New Zealand

New Zealand rides the boundary where the Pacific and Australian plates grind together. On the South Island the Southern Alps climb to Aoraki/Mount Cook, and the sea has flooded glacial valleys to form the fiords of Fiordland. The North Island is volcanic: Ruapehu rises from a central plateau, Lake Taupō fills the crater of an ancient eruption, and geysers steam around Rotorua. Long isolation left forests full of flightless birds such as the kiwi, with no native land mammals except bats.

Polynesian voyagers, steering by stars and swells, reached these islands around the thirteenth century, among the last sizeable lands to be settled, and their descendants became the Māori. James Cook charted the coast in 1769–70. In February 1840 Māori chiefs and the British Crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi, whose English and Māori texts differ on what was given up, and wars over land followed. In 1893 New Zealand became the first self-governing country where women voted in national elections.

Rugby comes close to a national faith, and the All Blacks face opponents with a haka before every test. Māori custom shapes public occasions, from the pōwhiri welcoming visitors onto a marae to the hāngī, food steamed in an earth oven. Katherine Mansfield wrote the country into literature, and Ernest Rutherford, born near Nelson, discovered the atomic nucleus. Grass drives the economy: dairy herds produce milk powder and butter, sheep give lamb and wool, and kiwifruit and Marlborough sauvignon blanc follow.