Ethicare Resourcing
Murihiku

Welcome to Southland

Southland Guide · Chapter 1 of 9

Nau mai, haere mai ki Murihiku. Southland is the bottom of the country — a broad green plain running down to a wild coast, with Fiordland at one end, Rakiura across the strait, and the most affordable city in New Zealand in the middle of it.

The last place people look, and one of the best

Southland is the southernmost region in New Zealand, and it is bigger and more varied than most people realise. Invercargill sits near the south coast with around fifty-seven thousand people and the region’s base hospital. Gore is an hour north-east through farming country. Te Anau is two hours north-west, on the edge of Fiordland National Park. And Rakiura — Stewart Island — lies an hour by ferry beyond Bluff, almost entirely national park.

The clinical picture here is strong, and this is the part that surprises people. Southland has a base hospital serving the whole region, with a rural network reaching into Fiordland and the western districts. It is real hospital medicine, in a city where a family home costs less than anywhere else in the country.

What it asks of you is a tolerance for weather and distance. This is cool temperate, maritime, often grey and frequently windy. Dunedin is two and a quarter hours away, Queenstown two, Christchurch six. If those two things do not put you off, Southland offers a combination — a base hospital, affordable housing, and one of the great wildernesses on earth an hour up the road — that almost nowhere else can.

Who wrote this
  • Ethicare is a healthcare recruitment company. This guide is free to read, asks nothing of you, and does not give visa advice.
  • Southland is the region we get asked about least and recommend more often than our enquiry numbers suggest. Where we think it’s the wrong answer, we say so.

The region, in nine numbers

~103,000
People across the whole region, in an area larger than Wales.
~57,000
In Invercargill, the southernmost city in New Zealand and one of the southernmost in the world.
1 base hospital
In Invercargill, serving Southland, Fiordland and Rakiura, run by Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora, with rural services across the region.
~2 hr 15
To Dunedin, where the region’s tertiary care and the medical school sit. Queenstown is around two hours.
Cheapest
City housing in New Zealand. Not "affordable relative to income" — the lowest actual prices of any city in the country.
~10 min
A typical commute across Invercargill. Traffic is not a concept that applies here.
~9.45pm
Sunset in late December. At 46 degrees south the summer evenings are extraordinarily long, and the winter mornings correspondingly dark.
1.2m hectares
Of Fiordland National Park, a World Heritage wilderness beginning about two hours from the city.
Aurora australis
Visible from here on a clear, active night. One of the few inhabited places in the world where that is an ordinary occurrence.

Six things you only learn once you’re here

The weather is the price of admission
Cool, changeable and windy, with more grey days than the north and fewer hot ones. Nobody here pretends otherwise. What you get for it is green country, no drought, and nobody else on the trails.
The summer light is astonishing
Light until nearly ten at night in December and January. You will eat outside at nine, and you will do things after work that you could not do anywhere further north.
There is a real accent
The Southland burr — a rolled "r" inherited from Scottish settlers, and the only distinct regional accent in New Zealand. You’ll hear it within a day and grow fond of it.
Housing costs almost nothing, comparatively
The single most consequential fact in this guide. A large family home here costs a fraction of an apartment in Queenstown, two hours up the road. Cost of living spells it out.
Locals defend the place fiercely
Invercargill has spent decades being the butt of other regions’ jokes, and Southlanders have long since stopped caring. The community pride here is real and it is welcoming.
Fiordland changes what a weekend is
Milford, Doubtful Sound, the Kepler and Routeburn tracks. Most New Zealanders visit once. You would live two hours away.
A note on names
  • Murihiku — "the last joint of the tail" — is Southland’s name in te reo Māori, and this is the rohe of Ngāi Tahu. Rakiura is Stewart Island; Waihōpai is the river Invercargill sits on. The southern coast has been travelled and harvested for centuries, and tītī — muttonbirding — remains a living customary practice on the islands off Rakiura.
  • You’re not expected to arrive fluent. You are expected to try. Te ao Māori at work covers pronunciation and the words you’ll hear on the ward.

How to read this guide

Nine chapters, all of them about Southland specifically. Anything true of New Zealand generally — visas, registration, tax, renting law, driving licences, schools — lives once in Moving to New Zealand.

If you read nothing else, read Why Southland for the full case — and what we’d ask you to weigh, and Cost of living, because the numbers here are unlike anywhere else in the country.

Download this guide as a PDF →