Cowrie tree felling? Other industries where skills were transferable, e.g. iron, steel, stone industries. sheep farming, gold mining. Just suggestions, but people usually emigrate for a better life.

Look at the page on 19th Century emigration/ Why Travel to New Zealand on:www.fernbook.co.uk/emigration

It states that assisted passages were set up around that time too.

I have 7 Families in my Tree, who Emigrated to New Zealand from the Forest of Dean.
Transferable Occupations being Coal Mining, Farming, Railway Building and Butchery.
Work was hard to find when my Families Emigrated between 1900 & 1930 and the Promise of Work and a Better Standard of Living made them decide to Emigrate to New Zealand.

I am curious in the opposite way! Why wouldn't you? Why would you stay in the Forest in the mid 19thC when the best you could hope for was to scratch a living as a tenant farmer or miner (in the case of my family)? If you read some of the books about the Forest you see how tough life was for most Foresters right up into the 20thC.

My great grandfather came here in 1860. He later brought out his 16 year old sister (they are now buried side by side with matching headstones in my local cemetery), and another brother and sister (and her husband) came as well.

My Forest ancestors were basically tenant farmers as far back as I can go, and my great grandfather was an iron miner. When he got here, he managed to buy a decent sized piece of farming land which he later added to with other properties both adjacent and in the nearby town. He and GGMa built a new two storey house and had a prosperous life which he could never have achieved as an iron miner in the Forest.

There are both push and pull factors in immigration - some push factors like poverty pushed people out of Britain in the 19thC, and some factors like opportunities to get your own land pulled people to NZ. My ancestors on my mother's side came here from Scotland in 1852 - great great grandfather was a ploughman in Alloa, with no future. He came here and developed a valuable farm on the hills above Dunedin - same reasons for migration as my Forest ancestors.

When I visited the Forest I was struck by how beautiful it is now, but life must have been grim when many Foresters left. Also remember many came here despite the fact that there was continuing conflict and wars here with Māori who were objecting to colonisation and land theft - notwithstanding this, they came anyway. They must have been pretty desperate for a new life!

My Barnett ancestors originally came from Dixton/Staunton area with the first family (Henry and Jane and 6 children) emigrating in 1863. Henry's brother Edwin with wife Charlotte and 4 children followed them in 1867. I am descended from the daughter of Henry and Edwin's brother James. James died in 1853, but 2 of his children joined their uncles in New Zealand: James in 1870 and my great grandmother Sarah in 1876.

So in the space of 13 years virtually the whole family had left the Forest of Dean and re-grouped in the Christchurch area of New Zealand.

I think this sequence of emmigration is quite common, with one family member acting as the trailblazer and then sponsor for other family members.