History

The Marlborough coast supported a small Maori population from possibly as early as the 12th century. Anthropologists named this part of central Aotearoa, Wanganui, an area that stretched from the inland Ureweras to Kaiapohia. Maori in the region lived by fishing and cultivating crops, including kumara, a sweet potato. Marlborough was not sighted by Europeans until the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770. Sixty years later, the first European settlers were drawn by the rich coastline and arrived to set up whaling stations. At first Maori and European co-existed, but with the arrival of the New Zealand Company in 1840 and its subsequent land purchases on behalf of Nelson settlers, conflict was sparked and skirmishes between survey parties and local Maori culminated in the bloody Wairau Incident near Tuamarina. Marlborough became a separate province in 1859. Gold was discovered in the early 1860s, but the boom did not last long. Marlborough's world-famous former residents include rocket scientist William Pickering and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ernest Rutherford.

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