by Redmer Yska
After discovering New Zealand in 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman set sail, never to return. This first European visitor could hardly have imagined that tens of thousands of his countrymen would eventually disembark there. It is a measure of New Zealand’s isolation that 310 years after Tasman, those post-war Dutch immigrants were the first continental Europeans many New Zealanders had seen. They suffered prejudice and homesickness, but they also injected innovation and sophistication into the culture, and produced some 100,000 descendants.
Main image: Building your own home was the dream of many Dutch immigrants in the 1950s
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