labour government, which resolved to pick up where the 1890s’ Liberal model of state development left off.

‘In New Zealand more than in any country in the world we find justification for the words of the Bible, “All flesh is as 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 centennial, 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.