Spanish and the Portuguese had an active presence in the Pacific from the early 16th century, but there is no firm evidence of Europeans reaching New Zealand before Abel Tasman in 1642.
For nearly 50 years Perrine Moncrieff was this country's foremost female conservationist. Born into an upper-class British family, she immigrated to New Zealand in 1921, settled in Nelson and bought land on the shores of Tasman Bay, which became a scenic reserve in the 1930s.
