New Zealand Avenue, Salisbury

New Zealand Avenue is to the north west of Salisbury, between the Devizes Road and the Wilton Road.

It is one of a group of roads in the area which are named after Commonwealth countries – the others being India Avenue, Canadian Avenue and Australian Avenue.

My feeling has always been that the naming of these roads is drawing some sort of parallel between the British Empire and the Roman Empire, which is brought to mind by the nearby Roman Road. The correspondence between the Roman Empire, Roman Road, which is so called because it closely follows the route of an actual Roman Road, and the ‘British Empire’ roads may be a coincidence, but it seems to me to make sense.

Derivation of New Zealand

New Zealand itself has separate Maori names for the North Island and the South Island. The northern island is Te Ika a Maui, which means ‘the fish of Maui’, and the southern island is Te Wai Pounamu, which means ‘the place of greenstone’ ¹.

The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman re-named the islands Staten Landt, believing them to be connected to the Staten Landt near to Cape Horn. ²

A Dutch cartographer, Joan Blaeu, renamed the islands Nieuw Zeeland after one of the the Netherlands 12 provinces.

Derivation of Zeeland

The name ‘Zeeland‘ literally means ‘sea land’. A leaflet on the Zeeland province website says that:

The history of Zeeland will always be linked to the water, which, depending on the circumstances, is sometimes deemed a friend and sometimes a foe.³

The point being made here is that the sea is a friend to the province in that it the economy depends on both tourism and fishing, but that it has been a foe when floods have occurred. The last great flood was in 1953, when 1836 people dies.

Visiting Salisbury?

For accommodation, see the Hotels in Salisbury page.

Footnotes

1. North and South Islands officially nameless – National – NZ Herald News [↩]
2. European discovery of New Zealand – Tasmans achievement – Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand [↩]
3. zeeland_glance.pdf (application/pdf Object) [↩]