Migration

• The journey by sea took 100 days, and voyagers endured rough seas, cramped conditions and illness
• Many people were reluctant to emigrate unless they were offered free travel or other rewards
• Migrants who came via Australia

  • Whalers and sealers, New Zealand's earliest non‐Māori settlers
  • Gold miners, who often 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 in depression
• Assisted migrants


  • Settlers (brought out by the New Zealand Company or its off‐shoots) mainly from England and Scotland in the 1840s to settle in Wellington, Nelson, Wanganui, Taranaki, Canterbury and Otago
  • 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, early 1880s, and before and after the First World War
• Migrants who came as a result of war

  • Soldiers brought out to fight in the New Zealand wars of the 1860s
  • War brides who came with New Zealand soldiers who had fought overseas
• Non-British migrants before WWII

  • A few French people at Akaroa in 1840
  • Germans, who came to Nelson in the 1840s
  • Scandinavians, who settled in Manawatū and Hawke's Bay in the 1870s
  • Chinese, attracted by the gold rushes (1860s)
  • Dalmatians, working the northern gumfields (1880s)
• Migrants after WWII


  • Many Dutch and a larger number of English and Scots in the 1950s and 1960s
  • People from Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands and other Pacific islands, attracted by work opportunities from the mid-1960s on
  • Immigrants from Asia and some from Africa since 1975 and 1987 when New Zealand changed its immigration policies to admit people on the basis of their qualifications and not their race