Aotearoa, year by year
Two centuries of Aotearoa New Zealand history, on the map where it happened.
- 122 events
- 1800–2000 two centuries
- 17 regions
- every entry sourced
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Drag the timeline, or press play. Click any marker to read about it, then follow the link for the full account. Open the full-screen map →
How to read this map
Colour carries the meaning. Each region takes on a blend of whatever is happening inside it, so a year of war and a year of reform look different at a glance. Each colour is also a way in — follow one to see every event under that theme.
- Treaty & Crown–Māori relations18
- War & conflict23
- Government & law27
- Social change & rights16
- Economy & industry15
- Settlement & migration9
- Disaster9
- Culture, science & sport5
A brighter, outlined region means an event names that place directly. A faint wash means something national is under way that touches everywhere.
A pulsing marker is one of the 47 nationally defining moments. Fading markers are events that ended in the last few years.
Defining moments
Eight of the turning points, spread across the two centuries.
The Musket Wars
Musket-armed war parties reshaped the map of Māori New Zealand. Perhaps 20,000 died and whole districts changed hands before the fighting burned out around 1840.
New Zealand Constitution Act
Representative government arrived, divided into six provinces — and the property franchise excluded almost all Māori, who held land communally.
The Native Land Court is established
The court converted customary communal title into individual freehold — the mechanism by which most remaining Māori land was lost, without a shot fired.
New Zealand enters the First World War
About 100,000 served overseas from a population of just over a million. Around 18,000 died and 41,000 were wounded — proportionally among the heaviest losses of any country.
Social Security Act
Free hospital care, subsidised doctors’ visits and universal benefits from cradle to grave — among the most comprehensive welfare systems in the world at the time.
The Tangiwai railway disaster
A lahar from Mount Ruapehu swept away the rail bridge over the Whangaehu River minutes before the Wellington–Auckland express reached it, killing 151 people.
TangiwaiThe Bastion Point occupation
Takaparawhau
Ngāti Whātua occupied their remaining ancestral land for 506 days against a government subdivision. Police and army removed them, arresting 222 people.
Takaparawhau, ŌrākeiHomosexual Law Reform Act
Sex between men over 16 was decriminalised, after a sixteen-month campaign and one of the most vitriolic public debates in modern New Zealand.
Parliament, WellingtonNew Zealand was the last large habitable landmass on earth that people reached. Polynesian voyagers arrived around 1300, which makes the entire human history of these islands about seven centuries — shorter than several European cathedrals have been standing. The two hundred years on this map are more than a quarter of it.
That compression is why the timeline feels crowded. Someone born the year before Te Tiriti was signed could have lived to see the 1893 election, when New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world where women could vote. One lifetime spans a country with no Crown presence at all and one shipping frozen lamb to London.
And a single argument runs the whole length of it. The wars of the 1860s, the Native Land Court, Parihaka, the land march of 1975, the settlements of the 1990s — nearly all of it traces back to two texts signed at Waitangi in 1840 that did not say the same thing. Drag the slider and much of what you are watching is the consequence of that.
Browse by era
Nine periods, each with its own character and its own arguments. The bar shows how much of the two centuries each one covers.
- 1800–1839Contact & the musket era17 events
- 1840–1859Crown colony20 events
- 1860–1872The New Zealand Wars16 events
- 1873–1889Colonial consolidation7 events
- 1890–1911The Liberal experiment9 events
- 1912–1938War, slump & reform13 events
- 1939–1959Total war & the welfare state14 events
- 1960–1983Protest & renaissance16 events
- 1984–2000Reform & settlement16 events
How this was made
Every event carries at least one citation, and nothing goes in without one. Summaries are written for this project rather than copied, and boundaries are the modern regions — which makes colouring Waikato in 1863 deliberately anachronistic.
Read the method and sources