You are probably familiar with seeing lows and highs on our weather maps around New Zealand. See, for example, previous blog posts on a mid-July northern low, How Lows and Highs move and the satellite loop in Winds Aloft.

In my blog post about winds aloft there is a loop of satellite images for a week in winter 2008.  It shows that the big cloud features in the mid-latitudes typically travel from west to east. In other words, the features you see on weather maps affecting New Zealand have usually started out roughly in the area of southern Australia.