Making New Zealand - Roads

There's nine active faults within 50 kilometres and the main alpine faults are within 20 kilometres, so everything that was built here was built to take stresses 40 percent higher than any other bridge previously built.

– NZ Transport Agency Operations Manager Peter Connors on the challenges of the Otira Viaduct in Arthur's Pass

The biggest impetus for roading came with the New Zealand Wars, and the need for the British military to move large numbers of people and equipment around the country ... For example the Great South Road was set up specifically as a military supply route.

– Historian Matthew Wright, early in this documentary

They were mostly English, a pommy mob, and they followed bridges around the world ... They fascinated me, and they were happy to talk, as long as you were up there with them. They had no safety gear, nothing. Nothing to stop them falling off except their own skill. I got quite good at climbing. I never told The Auckland Star...

– Auckland Star journalist Garth Gilmore on getting the scoop from Auckland Harbour Bridge construction workers

In the far south, the tourism potential of Milford Sound and Fiordland was recognised by the first Pākehā explorers, and it was the entrepreneurship of the early tourism operators that drove the road here.

– Narrator Mark Clare

The men who worked on the road, they worked and slept where they did the work ... They had no heating. They generally just had an oil lamp. The tents froze, they froze. A lot of people were killed. There was a lot of dynamite accidents. People died of hypothermia. It just amazes me what they did, what they put up with, how they did it.

– Historian Ivan Taylor on the construction workers of Otira Gorge in Arthur's Pass, early in this documentary

The only access for a car was a very slow ferry. At the end of a Sunday afternoon you would get queues. You might be in the queue for an hour or two, just to get back on the ferry back to Auckland.

– Journalist Garth Gilmore on getting between Auckland and the North Shore, in the days before the building of the Auckland Harbour Bridge

There was opposition to the bridge. There was a lot of argument over where it should be ... you'd get the people complaining 'I don't want it in my backyard'. But it had to go in somebody's.

– Journalist Garth Gilmore on getting betwe before the building of the Auckland Harbour Bridge

Ambitious is the word that jumps at me. I mean it's a big bridge: it's 45 metres high roughly, and 440 odd metres long, in a really challenging environment.

– Engineer Richard Holyoake on the building of Otira Viaduct in Arthur's Pass

... it quickly became apparent the opening episode of Making New Zealand is an absolute corker. The team from Top Shelf Productions, led by director/producer Mark Everton, has done a great job of efficiently providing enough historical context to underscore the significance of their general subject before providing relatively detailed accounts of a handful of major roading projects ... Roll on the rest of the series.

– Nick Grant reviewing this episode, for the Herald on Sunday, 18 May 2014