page_title: Australia–New Zealand relations
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Australia–New Zealand relations / History
caption_attribution_description: English: How we see it. A cartoon depicting New Zealand's reaction to Australia's invitation to join their federation.
context_page_description: Australia–New Zealand relations, also referred to as Trans-Tasman relations, are extremely close. Both countries share a British colonial heritage as antipodean Dominions and settler colonies, and both are part of the wider Anglosphere. New Zealand sent representatives to the constitutional conventions which led to the uniting of the six Australian colonies but opted not to join. In the Boer War and in both world wars, New Zealand soldiers fought alongside Australian soldiers. In recent years the Closer Economic Relations free trade agreement and its predecessors have inspired ever-converging economic integration. Despite some shared similarities, the cultures of Australia and New Zealand also have their own sets of differences and there are sometimes differences of opinion which some have declared as symptomatic of sibling rivalry. This often centres upon sports and in commercio-economic tensions, such as those arising from the failure of Ansett Australia and those engendered by the formerly long-standing Australian ban on New Zealand apple imports.
context_section_description: The microcontinent Zealandia, of which present day New Zealand represents the largest unsubmerged part, probably separated from Antarctica between 130 and 85 million years ago and then from the separate continent of Australia 60–85 million years ago in the break-up of East Gondwana occurring in the Cretaceous and early Paleogene geologic periods. Zealandia and Australia together are part of the wider regions known as Oceania and Australasia. Australia, New Zealand's North Island and the northwest of the South Island are on the Indo-Australian Plate, with the remainder of the South Island on the Pacific Plate.
  The History of Indigenous Australians on their own continent is generally thought to be rich to the extent of at least 40,000–45,000 years duration, whereas Polynesian Māori arrived in Aotearoa/New Zealand in several waves by means of waka some time before 1300. Indigenous Australians and Polynesian Māori indigenous to New Zealand are not recorded to have met or interacted prior to 17th and 18th century European exploration of Australia. Regarding the respective indigenous populations, while it may be said that there is a single Māori language and the iwi have been able to present as a unified population represented by a monarch neither has ever been able to be said of the Australian Aboriginal languages or their corresponding population groups.
  The first European landing on the Australian continent occurred in the Janszoon voyage of 1605–06. Abel Tasman in two distinct voyages in the period 1642–1644 is recorded as the first person to have coastally explored regions of the respective landforms including Van Diemen's Land – later named for him as the Australian state of Tasmania. The first voyage of James Cook stands as significant for the circumnavigation of New Zealand in 1769 and as the European discovery and first ever coastal navigation of Eastern Australia from April to August 1770. The European settlement of Australia and New Zealand, then referred to as the colony of New South Wales, dates from the arrival of the First Fleet into Cadi/Port Jackson on Australia Day, 1788.
  New Zealand was separated from the Colony of New South Wales in 1840, at which time its pākehā population number about 2000 descended from Christian missionaries, sealers, and whalers (as opposed to mainland Australia's much larger penal colony population).
  Although it is accurate to distinguish that New Zealand was never a penal colony, neither were some of the Australian colonies. In particular, South Australia was founded and settled in a similar manner to New Zealand, both being influenced by the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
  Both countries experienced ongoing internal conflict concerning indigenous and settler populations, although this conflict took very different forms most sharply manifested in the New Zealand Wars and Australian frontier wars respectively. Whereas Maori iwi endured the Musket Wars of the period 1807–1839 preceding the former in New Zealand, indigenous Australians have no comparable period of the experience of warfare amongst each other employing European-introduced modern weaponry either before or after their own confrontations with European settler society. Both countries experienced nineteenth century gold rushes and during the nineteenth century there was extensive trade and travel between the colonies.
  New Zealand participated as a member of the Federal Council of Australasia from 1885 and fully involved itself among the other self-governing colonies in the 1890 conference and 1891 Convention leading up to Federation of Australia. Ultimately it declined to accept the invitation to join the Commonwealth of Australia resultingly formed in 1901, remaining as a self-governing colony until becoming the Dominion of New Zealand in 1907 and with other territories later constituting the Realm of New Zealand effectively as an independent country of its own. In the 1908 Olympics, the 1911 Festival of Empire and the 1912 Olympics the two countries were represented at least in sporting competition as the unified entity "
caption: Political cartoon from 1900 that shows the colonies of New Zealand and Fiji rejecting the offer to join the Federation of Australia, with Zealandia referencing Australia's origins as a penal colony.
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