Events
- January - Nambassa five day celebration of music, crafts and alternative lifestyles culture on 250-acre (100 ha) farm at Waitawheta Valley between Waihi and Waikino. Attendance 20,000.
- January - The second Sweetwaters Music Festival is held near Ngaruawahia.
- 27 April - The Mahon Report into the crash of Air New Zealand Flight 901 is release, in which Juctise Peter Mahon famously accuses Air New Zealand of telling "an orchestrated litany of lies".
- 3 May - The first newspaper published on a Sunday in New Zealand; initially called the New Zealand Times.
- July - Passports reintroduced for New Zealanders travelling to Australia. The Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs says the exemption was exploited; travel had not required passports following the 1972 Trans-Tasman Travel Agreement.
- 13 July - Springbok rugby union team arrive in New Zealand to begin the 1981 Springbok Tour
- 13 September - The Springbok rugby team leave New Zealand.
- The Kohanga reo scheme is established by the Department of Māori Affairs.
Read more about this topic: 1981 In New Zealand
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“The geometry of landscape and situation seems to create its own systems of time, the sense of a dynamic element which is cinematising the events of the canvas, translating a posture or ceremony into dynamic terms. The greatest movie of the 20th century is the Mona Lisa, just as the greatest novel is Gray’s Anatomy.”
—J.G. (James Graham)
“All strange and terrible events are welcome,
But comforts we despise.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“One cannot be a good historian of the outward, visible world without giving some thought to the hidden, private life of ordinary people; and on the other hand one cannot be a good historian of this inner life without taking into account outward events where these are relevant. They are two orders of fact which reflect each other, which are always linked and which sometimes provoke each other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)