The Handbook of English Pronunciation

15Australian and New Zealand English

LAURIE BAUER

Introduction

Similarities and differences in settlement

Australia and New Zealand were both discovered for Anglophones by James Cook. Australia was first settled as a penal colony in 1788 and New Zealand was officially settled following the Treaty of Waitangi (signed between the Crown and the New Zealand tribes) in 1840, though by that time there was already a great deal of contact with Maori people and a fair amount of de facto settlement. There was also considerable trade by 1840 between Australia and New Zealand (Bauer 1994a: 382). With dates of settlement so close together, and the close links that have, post-British settlement, always existed between the two countries, Australia and New Zealand are often seen from a European perspective as forming a larger coherent area (the antipodes, or Australasia), losing track of the notion that the distance between Sydney and Wellington is about the same as the distance between London and Labrador.

The biggest difference between the settlements, though, is the difference in the nature of the earliest settlers. Various Australian sites were settled as places of transportation for convicts and the population was made up of those convicts and the people who were sent to be in charge of them. New Zealand was largely settled by those who desired to own land but either could not get land in Britain or had been dispossessed of the land they had held.

At later periods, there was also a big ...