Many travelers heading to the islands of the Maldives will be coming for one thing and one thing only: diving. And there’s hardly a single better place to don the SCUBA gear and wetsuits in the country

As popular as the ostriches are in nearby Oudtshoorn, the Cango Caves is a 20-million year-old system of caves that cut deep into the limestone. Located just 30km from Oudtshoorn in the Klein Karoo, the

Warkworth Satellite Earth Station (1971) Globalisation, Part 2 New Zealand sent its first phone messages to Britain by satellite in 1965 using INTELSAT-1, but the country really entered the space age in

Victoria Channel (1881) Gateway for commerce and industry Think of this as a watery Old Coach Road, for the rules that applied to colonial land transport also worked here. Before modern trucks, forklifts

Totara Estate (1882) Birthplace of the frozen meat industry Totara Estate is one of New Zealand’s most important historic places, more important than these austere Ōamaru stone buildings may suggest. This

The final phase of the New Zealand Wars began in mid-1868, when Tītokowaru attacked colonial troops in South Taranaki and Te Kooti escaped from the Chatham Islands with several hundred followers. Tītokowaru’s

Roslyn Woollen Mill, Dunedin (1879) A major secondary industry Woollen milling was one of our first large secondary industries. Arthur Burns opened the first mill at Mosgiel in 1871 and others followed,

The Waikato War of 1863-64 was the most intensive of ‘Queen Victoria’s little wars’ in New Zealand. By now the government forces were better organised. Governor Grey’s Great South Road was snaking down

Go on in the old fashion/And ne’er improve the town/And still on all new comers/Keep up a fearful down.’ So sang the most popular balladeer of Dunedin’s bustling, booming gold-rush heyday, ‘The Inimitable’

Ōamaru’s coast was just as exposed as Timaru’s. Indeed, for 15 years from the early 1860s it was one of the colony’s most notorious shipwreck sites. But still the ships kept coming, so in time the Oamaru

Pigeon Island Bird Pen (1894) Cradle of conservation ‘With its superfluity of damp and sandflies, it is about the most miserable and useless place that man ever set foot in.’ Pioneer conservationist Richard

When the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 became British law, the colonys 30,000 European inhabitants found themselves ruled by a governor, a two-house General Assembly, six elected provincial superintendents

Pātea Port Works (1881-1901) The big cheese’s graveyard Unlikely as it may seem, ships from Pātea once provided over half of the port of Wellington’s dairy exports. At first called Carlyle, the little

Land transport was difficult and costly in early colonial days. People walked, or if they were lucky, road on bullock carts along beaches or the sort of narrow Māori tracks found in the Ōhariu Valley,

Ōamaru Courthouse (1883) Colonial justice These days Ōamaru is a retirement and heritage centre, but the youthful, male-dominated colonial town was often a noisy, violent and drunken place, where testosterone

New Zealand Clothing Company Building (1883) Hallensteins’ headquarters Hallenstein Brothers, or ‘HB’, as almost everyone called the firm, began in 1873 when German-born merchant Bendix Hallenstein (1835-1905)

Makatote Viaduct (1908) The main trunk unites the North Island The South Island main trunk line linked Christchurch and Dunedin by 1878 and was extended to Invercargill the next year, but another three

Many Māori embraced the new opportunities offered by the international economy. They crewed whale ships, worked at whaling stations, grew crops, exported to Australia and also supplied much of early Auckland

In 1998 George Griffiths and Anthony Ritchie saluted 150 years of organised European settlement in Otago with their musical pageant, From the southern marches. Just before the curtain came down they had

Invercargill Water Tower (1889) Utility and beauty Fire always threatened colonial towns, where the mix of wooden buildings and dry summer spells could be an explosive combination. Local authorities struggled