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working-class crime and protest [which] is described as if it were based on a minimal social
organisation”. 48 The second was based on the fact that, because New Zealand was viewed as an
open society that did not discriminate against any one class, no competition for status existed, and
therefore neither did the need to keep up traditional Victorian appearances appropriate to one’s
specific class, nor any sense of stigma against economic failure or manual labour; in fact, here,
physical labour was encouraged, as “industry, thrift, and perseverance” were the only “objects of
respect and prestige” due to the only way to earn a living being hard work which, in contrast to
Britain, resulted in more profit, as well as respectable and decent moral virtues. 49
Over time New Zealand further offered “specialist paradises” to cater to various different
walks of life, including “brides, governesses, carpenters, gentry, invalids and investors”: 50
The Pakeha paradise complex offered a bewildering array of heavens on earth: a racial paradise
where Anglo-Saxon virtue flowered; an investors’ paradise, where Old Britons could safely
entrust their money to New Britons; a workers’ paradise full of well-paid jobs; a brides’ paradise
full of well-paid husbands; and a genteel paradise where a little money and status went a lot
further than at home, and where gentility and the work ethic could be more readily reconciled. 51
The various immigration schemes to New Zealand appealed particularly to the poor and
unemployed lower and middle classes, as well as capitalist investors and speculators alike,
through promoting potential wealth, employment and land ownership, in contrast to the
unfavourable conditions at home. 52 When combined with the myth of ‘natural abundance’ (in
reality it was quite limited in size and location, and in most places required much progress to
improve its untamed primitiveness), its uniquely exotic and beautiful character which at the same
time offered a sense of familiarity and safety to the European settler, the rejuvenating and
temperate climate which was highly favourable to the ‘better’ British stock, and the fact that this
latest outpost of the British Empire was a colony not founded on slavery or convicts, it is easy to
see why many felt the long and potentially dangerous voyage to New Zealand was justified. Thus,
it is to these images that we turn when interpreting the written accounts of German-speaking
explorers and travellers during the colonising period of the 1840s to 1880s, whether eventual
48
Ibid., 63.
49
Ibid., 66-73.
50
Ibid., 306.
51
James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders: From the 1880s to the Year 2000. Auckland:
Allen Lane/Penguin Press, 2001, 22.
52
See, for example, Burns, Fatal Success, 191; Judith Bassett, “A Paradise for Working Men 1870-1880”, in: Binney
et al., The People and the Land: Te Tangata me Te Whenua: An Illustrated History of New Zealand, 1820-1920.
Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990, 165-81; Duncan Mackay, Frontier New Zealand: The Search for Eldorado (1800-
1920). Auckland: HarperCollins NZ, 1992.
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