Touring New Zealand, Edwardian style
In a new book looking at ‘modern’ tourism, Paul Moon reveals how Britons were tempted Downunder
In November 1902, the travel agency Thomas Cook published a guide to what New Zealand offered, mainly to British tourists to the country. This remarkable volume, with the cumbersome title New Zealand as a Tourist and Health Resort: A Handbook to the Hot Lake District, the West Coast Road, the Southern Lakes, Mt. Cook, Sounds, Etc, provides an extremely rare insight into the nature of New Zealand at the start of the Edwardian era, and how this fledgling state wished to parade its attributes to overseas visitors. In the main centres, the country appeared to have shed its colonial skin and had emerged as a modern, urbane, and perkily self-assured nation — small in comparison to its European counterparts, but apparently striving for all the traits of a developed European nation, while still harbouring its status as an antidote to the crowded urban life most Britons endured.
Yes, New Zealand’s cities and towns were clean, new and charming, but it was in the hinterland where the “real” New Zealand — wild, exotic, and “Maori” — existed, waiting to be discovered by the intrepid traveller. The country was depicted in the handbook as a prosperous, ambitious, and happy South Pacific state, made unique by its “magnificent scenery” and its romanticised indigenous population. And, in one of the handbook’s many bursts of enthusiasm, New Zealand was labelled as the “eighth wonder” of the world. Such hyperbole may seem misplaced to modern readers, but at the time of publication these claims appealed enormously to tourists travelling from what must have seemed to be the more sedate and tamed landscapes, particularly of much of England.
Yet, for all its praise for the present and future of the country, the handbook inadvertently captured in vivid detail the tail end of a New Zealand that was fast disappearing. Traces of the country’s recent colonial past kept surfacing and seemed to be competing at times with the more “modern” impression of New Zealand that its authors were striving to project. The upheavals of the preceding four decades, including wars, the confiscation of Maori land, and the ensuing widespread poverty and dispossession of the indigenous population were all carefully painted over with colourful hues emphasising the beauty and leisure opportunities that the country offered.
Another aspect of New Zealand that was heavily emphasised in the handbook but that barely registers nowadays, is the considerable attention devoted to the country’s curative properties, which it was claimed were still largely unknown internationally. The “all-healing” and “medicinal” waters in lakes, rivers, and thermal springs — depicted as the “Sanatorium of Nature” — were such that if and when word got out, the country would not be able to accommodate “the crowds that would flock” to this nearly miraculous feature of New Zealand’s landscape.
But what was it that these tourists were seeking that would prompt them to travel to a location about as far from Britain as it was possible to go? Several reasons coalesced to make New Zealand a desirable destination for the Edwardian British tourist. First, there had been advances in transport in recent decades, which made the journey by steamer from England to New Zealand a comfortable six weeks — just a third of the time it had taken in 1850. There was also the advantage for Britons that destinations such as New Zealand were in the Southern Hemisphere, and therefore offered an escape from Northern Hemisphere winters. And then there was the growth of tourist facilities of a sort that had not existed in many locations just a generation earlier and which now made the process of exploring a country that much more convenient. Less tangible, but just as important, was the way in which “the landscape was appropriated and turned into a playground for whites”. The culture of indigenous groups was
tapped into for its entertainment value, and, while frequently depicted as “primitive”, or “savage”, was presented in a form that was tamed and choreographed for consumption by tourists.
Tourism was beginning to develop into what would later become known as a mass-market industry, with agents such as Thomas Cook enabling travellers to organise and pay for much of their trip before they departed — a concept that was still relatively new but which was rapidly gaining popularity because of the convenience it offered. This, in turn, had a symbiotic relationship with the domestic tourism industry. If visitors were going to enter the country in rapidly increasing numbers, then accommodation and facilities had to be provided for them, which in turn led to the rise in the number of hotels at these destinations.
Organised global travel offered the middle-class Briton an affordable chance to indulge in their own form of Grand Tour. It might have been measured in months rather than years and, to some extent, the search for antiquity had been supplanted by the quest for novelty, but the underlying motive of discovering the Other remained very similar. As the historian F. Robert Hunter described this revolution in tourism:
“Previously, individuals and small groups had travelled for exploration, adventure, trade, learning, and religious inspiration, but not primarily for leisure and recreation, and certainly not en masse ... The aristocracy ... introduced the idea of the sojourn in the countryside, leaving cities for the health-giving waters of Bath or the seaside delights of Brighton and Nice. Modern-day tourism — travel that was affordable, conducted by professionals, and involved large numbers of people on fixed itineraries: this was the direct result of the industrial revolution. Beginning in Britain, the industrial revolution introduced the idea of a work time and a non-work time, a space in which travel for vacation could be introduced. It created industrial and administrative elites who were the first to have paid vacations, and new working and middle classes. And it produced steamships, railways, and telegraphs, which shrank distances between places within countries, and between countries and continents. The potential developed
for a new and important kind of human migration, one offering possibilities for leisure and recreation as well as opportunities for profit.”
A critical aspect of this revolution was the role of advertising. By the Edwardian era, posters, pamphlets, and even postcards served to promote places in ways that had never been undertaken on such a scale before. The image had displaced text as the main means of “selling” a destination and hence certain sites were depicted in ways that emphasised their allure to British audiences. In turn, this cast the British traveller as the visual consumer of foreign locations — even before they had departed. Tourism was finally catching up with other aspects of the industrialised world and was becoming a mass-produced, affordable commodity.
However, there was a paradox that lay at the heart of the burgeoning tourism industry in New Zealand. The very thing it offered visitors — something novel, picturesque, dramatic, and “native” — was precisely what was being eroded by the expansion of accommodation and other facilities that represented much of the urbanised life and surrounds that tourists were paying to escape from. Modernity, it turned out, belonged as much to their destination as their place of departure.
The handbook, the details it contained on structuring a tour through New Zealand, and all the connections with tourism and related businesses in the country, was the product of one of the most successful and enduring British travel
firms: Thomas Cook & Son. Formed in 1841, the firm expanded into various areas of global travel, including organising around-the-world tours from 1872, and, the following year, publishing a timetable covering much of Europe’s railway network.
In 1874, it introduced what it called “circular notes” — a form of de facto currency similar to travellers’ cheques, which not only made travel costs more convenient for the tourist to manage but also gave the firm greater control over both its cash flows and the services it procured for its clients.
The firm’s first office in New Zealand was opened at 103 Queen St, Auckland, in 1888, making it the furthest outpost of this rapidly expanding trans-national travel and tourism venture. By the end of the century, Thomas Cook & Son was selling over 3.5 million tickets annually and had revolutionised the way people travelled globally.
A key element in the firm’s success was the production of guides for the various countries it operated in. By the beginning of the 20th century, there were guides on Belgium, France, China, Britain, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, North Africa, Palestine, Syria, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Spain and New Zealand.