Canterbury, New Zealand
The Shape of It
A hundred miles of flat, a wall of mountains, and a peninsula no one knew was attached.
Canterbury is New Zealand’s largest region, which means something particular here: a vast flat plain pressed between the Southern Alps and the Pacific, braided rivers running across it in dozens of channels, and a sky that can change its mind in an hour. William Pember Reeves, born in Lyttelton in 1857 and as good a witness as any, wrote that the Canterbury Plains constituted “about as flat a stretch of one hundred miles as is to be found in the world.” He meant it as geography, not complaint.
To the west, the Southern Alps rear up abruptly — not a gradual climb but a wall, the Main Divide carrying glaciers and snowfields and the country’s highest peaks. To the east, the Pacific. The flatness of the plains is not accidental: it is made of gravel fans, material that millions of years of Alpine grinding have sent tumbling out of the mountains and spread in layers across what was once a shallow sea. The rivers that built it — the Waimakariri, Rakaia, Rangitātā, Waitaki — continue to rework it, switching channels without notice and making flood management a permanent local occupation.
Banks Peninsula juts into the Pacific from the middle of the Canterbury coast. It is the eroded remnant of two overlapping shield volcanoes — the inner harbour at Lyttelton is actually the flooded crater of one of them — and from offshore, with its bays and inlets, it looks entirely like an island. Captain James Cook, surveying the east coast in 1770 without landing, concluded that it was, and mapped it accordingly as “Banks Island.” In 1809 Captain Chase of the survey vessel Pegasus attempted to sail between Banks Island and the mainland, and discovered his map was wrong. The discovery ended four decades of geographical confidence but did not prevent Banks Peninsula retaining its inaccurate name in the singular.
The Port Hills form the southern edge of Christchurch — the rim of that same flooded volcano, separating the city from its port. To cross them on foot before 1867 meant the Bridle Path, a steep track up which the first settlers had to haul everything they owned. Even after the road tunnel opened in 1964, the hills divided two communities that were technically one city. In the February 2011 earthquake, the epicentre was at the Port Hills, and the hillside suburb of Sumner lost houses to rockfall and cliff collapse. The hills were not done with anyone.
Inland, beyond the plains and their edge of foothills, the high country opens into something altogether different: the Mackenzie Basin, broad and tussocky, its lakes the colour of glacial flour, its skies usually enormous. Lake Tekapo and Lake Pūkaki are fed by meltwater carrying suspended rock particles so fine they reflect blue and green. The basin sits at around 700 metres and was, until the 1850s, entirely unknown to European settlers.
The Plan
England abroad: a carefully designed colony that arrived to find the mud had its own ideas.
Most colonies happen. Canterbury was designed. In 1848, a group of Anglicans in London formed the Canterbury Association with a specific goal: to recreate in New Zealand a stable, class-ordered, Church of England society — the kind that England itself seemed increasingly unable to maintain. There would be rich landowners, tenant farmers, skilled tradespeople, and servants, all in their proper ratios, presided over by a bishop. They would send four ships at once, carrying different classes of people simultaneously, so that no class arrived to find itself alone.
It was decided “to call it Canterbury after our ecclesiastical mother.”
Dr John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury, was elected president.
The city was named not after Christchurch in Hampshire, as the local Archdeacon long believed, but after Christ Church, Oxford — confirmed by J.R. Godley, the Association’s Oxford-educated founder, who wrote to his father in 1851: “I hope my old college is grateful to me for naming the future capital after it.” The Archdeacon had noticed a river running through the settlement bearing the name Avon and concluded there was a Hampshire connection. He was wrong on two counts. The Avon was named by the Deans brothers — Scottish settlers who arrived before the Association’s ships — after a river in Ayrshire that formed the boundary of their grandfather’s estate. Shakespeare’s Avon had nothing to do with it.
The original plan, drawn up by chief surveyor Captain Joseph Thomas, had located Christchurch at the head of Lyttelton Harbour, with a subordinate town called Stratford on the Avon where Christchurch now stands. The geography of the harbour made this impractical, and Thomas eventually placed the port at Lyttelton and the city on the plains. The name Stratford was quietly dropped. Something to consider when crossing Colombo Street.
The four ships arrived in December 1850: the Charlotte Jane, Sir George Seymour, Randolph, and Cressy. They disembarked at Lyttelton to find that the only route to Christchurch was a steep narrow track over the Port Hills — the Bridle Path — suitable for pack horses, not for families carrying furniture, trunks, and the contents of a life transplanted. Heavy goods went by sea around to the mouth of the Heathcote River, were unloaded, transferred to wagons, and dragged to the swamp that was to become the Garden City. It took seventeen years before a tunnel connected Lyttelton to the plains by rail.
The tunnel that would eventually connect city to port was proposed almost before the ships had finished unloading, but it took until 1857 for Superintendent William Moorhouse — “Railway Billy” — to convince a reluctant council to proceed. English contractors made a start, struck hard rock, demanded more money, and went home. Australian contractors took over in 1861. The two headings finally met in May 1867, after six years of drilling through the walls of an extinct volcano. The Lyttelton rail tunnel, at 2.6 kilometres, was the first tunnel in the world through a volcanic crater, and the longest in New Zealand. It is still in use.
Later arrivals from Australia were known to the original Canterbury Association settlers as “shagroons” — squatters who had not come via the approved route and therefore did not quite count. Canterbury society had its own social cartography, and it used it.
The French
How Banks Peninsula came within five days of being the nucleus of a French South Island.
In 1838, a French whaling captain named Jean François Langlois negotiated the purchase of most of Banks Peninsula from Ngāi Tahu chiefs for 1,000 francs — approximately £40 — with a deposit of 150 francs paid in goods, including a pistol. He returned to France, formed a company with Nantes and Bordeaux merchants, and secured royal support. King Louis-Philippe approved the scheme: France would have a Pacific colony, the settlers anchored at Akaroa and linked to a proposed penal settlement in the Chatham Islands. The plan was not modest.
Captain Charles François Lavaud sailed from France in February 1840 with the naval corvette Aube. The emigrant ship Comte de Paris followed in March, carrying 59 settlers. What neither ship knew was that in their absence, the situation had changed entirely: the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed on 6 February, and British sovereignty over the whole country declared in May. Lieutenant-Governor Hobson, learning of the French plans, dispatched HMS Britomart to Akaroa to make the position clear.
The Britomart entered Akaroa Harbour on 10 August 1840. The Aube followed five days later. The Comte de Paris — its passengers still unaware that they had nothing to colonise — arrived two days after that. As the settlers sailed up the harbour on 17 August, the Union Jack was already flying from the flagpole.
“The wheat seems better than in France. All the vegetables are growing well. It is truly regrettable that we arrived here after the British.”
Lavaud accepted that France could not create a colony without causing a diplomatic incident it could not win, and allowed his settlers to establish themselves on land allocated to them under British oversight. They built houses, roads, wharves, a church and a hospital. French priests taught the children. The local bishop arrived, found the settlers irreligiously apathetic, and left in disgust. The French navy departed in 1846 as the whaling trade declined. Most settlers stayed and became naturalised British subjects.
Akaroa today retains French street names — some genuine, some added in the 1960s for the tourist trade — and the Langlois-Eteveneaux Cottage, one of the oldest buildings in Canterbury, the last standing French colonial structure. The Comte de Paris descendants still meet to celebrate their connection to the settlement. In a 2002 New Zealand novel, Son of France, Christchurch is reimagined as Sainte-Chapelle, the country’s capital is New Lyon, and Wellington is the only part of the country in British hands. It was translated into French as Graine de France. This is the novel the other timeline probably has on every shelf.
The Nor’wester
Te Hau Kai Tangata: the cannibal wind.
Canterbury has a wind that is genuinely its own. It begins as a moisture-laden westerly in the Tasman Sea, rises over the Southern Alps, and deposits most of its moisture as rain — sometimes twelve metres of it a year — on the West Coast. As it descends on the eastern side, it compresses, heats, and dries. By the time it reaches Christchurch, it is no longer the same wind at all: hot, dry, sometimes gusting to 130 km/h, and laden with positive ions and fine gravel from the riverbeds. It can push the temperature to 30°C on what began as a mild afternoon.
The Ngāi Tahu called it Te Hau Kai Tangata: the cannibal wind, or “the wind that devours humankind.” Early Pākehā settlers wrote about it with a mixture of dread and exhaustion. The shagroon Mark Stoddart put it in verse:
I’ve witnessed all the winds that blow,
From Land’s End to Barbadoes —
Typhoons, pamperos, hurricanes,
Eke terrible tornadoes.
— Mark Stoddart, settler, on the Canterbury nor’wester
The nor’wester’s approach is announced by a distinctive cloud formation: a band of high white lenticular cloud known as the nor’west arch, or the Canterbury arch, which forms against an otherwise clear blue sky above the Southern Alps. Once you know what it means, it is not a welcome sight.
The wind typically ends with a southerly change — a rapid, drenching reversal that can bring snow at sea level in winter and relief at any time of year. The Christchurch Botanical Gardens contain an aeolian harp, made by composer Chris Cree Brown, designed to sound in the lightest of breezes. In a strong nor’wester it probably sounds like something being dismantled.
Notable Folk
A tennis player the world mourned, a sheep thief the world named a country after, and a man whose dog had better professional ethics than he did.
The son of a wealthy English immigrant family, Wilding grew up at Fownhope, a Christchurch property large enough to contain private tennis courts, a swimming pool, a cricket wicket, and a croquet green. He won the Canterbury Championships at seventeen, studied law at Trinity College Cambridge (the tennis courts took more of his attention than the law torts), and between 1910 and 1913 won four consecutive Wimbledon singles titles — the only New Zealander ever to win a Grand Slam singles title, before or since.
He was tall, fair-haired, and did not drink or smoke, which was unusual for the era. He followed a rigorous training programme. When he lost the 1914 Wimbledon final, women in the stands took out handkerchiefs and cried. His obituary in the Christchurch Press noted that he had “carried the name of the Dominion into regions of the earth where it was probably unknown until it became associated with his fame.”
Wilding joined the Royal Marines when war broke out. The evening before his death at Neuve Chapelle, a fellow officer told him he had been “in rotten form” at the previous year’s Wimbledon. “One can’t always be at one’s best,” Wilding replied. He was killed by a shell the next morning, 9 May 1915. He was thirty-one. His sister Cora later founded both the Youth Hostel Association of New Zealand and the Sunlight League, which established health camps for children. The family were good at institutions.
In March 1855, a Scottish shepherd named James Mackenzie — speaking poor English but fluent Gaelic, origin obscure, motives disputed — drove 1,000 stolen sheep from the Levels Station near Timaru over a remote mountain pass into a broad inland basin that no European pastoralist yet knew existed. He was assisted by a Border collie named Friday, who had been trained not to bark.
He was caught by the station manager and two Māori shepherds, escaped the same night, walked a hundred miles to Lyttelton barefoot, and was recaptured there. Over the next nine months he escaped twice more and had to be put in irons before a pardon was arranged, apparently due to a miscarriage of justice involving a mystery employer no one could identify. He paid his passage to Australia the same month his pardon was granted and was never heard from again.
Friday, after her master’s arrest, continued to drive the stolen flock alone. She attacked anyone who approached and could not be restrained. The high country Mackenzie had discovered was promptly settled by other pastoralists, who named it the Mackenzie Country — not after Friday, who arguably deserved it more. A bronze statue of Friday stands at Lake Tekapo; there is no statue of Mackenzie. Samuel Butler, who briefly ran a station near there in the 1860s, noted that Mackenzie’s “boldness and skill won him sympathy and admiration.”
Born in Lyttelton three weeks after his parents arrived from England, Reeves was to say that he was a New Zealander, but “only just managed it.” He became, in turn, a lawyer, a cricket-playing Canterbury parliamentarian (one of the best Canterbury bats of his era), Minister of Labour under the Liberal government, the man responsible for some of New Zealand’s most progressive labour legislation of the 1890s, and eventually director of the London School of Economics. Allen Curnow, in the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, called him “New Zealand’s first eminent statesman and law giver, and her first native-born poet worth the name.”
His 1898 history, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa, remained the standard account of New Zealand until the 1950s. He was offered a knighthood three times and declined it three times. His son Fabian, christened so because of Reeves’s socialist sympathies, was killed in the First World War at twenty-one. Reeves died in London in 1932, at seventy-five, and is mostly unknown in the country he wrote the first proper history of.
A farmer near Temuka who built his own engines because no suitable lightweight engines could be bought, made his own tools, and constructed a flying machine from bamboo and scrap metal in his farm workshop. Witnesses interviewed many years later recalled seeing him fly — and crash — on 31 March 1903, nine months before the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk. His father and uncle walked up to the workshop one Sunday and returned saying: “If he gets that contraption in the air he will fall out and kill himself.”
The ambiguity in Pearse’s own statements — he sometimes said he didn’t achieve anything “practical” until 1904 — makes a definitive claim impossible. His biographer credits him with several genuinely advanced design concepts: monoplane configuration, wing flaps, tricycle undercarriage with steerable nosewheel, and variable-pitch propeller blades. He largely abandoned his aviation work around 1911 and spent the rest of his life in quiet, obscure tinkering. He died in 1953, the year of powered flight’s fiftieth anniversary. The Wright Brothers had ceremonies.
Ian Brackenbury Channell, former RAF navigator and academic psychologist, arrived in Christchurch in 1974 and began addressing crowds from a stepladder in Cathedral Square on subjects ranging from free speech to the necessity of inverting the world map so that New Zealand appeared at the top. The city council initially attempted to have him arrested. He became popular enough that they made Cathedral Square a public speaking area instead.
In 1982 the New Zealand Art Gallery Directors Association declared him an authentic living work of art. In 1990, Prime Minister Mike Moore appointed him Wizard of New Zealand. In 1998 the Christchurch City Council signed a contract paying him $16,000 a year “to provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch.” During his tenure he performed rain dances in Canterbury and the Australian outback, repainted a blue telephone box red in a twelve-day campaign against Telecom, and led a wizards’ conclave that descended by gondola from the Port Hills bearing the address of his new website. The council terminated his contract in October 2021, after twenty-three years. He said he would continue appearing in the city regardless, and that they would have to kill him to stop him.
Place Names
The names the Association gave to the rivers did not survive. The rivers knew their own names.
The Canterbury Association’s surveyors gave the main rivers English names. The Waimakariri became the Courtenay; the Rakaia, the Cholmondeley; the Rangitātā, the Alford. None of them stuck. The settlers presumably could not face writing “Cholmondeley” in their letters home. Waimakariri means “wintry cold water.” The Kaikōura district, further north, takes its name from a Māori phrase meaning “the fire where crayfish were cooked.” Both are better descriptions than what they were replaced with.
The naming of Banks Peninsula as “Banks Island” by Captain Cook in 1770 was a reasonable mistake from a man who surveyed it from offshore and couldn’t get close enough to see whether it was connected. He named it after the botanist Joseph Banks, sailing with him on the Endeavour. Cook made similar island errors in New Zealand, and this was considered more forgivable than the one that led to the naming of the Marlborough Sounds. The error in Banks Peninsula’s case was corrected in 1809, when Captain Chase of the Pegasus tried to sail between it and the mainland and discovered he couldn’t.
Did You Know?
Things that happened, things that didn’t, and one dog who never got a biography.
- That the Christchurch Avon is named after a small river in Ayrshire, Scotland — and has nothing whatsoever to do with Shakespeare, Stratford, or Christchurch in Hampshire? The Archdeacon of Canterbury believed otherwise for years and wrote accordingly.
- That the Canterbury Association’s chief surveyor, when planning the settlement in 1849, intended to put Christchurch at the head of Lyttelton Harbour and call the settlement on the Avon “Stratford”? The geography proved impractical. Canterbury narrowly avoided being named after a different Shakespeare play.
- That Captain Cook mapped Banks Peninsula as an island in 1770 because it looks like one from offshore — and that the error stood on maps for nearly forty years before anyone tried sailing between it and the mainland?
- That the Lyttelton rail tunnel, completed in 1867, was the first tunnel in the world driven through the side of an extinct volcano — connecting a port of roughly 2,000 people to a city of roughly 3,000 at a cost of £195,000? The English contractors walked off the job after hitting hard rock. Australian contractors finished it.
- That James Mackenzie, after escaping twice from gaol, being put in irons, serving nine months of a five-year sentence, and being pardoned for an apparent miscarriage of justice, paid his passage to Australia the very month of his release and was never seen or heard from again? No one knows what became of him.
- That Friday — Mackenzie’s Border collie — continued to drive the stolen sheep after her master was arrested, attacking anyone who came near, and had to be forcibly restrained? The Mackenzie Country is named after the man; there is a bronze statue at Lake Tekapo for the dog.
- That Richard Pearse, a South Canterbury farmer who may have built and flown a heavier-than-air powered aircraft nine months before the Wright Brothers, largely gave up aviation around 1911 and lived obscurely until his death in 1953? A tiled path in Wānaka once commemorated 1903 as the year of the world’s first powered flight, “in Timaru”, with the Wright Brothers listed as having also flown that year. The tiles were removed in 2019.
- That Anthony Wilding, four-time Wimbledon champion, was told the evening before his death at Neuve Chapelle that he had been “in rotten form” in the previous year’s Wimbledon final? He replied: “One can’t always be at one’s best.” He was killed by a shell the following morning. He was thirty-one.
- That Wilding’s sister Cora, less famous than her brother, founded the Youth Hostel Association of New Zealand and the Sunlight League, which established health camps for children? The family had a gift for practical institutions.
- That William Pember Reeves, who wrote the first comprehensive history of New Zealand and helped found the London School of Economics, was offered a knighthood three times and declined each time? He is now largely unknown in the country whose history he wrote.
- That the Christchurch City Council paid its official wizard $16,000 a year from 1998 to 2021 for “acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services”? That the French whaling captain who initiated the Akaroa colonisation scheme paid a deposit of 150 francs for most of Banks Peninsula, in goods — including a pistol?
- That the French regional governor, surveying what the British had just claimed, observed wistfully that “the wheat seems better than in France”?
- That the nor’wester — Canterbury’s hot, dry föhn wind — has been statistically linked to a ten percent increase in violent crime on days it blows, as well as increased hospital admissions for diabetes and renal failure? The Ngāi Tahu called it Te Hau Kai Tangata: the cannibal wind.
- That the Canterbury Rugby Football Union, founded in 1879, was the first rugby union in New Zealand — and that the provincial team have played in black and red ever since, a combination the Crusaders franchise eventually adopted along with rather more marketing?
- That the French bishop sent to minister to the Akaroa settlers in 1840 eventually closed his mission and left “in disgust, due to the religious apathy of the French immigrants”? He had come all the way from France. They were, it seems, not in need of saving.
This page draws on Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand; NZ History Online (Manatū Taonga); the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography; William Pember Reeves, The Long White Cloud: Ao Tea Roa (London, 1898); New Zealand Geographic (various issues, including the nor’wester and Canterbury tales articles); Christchurch City Libraries’ resources on Anthony Wilding and The Wizard; Peter Tremewan, French Akaroa (Canterbury University Press, 2010); and contemporary newspaper records. The selection, arrangement, and editorial commentary are a later hand’s. All errors of fact are ours; the dog Friday requires no further advocacy.