New Zealand

Australia and New Zealand like to describe themselves as young countries. What they really are is countries built by movement — waves of people arriving with skills, labour, ideas, food,...

Some rivalries are fought with armies. Australia and New Zealand fight with coffee cups, bakery counters, and dessert forks. On the surface, it’s playful banter — jokes about flat whites, meat pies, and pavlova. But underneath the humour is a deeper story about migration, identity, and how two young nations define themselves through what they eat.

For much of its modern history, New Zealand ran on four legs. Sheep paid for the roads, the schools, the hospitals, and the welfare state. They shaped the landscape, the economy, and the country’s sense of itself. At one point, there were more than 70 million sheep in a nation of barely three million people.