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 "Māori" — 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 Māori 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.
