CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 55 of 120

Correct — C, New Zealand. All three places belong to New Zealand, and all three carry names given on the same voyage. Stewart Island, Rakiura in Maori, is the country's third-largest island and its southernmost inhabited one, 1,746 square kilometres of it lying about 30 kilometres beyond the South Island across Foveaux Strait, with Oban as its only town. The Bay of Plenty runs 260 kilometres along the north coast of the North Island, from the Coromandel Peninsula east to Cape Runaway; James Cook named it in 1769 for the food he saw stored in the Maori villages there, in deliberate contrast with the Poverty Bay he had just left. Hawke Bay is the great bite out of the North Island's east coast, some 90 kilometres from the Mahia Peninsula to Cape Kidnappers, which Cook named on 15 October 1769 after Sir Edward Hawke, then First Lord of the Admiralty.

• (a)Canada — None of the three is Canadian. Canada's comparable names run to the Bay of Fundy, Hudson Bay and Vancouver Island; the Cook connection points to the South Pacific, not the North Atlantic.
• (b)Australia — The near miss, and the one most candidates take, because Cook charted the Australian east coast on the same voyage. But Botany Bay and Moreton Bay are the Australian names from that voyage — Stewart Island lies south of the South Island of New Zealand, more than two thousand kilometres from Australia across the Tasman Sea.
• (d)Ireland — Ireland has Bantry Bay, Galway Bay and Dingle Bay. It has no Stewart Island and no Bay of Plenty, and its coastal names come from Irish and Norse rather than from an eighteenth-century Pacific survey.

New Zealand is made of two large islands, the North and the South, with Stewart Island a distant third off the southern tip. Much of its coastal nomenclature dates from Cook's first voyage in the Endeavour, when he circumnavigated and charted both main islands in 1769 and 1770. That is why so many New Zealand headlands and bays carry the names of Admiralty figures or of what Cook found ashore, sitting alongside older Maori names that are now used in parallel.

The item is a three-clue triangulation, and it is fairer than it looks because any one of the three fixes the country. The Bay of Plenty and Hawke Bay are both on the North Island and both from Cook's 1769 survey; Stewart Island sits at the other end of the country. The trap is Australia, because Cook is filed mentally under Australia in most Indian classrooms. A useful discriminator is the shape of the names — 'Plenty' and 'Poverty' as a matched pair, and an island named for a nineteenth-century sealing captain, William Stewart, are New Zealand's habits. One spelling point the paper gets right and many candidates do not: the water is Hawke Bay without an apostrophe, while the region around it is still called Hawke's Bay.

• Stewart Island, or Rakiura, is New Zealand's third-largest island, 1,746 square kilometres, separated from the South Island by Foveaux Strait; its only town is Oban.
• The Bay of Plenty stretches 260 kilometres along the North Island's northern coast, from the Coromandel Peninsula to Cape Runaway.
• James Cook named the Bay of Plenty in 1769 for the well-supplied Maori villages he saw, against the Poverty Bay he had named earlier.
• Hawke Bay, on the North Island's east coast, was named by Cook on 15 October 1769 after Sir Edward Hawke, First Lord of the Admiralty.
• New Zealand is reckoned part of Polynesia among the Pacific island groups.

• Assuming any Cook place name must be Australian. He charted New Zealand first, in 1769.
• Reading Stewart Island as a Canadian or Scottish name and following that instinct.
• Confusing Hawke Bay, the water, with Hawke's Bay, the region that surrounds it.

As a country identification from a cluster of place names, or as a match of islands and bays to their countries.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Foveaux Strait separates Stewart Island from which one of the following?

  • (a)The North Island of New Zealand
  • (b)The South Island of New Zealand
  • (c)Tasmania
  • (d)The Chatham Islands

  Answer(b) The South Island of New Zealand — Stewart Island lies about 30 km south of it across the strait.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Cook Strait separates which two land masses?

  • (a)Australia and Tasmania
  • (b)The North and South Islands of New Zealand
  • (c)New Zealand and Fiji
  • (d)New Guinea and Australia

  Answer(b) The North and South Islands of New Zealand — the Bass Strait is the one that separates Australia from Tasmania.