I was reading about the history of the gold rush in Otago in the 1860s, and the author consistently referred to the seven colonies – basically the six colonies of colonial Australia plus New Zealand.

And certainly in the 1860s the seven colonies formed a little British community trading and squabbling among themselves with little industry to speak of – most manufactured items were imported. For example Australia didn’t get round to making making its own glass medicine bottles until the early 1870s, and glass beer bottles were also usually imported from England until around the same time.

Incidentally, even though glass bottle manufacturing started in the 1870s, the import trade continued – when the Fiji went down in 1891, part of her cargo was glass medicine bottles imported from Germany.

Now, in 1889, when Henry Parkes gave the Tenterfield oration, he urged the seven colonies to form a federation, and indeed right until the 1920s there was an assumption that New Zealand would some day join Australia – its why Canberra Avenue in Canberra was originally going to be named Wellington Avenue and why it passes the suburb of Manuka. Its also why there’s still a reference to New Zealand joining in the Australian Constitution.

Well, New Zealand never did, and became a successful nation in its own right, rather than ending up as a second Tasmania.

Today, the idea of New Zealand joining Australia seems a bit odd, but in Parkes’ time it kind of made sense, and part of reason is to do with railways, or rather the lack of them.

When Parkes gave the oration in Tenterfield, Tenterfield was on now abandoned main line to Brisbane – there was no coastal railway line, and most of the coastal communities of New SouthWales were reached by sea from Sydney – it’s why small places like Tathra on the south coast still sport impressive steamship wharves.

Melbourne and Sydney had been linked by rail only a few years before as had Melbourne and Adelaide. There was no direct Sydney Adelaide line via Broken Hill until the 1920s, and in Queensland the Far North line to Cairns was not completed until around the same time.

There was no railway line across the desert to WA and the line from Adelaide to Darwin was stalled at Alice Springs, and remained so until the early 21^st century.

Travel between the big cities of Australia – which all lie on the coast more or less was by ship. Cargo mostly moved the same way, in part due to the break of gauge between the different colonies’ railway systems – bulk items sent by ship from Melbourne to Sydney say did not need to be transhipped on the border at Albury.

And in such a world of sea based transport it probably seemed eminently sensible to consider New Zealand as an extension of Australia – the journey from Sydney to Auckland or Wellington was no longer than that to Hobart, or indeed from Brisbane to Cairns.

Now of course, we are oriented to land transport and we see the difficulties of a sea based world, but in the nineteenth century a sea based journey was sometimes the only choice and considerably more comfortable than a slow, jolting, steam train.