“The frontier makes brothers of us all”

“The frontier makes brothers of us all” is Crosbie Wells’s hopeful interpretation of life in New Zealand: a place where people may leave former lives behind, find new prospects, and recognize one another beyond rank. In a letter written from Dunedin in June 1854, he presents the frontier not as a world without hierarchy, but as one in which ordinary gestures and opportunities make social distance seem less absolute.

The letter and its change of course

Writing to a person of high station who has not replied, Crosbie says he has become content with the silence. He has found modest employment and decent lodgings, and is settling down in Dunedin. Though he is living on what he calls the contrary face of the world, and feels as far from England as a person could be, he announces that he will not return: he has resolved to make New Zealand the land where he will be buried.

The expression gives a reason for that decision. Crosbie describes a society in which people have left their former lives behind and, in their different ways, are equal. The frontier, in this account, makes reinvention seem possible: his modest wage and lodgings are not signs that his prospects are closed, but a beginning from which he may rise.

Equality and its limits

Crosbie’s claim is qualified by his own acknowledgment that the flockmasters of Otago remain barons, as they had been in the Scottish Highlands. The old hierarchy has not vanished simply because people have crossed the world. His point is instead that rank does not govern every encounter: he is struck by people tipping their hats to one another in the street regardless of station, a gesture he regards as wondrous.

That contrast gives the phrase its force and its limits. Brotherhood is not presented as proof that everyone has equal wealth or position; it is Crosbie’s name for a social possibility he sees in everyday recognition and the chance to rise. His conviction belongs to a particular letter and a particular moment of settlement, rather than a general account of frontier life.

The expression’s significance

Crosbie’s sentence, “The frontier I think makes brothers of us all,” turns a geographical distance from England into a promise of social renewal. Its emphasis is on what people may become after leaving their pasts behind, and on the courtesy through which that possibility becomes visible in ordinary public life. The expression therefore joins two meanings of the frontier: separation from an old world and the opening of a new, if still unequal, one.