In 1830 My family emigrated from England to New Zealand. They were part of a huge wave of migration from England to New Zealand. They left because of the fact that there were no jobs. So my ancestors chose New Zealand because of the many opportunities that it offered. This inquiry looks at the push and pull factors that influenced my ancestors and many others to leave their homeland and move to the small island nation at the bottom of the South Pacific.
One of the major push factors was that in the 1830’s according to history (a.k.a a newspaper from the 1830’s) new machines had come into the factories. Now in the 1830’s this technology was still new so it gave rise to new political problems. And a middle class grew a political consciousness and seeing as the machines were taking over the workers jobs which meant that people started to leave the country to find more jobs in other countries like America and Australia, or even the whole world to seek a new life, new work, new friends and new family in a foreign country.
Another problem in the 1830’s for my family was the low pay for the work they were doing. If it rained there would be no work so the families would go without food or any other things and this helped them to make the decision to leave as well as having no money and no jobs to provide for their family. That is another reason why they decided to move away from family in England and decided to move to freedom in New Zealand.There were good people in New Zealand with the Maori and some Europeans being over here way before the 1800’s. The fight over land when more and more people came to New Zealand may have led to the Treaty of Waitangi.
I think back then in the 1830’s it was more about the jobs and no money that made them move away because they would have needed money to live in England to buy food and all the essential stuff in life. So they made the decision to get on a boat and go sail away to New Zealand, the wonderful place where Maori and Europeans live already. They and all the other people that came over to New Zealand to seek a new life with new people and the Maori tribes that had been here in New Zealand long before the Europeans.
The major pull factor that I have for my ancestors is the population in New Zealand was only about 90.k back then. So they might have been drawn here by the freedom that they would have while living over here and having opportunities that they might not have in England. But in New Zealand they have heaps of space to build a house. With which they could decide where they wanted to build plus they would have come over with some other people and others in their family coming over from England on their boats coming to make a new life and a new family with new jobs in this new country called New Zealand.
Pull factor number 2 was that they were looking for new opportunities and a stable life where they could be sure that they could provide their family with food that night or the next week, Because over in England they weren't sure and they weren’t being paid enough.So they decided to move over here to New Zealand for the opportunities that the country presented to them like better places to live and they could choose where they wanted to live like christchurch or dunedin instead of just having the one place that you couldn’t even provide for their family let alone move to a new city.So that is another reason why they decided to move to New Zealand.
I think back in the 1830’s the population of New Zealand might have been the big pull factor because all the other countries that they could have chosen to migrate to had a lot more people during that time but New Zealand only had around 90.k people.But America on the other hand had a total population of 12 million but they decided to choose New Zealand over the other places that they could have chosen.They probably chose New Zealand because of our income and our culture. Our income was around 700 dollars and our life expectancy was about 34 years back then,But our population was around 90.0k before they came and after they got here it was about 92.02k. So there was about 2 thousand people that came over From England with my great great great grandad John Mills and his wife Johanna so that's a pretty small number when you think about it and that's out of at least a million over in England I think.
So in conclusion I think that the main reasons that they left England and chose to come to New Zealand is that there were no jobs in England any more and New Zealand had heaps of jobs and space compared to some of the other countries in the 1830’s.In New Zealand we already had the some Maori and Europeans living here so there was another thing that might of drawn them here. Also they might have wanted to learn something new instead of having a normal life over in a place like America or Russia and maybe even China which already had a population of 407 million people there. But New Zealand didn’t even have a population of 100 thousand people so that’s a big difference.