How New Zealand Became East of Eden

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is often described as a quintessential California novel, yet the new Netflix production travelled roughly 10,000 kilometres from the Salinas Valley to recreate its world in New Zealand.

The seven-part adaptation was filmed extensively across the country, with locations in Auckland, the Coromandel and Otago standing in for early 20th-century America.

It is an unusual journey for a story whose roots stretch much further back than California.

The title East of Eden comes from Genesis 4. After Cain kills his brother Abel and leaves the presence of God, he settles in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

That biblical connection runs through Steinbeck’s novel. Steinbeck in the Schools, a programme of San José State University’s Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, describes his ambition as a “mythic dramatization” of the perpetual struggle between good and evil.

But East of Eden is not simply Genesis retold with different names. Steinbeck draws on the Cain and Abel story to explore sibling rivalry, love, rejection, guilt and inheritance, while asking whether people are destined to repeat the patterns handed down to them or can choose another path.

California is equally important. Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley and wrote the novel partly for his sons, drawing on his family history and memories of the region.

The production faced a curious problem: the modern Salinas Valley no longer looks as it did in the period Steinbeck was writing about.

Series creator Zoë Kazan told Netflix that New Zealand offered relatively unspoiled landscapes and an unusual concentration of surviving Victorian architecture. She pointed to wealth generated during New Zealand’s gold-rush era as one reason so many period buildings remained available to the production.

Ōamaru’s Victorian precinct helped recreate historic Salinas, while Alberton, Highwic and the Thames School of Mines were among the North Island heritage locations transformed into early 20th-century America.

A story rooted in a biblical account became a California classic. Seventy-four years after Steinbeck’s novel was published, New Zealand helped bring Steinbeck’s California back to the screen.

East of Eden is streaming now on Netflix.