Historical Dictionary of New Zealand (3rd edition)

摘要

New Zealand or Aotearoa, "the land of the long white cloud", sits alone in the Pacific Ocean nearly 1,000 miles to the east of Australia. With a unique but now sadly diluted flora and fauna, it was one of the last significant land masses to be inhabited by humans. The Maori peoples only arrived from about 1200 CE with the first European settlers not following until the early years of the nineteenth century. Today the population totals a little over four and a half million relatively thinly spread across slightly more than 100,000 square miles and famously outnumbered by sheep. Barry Humphries once cruelly quipped "New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand million (sic) sheep, three million of whom think they are human". Sheep numbers have declined and the human population grown since this acid remark, but New Zealand remains a small country, its population well under 0.1 per cent of the global total. As users of this book will discover, however, it is a country that "punches above its weight" and whose people are far from sheepish. New Zealanders have conquered Everest (Hillary), fathered nuclear physics (Rutherford), excelled on the athletic track (Snell), reached new operatic heights (Te Kanawa) and humiliated far more populous nations on the rugby pitch (All Blacks).