The Age Structure of New Zealand's North Island Communities

Abstract

T nHE various forces which impinge upon and mould a society are reflected eventually in the age composition of the population. Thus, the pre-capitalist and the mature capitalist societies each display distinctive age structures, according to their different stages of development and different ways of life. Broad social and economic differences within a single state, such as appear between the European and the Maori in New Zealand, result in emphatically different age pyramids (Fig. 1). But differentiation by age structure is not limited to these broad national and international levels. The age composition faithfully reflects more subtle differences in ways of living; so that by their age structures it is possible to distinguish within New Zealand the sheep farming from the dairying community, the metropolitan from the borough community, and so forth. An analysis of the different age structures highlights some of the fundamental economic and social forces at work within the country. The study of age structures transfers the attention of the geographer from the readily observable differences in the landscape to the less obvious social and economic foundations, and consequences, of those differences. In such a way he is also brought to grips with the demographic basis of human geography. And such an approach emphasizes the community as a unit of geographical study wherein the varied aspects of landscape and man's interaction with the habitat may be studied, rather than within the more formal divisions of regional, and frequently physical, boundaries. This paper being largely of an exploratory nature, its scope, for convenience, has been limited to the North Island of New Zealand. But there is little doubt that what follows is in the main valid for the whole country, for more recent work on South Island communities and their age structures confirms the patterns which appear in the North Island. The development of the paper is simple. The contrasting age structures of the European and Maoris are described first, and then the urban and rural populations of both groups are discussed generally, after which the European community is analyzed by its constituent rural and urban communities.' The New Zealand Census publishes rural age groupings for individual counties, but here individual counties have been grouped together regionally according to the predominant type of farming community; so that an age structure for