South Island nationalism

Julius Vogel, the 8th Premier of New Zealand, was a continual advocate of separation of the North and South Islands, which led to his dismissal from the Otago Daily Times in 1868.

The successive waves of Māori iwi (tribes) to settle the South Island – namely the Waitaha, the Ngāti Mamoe, and Ngāi Tahu – had been politically independent from their northern counterparts.

[2] Several attempts by the Ngāti Toa (from the Kāpiti Coast) to annex the island during the 1830s, under the leadership of Te Rauparaha, were eventually repelled by an alliance of the Southern chiefs of Ōtautahi and Murihiku.

[3] By the time the first European settlers arrived in the South Island (then known natively as Te Waipounamu) in the early 1840s, the Ngāti Toa only held control of the Wairau plains.

It was subsequently Anglicised as New Zealand by British naval captain James Cook of HM Bark Endeavour who visited the islands more than 100 years after Tasman during (1769–1770).

Grey implemented the ordinance with such deliberation that neither Council met before advice was received that the United Kingdom Parliament had passed the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852.

Similar resentment also occurred in other provinces, but the relative wealth of Otago (due to the 1861 gold rush) meant that it was felt there more strongly than elsewhere.

It was, noted the Otago Colonist, "the sad but inevitable result of joining by artificial bonds of union countries that Nature (by Cook Strait) designed should be separate".

Otago, argued its editor, Julius Vogel (who, ironically, was ultimately to lead the centralists to the abolition of provincialism), was in terms of shipping days three times as far from the capital of Auckland as it was from Victoria or Tasmania, and he looked forward to "a glorious future – the separation of the two islands".

In an attempt to hold her place as a capital of some description, in 1865 Auckland joined forces with Otago to support a resolution in the General Assembly calling for independence for both islands.

[13] In a 2006 feature article in the New Zealand Listener on the future of a wind farm in Central Otago, Bruce Ansley expressed the view that the South Island independence movement is kicking back into gear.

The Southern Alps are the South Island's most prominent geological feature, and agriculture and forestry the main primary industries, making this concept an appropriate representation.