Sketch from the South Bank of the Rangitiki, Captain William Mein Smith, artist, September 1841, Rangitikei, ‘The fittest country in the world for colonisation…the most beautiful country, with the finest climate and the most productive soil’: this was Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s description of New Zealand in 1836.(1) It was also the view promoted by the New Zealand Company, with its aim of recreating a British rural arcadia in the southern hemisphere. The company’s plans involved the sale of land, divided into one-acre ‘town’ sections and hundred-acre ‘country’ sections, to intending settlers. These sales took place in Britain, some even before the company owned any land in New Zealand, and many were made to speculators who had no intention of emigrating.
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