Author(s): George Bowen

History

Last, loneliest, loveliest...

When Rudyard Kipling visited New Zealand in 1891, he stepped ashore onto the last substantial landmass to be permanently settled by humans, the most distant of all countries from traditional centres of civilisation in the North, and perhaps for those reasons still possessing areas of untouched natural beauty. Hence his description. (Milford Sound, Kipling thought, was the eighth wonder of the world.)

Aotearoa/New Zealand has been settled by people for a mere thousand years. For most of those people, putting down roots came hard and Home tended to be a dimly remembered place in the distant North, visited again at death (or at least old age). How do such people, travelling here from many places, settlers in a country whose landscape all those rivers and mountains could seem indifferent to human life and values, form for themselves a unique identity? Have we succeeded yet?