'Fraction too much friction': Tasmania-New Zealand tensions over apples

While New Zealand is 2000 kilometres from Australia across the Tasman Sea, it is Australia's closest neighbour historically and in terms of connections, sharing a history of British colonisation as white settler societies in the southern hemisphere. A shared British past linked Australia to New Zealand once the age of European exploration established imperial beachheads at Sydney and Hobart. This shared colonial past encompassed trans-Tasman traffic out of Tasmanian ports as well as Port Jackson: from sealers and whalers, Maori enterprises, military campaigns and pastoralists to miners, shearers, labourers, entertainers, professionals and all sorts in pursuit of profit, escape, work or adventure. Intermittent waves of people augmented this traffic in depression or boom times. Networks of family members moved in circuits across the Tasman Sea, especially Tasmanians to Victoria and New Zealand from the 1850s to the 1870s.