New Zealand is located 1600kms southeast of Australia in the South Pacific, and consists of three main islands plus many small islands and has three overseas terriories of Cook Islands; Niue and Tokelau. The land has a temperate climate with wide ...regional variations. Generally the land is rolling hills with volcanoes throughout and a backbone of mountains known as the Southern Alps. The forebears to our modern Maori population arrived some 1000 years ago with Europeans arriving much later in 1769.