| Dunedin! It's impossible to imagine any
city more remote from Scotland and yet, at the same time, so
quintessentially Scottish. The architecture, the street names, the
beautiful setting by the sea, the long blue arm of Otago Bay reaching up
to the spectacular green hills that cradle the city: it's all so
familiar to the eyes of a Scot. And no wonder. Dunedin proudly claims to
be the the most Scottish city in New Zealand. It's very name is Gaelic
for Edinburgh.
With the Otago Settlers Museum in
Dunedin's Queen's Gardens, a very large room with great vaulted
ceilings, is devoted entirely to the framed photographic portraits of
the men and women who pioneered the city and its surrounding districts.
Wonderful sepia-toned images line the walls from floor to ceiling, rank
upon rank of stern, bearded men and their solemn, determined looking
wives. There are the Scots who came in their thousands about the middle
of the 19th century and who made Dunedin for many years, the biggest,
wealthiest, most impressive city in New Zealand. Their influence, their
work ethic, their values are still very much alive and well in the
lovely, leafy university city today.
The first settlers, who arrived in 1848
after a cramped and tortuous passage aboard the John Wickliffe
and the Philip Laing, were members of the newly formed Free
Church of Scotland which was established after the great split with the
Presbyterian Church. They came seeking freedom of worship in a land
untouched by religious strife. They were led by two dynamic individuals,
the Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet, Robert Burns, and
William Cargill, of the 74th Highlanders. In 1844, Burns wrote to
Cargill: "If it shall be God's will that we shall succeed in
establishing this colony, I persuade myself, with His blessing attending
us, we may be instrumental in planting down in these favoured islands a
well ordered, God-fearing community that may stand in these remote
regions a sample of the Kingdom of Christ which like a light burning in
a dark place, shall bear no indistinct testimony to the Truth".
Many of the Scots who journeyed out with
Burns and Cargill were stockholders in the New Zealand Company which had
purchased title to the land around Otago Harbour from the Maori people who
had lived there for thousands of years. For 13 years they had the place
pretty much to themselves. But in 1861 all that was to change. Gold was
discovered just 60 miles away and within months Dunedin was swamped by
hundreds of thousands of get-rich-quick miners. The population doubled
and, when more gold was discovered in 1862, even more rough and ready
miners, many of them Australians, flooded in from across the Tasman. By
1871 Otago has a population of 70,000. Twenty three million pounds worth
of gold was won from the Otago goldfields in the first tumultuous
decade. A further 23,000 arrived with the stimulus to growth created by
huge public works schemes. Streets were paved and lit and a town gas
supply laid on. Grand Victorian buildings, most of which still stand,
mirror the prosperity and confidence of the era. And, as befits the
vision of Burns and Cargill, the most splendid of them all was the new
Presbyterian First Church opened in 1873. Industrial and commercial
enterprises flourished, the agricultural and pastoral sectors expanded
and Dunedin's merchants and shipping agents imported raw materials and
luxury items for the whole country.
Evidence of that great wealth is to be
seen throughout the city today from the extraordinary grandeur of its
Victorian railway station to the confident, solid, granite towers of
Otago university. |
