New Zealanders love to travel and, in particular, we love travelling overseas. In March 2020, that all came to an abrupt halt when the government closed the borders due to the Covid pandemic.
Afternoons resident historian, Dr Grant Morris from Victoria University, charts the golden age of New Zealand overseas travel from the mid-1960s to 2020.
Morris tells Jesse Mulligan that, before air travel, going by boat to places like England was difficult, lengthy, and expensive.
Air New Zealand plane. Photo: Supplied / Air NZ
“Just factoring in all of the costs involved and the time and you can get an idea of how limited that would be for most people.”
The exception that was Australia given its proximity to New Zealand.
“But even Australia, you’re on a boat for several days and it wasn’t as prevalent as one might think.”
The seeds for commercial passenger flights were embedded in the technological advances for planes in World War II, such as jet propulsion, but Morris says that took a while to translate and get to New Zealand.
“Developments that were happening in the United States and Europe took some time to get to New Zealand.”
It was in the 1960s that Air New Zealand moved from propeller to jet propulsion and other airlines decided to start to fly to Auckland.
“Then, the world starts to open up… when you’re getting the jet airplane, you’re getting something which takes something similar to what we’d expect today, to get to the UK with one major stop.”
Early on, flights overseas were expensive and overseas travel remained the domain of the rich and upper middle class until an economic of scale was reached.
By the 1970s, the idea of Kiwi overseas experience in the UK was fairly entrenched. Shorter trips saw Kiwis heading to Australia and South East Asia.
With lower cost airfares driven by more competition in the 1990s, overseas travel was available to huge range of New Zealanders and Morris believes we took that for granted until it came to an abrupt end last year.
“We’re living through history at the moment, we’re living through a massive change and one of those is the way we look outward. Many of us have now become used to overseas travel for holidays. It’s become part of our lives.”
