Totally Totara

Thursday 18 April 2024

Yesterday we were back on the road again, doing our first filming for JTNE in 2024. Hopefully readers will have noticed the regular release of the ongoing sequence of pioneer stories in the Pioneers of Southern New Zealand part of the project. There are now 46 of the stories available on our Youtube channel, the latest one being William Trotter’s story that went live this week. Will keeps us updated on the number of view each episode attracts and it is surprising which rank as the favourites with our viewers. At the moment, the top five in order of views are:

• Nat Chalmers, with 730 views
• Mary Hosty, with 700
• Peter and Douglas Ayson, with 650
• William and Mary Duff, with 644.
• Rev Donald McNaughton Stuart, with 600

The lowest number of views is for John De La Condamine Carnegie and that is a little disappointing because he is a fascinating character and I thought we presented the story well. Check it out and give him a boost if you haven’t seen it. Meanwhile, the one on the Chalmers family of South Otago had over 500 views within 36 hours of its release last week, which was a pleasant surprise but a little hard to explain because it received no promotion at all from our end. Something’s working.

If you think about the project in terms of audience engagement and compared the individual videos to say a talk in the Museum’s Auditorium, that represents filling that room to capacity six times over in each case. We are always very happy just to fill the Auditorium once for any talk so the Youtube outreach represents a pretty good extension to the Museum’s physical visitation by any standard. We also recently reached the significant milestone of over 250,000 views on the channel across all our offerings, which is roughly equivalent to an entire year’s visitation at the Museum. I think that’s pretty good and underlines the value of this medium as an extension of the Museum’s engagement with our audience, and especially those who can’t easily get to Toitū in person.

If you’ve missed some of those recent Pioneer Stories releases, here’s the playlist of all of those available to date: Pioneer Stories playlist

Meanwhile we are still working on the other 54 stories that make up the total 100 in the project and yesterday we travelled up to North Otago on a beautiful autumn day to film scenes for our Thomas Brydone, John Reid and Duncan Sutherland stories. Brydone was the main focus for the day so we concentrated our efforts at the amazing Heritage New Zealand-managed historic site of Totara Estate.

This was where the sheep that made up the first shipment of frozen meat from New Zealand to Britain were prepared in 1881, a successful experiment initiated and organised by Thomas Brydone that decisively changed New Zealand’s economic future in a way that might be compared with Gabriel Read’s discover of gold in Tuapeka in 1861.

By showing that sheep meat could be successfully transported in good condition from New Zealand all the way to Britain, it opened up a huge market for New Zealand’s primary produce and made small family farms economically viable for the next century or more. Without the innovation of refrigerated shipping, New Zealand could never have prospered on the back of the country’s sheep the way that it managed to do thereafter. Prior to this watershed event, sheep were grown here principally for their wool and their meat was more or less a by-product. Only a small number of sheep carcasses were needed to feed the colonial population and the rest just created a problem of disposal once the animals reached the end of their lives. Some were boiled down for tallow and such like but mostly their potential as food for humans was wasted due to the ‘tyranny of distance’ from major markets.

Thomas Brydone represents the very best of 19th-century scientific farming and estate management, one of Scotland’s great gifts to New Zealand’s development. He was born in West Linton in Peebleshire in 1827, the son of a shepherd who followed an upward trajectory as he moved his family around Scotland on the way to becoming a substantial farmer. Thomas got an excellent education at the Perth Academy, one of Scotland’s oldest secondary schools (which we visited in 2022), and then embarked on his own career, learning estate management from some of that country’s major landowners. Britain at that time led the world in its scientific approach to farming and it was that corpus of knowledge that Brydone brought with him to Otago in 1868 when he was sent out to manage the New Zealand holdings of a large Scottish conglomerate, the New Zealand and Australian Land Company.

The Company had extensive farming operations in Otago and Southland but they were not being farmed efficiently nor producing the expected profits. Brydone quickly sorted out the problems and set the business on a more productive footing. When it then merged with another rival land company, the Canterbury and Otago Association, the new entity was the largest farmer of sheep in New Zealand with holdings all across the southern landscape. Brydone became the superintendent of this huge operation in 1878, while the former Canterbury & Otago Association manager William Davidson looked after general management in Britain. It was these two giants of New Zealand farming history that set up the 1881 experiment to trial refrigerated shipping. Brydone’s role was to prepare the stock at the New Zealand end.

To that purpose, he built slaughtering facilities at the Company’s Totara Estate just south of Oamaru, the carcasses then being sent by rail down to Dunedin where they were loaded on to the specially adapted sailing ship Dunedin at Port Chalmers. When it successfully delivered meat in top condition for sale in the London markets in early 1882, a corner had been turned for farming in New Zealand. But it didn’t end there. That same year Brydone set up New Zealand’s first dairy factory at Edendale in Southland to export cheese and butter. He transformed the Company’s Edendale land, hitherto unprofitable for either sheep or cropping, by adding lime and other fertilisers to the soil. It soon emerged as some of the best pastureland in the country and he was able to demonstrate the potential for large-scale dairy production. Exporting cheese and dairy products to Britain would be as essential to New Zealand’s long-term economic success as the frozen meat experiment.

Bear in mind that these critical developments occurred little more than 30 years after the first Scottish settlers had landed in Port Chalmers to begin the development of the Otago settlement. What an amazing story that is. The high hopes and pious aspirations of those first pioneers had seen the embryonic colony struggle along relatively humbly for the first decade or so. Then grain and wool began to establish its economic viability. The chance that Otago’s hinterland was rich in gold provided an unexpected boost in the 1860s, industrial development followed apace in the 1870s, and then this characteristically Scottish application of innovative technology in the 1880s opened the way to long-term prosperity.

Totara Estate does a great job of preserving the birthplace of this farming revolution. Brydone’s farm buildings, constructed from the beautifully mellow Oamau limestone, are well interpreted, though on a golden autumn day they seemed idyllic and peaceful where they must have been a hive of activity in late 1881. Sheep have become much less a feature of the Otago landscape than they were when I was a boy half a century ago and I always feel nostalgic for my boyhood in South Canterbury when I see (and hear) flocks of sheep so it was great to hear some “baas” today. Climbing Sebastopol Hill behind the Estate to inspect the Brydone memorial offered us sweeping views of the North Otago landscape with perspectives inland, to the north, and all down the coast.

When my children were small and we drove often between grandparents in Timaru and our home in Dunedin, I always put the kids through a regular series of tests on the historic significance of key features of the landscape that we passed by. The big two were the monuments at Totara to the centenary of frozen meat shipping and the similar hilltop memorial to John McKenzie at Puketapu behind Palmerston. They eventually knew the answers but invariably mixed them up, confusing the monuments. I realise now that I missed a trick in not stopping the car and walking them up each hill so that the wonders of their distinctive monuments and associated views could imprint themselves on their memories. Sorry kids, but that’s what’s going to happen next time we drive this road together.

Once again, the JTNE project has given me the opportunity to actually walk these historic spots and I would warmly recommend the two monuments to any readers. Both are impressive landmarks on the Otago landscape that merit closer inspection and the views from each of them are just wonderful. We’re almost at the end of filming now, with just a couple more spots around Otago harbour to complete. Keep an eye out for the ongoing releases as Will and Chris complete the production side of things and our tally of pioneer profiles gradually approaches 100.

A pre-Christmas Peninsula post

It’s been six months since my last post on this blog but there’s been a lot of activity on the Pioneer Stories part of the Journey to New Edinburgh project since then. Will has been busy editing the stories together and Chris has added his technical finesse when he’s had a moment away from his other work. I’ve added voice-overs to linking sections, helped locate images in the Toitū collection, and checked the clips (and subtitles) for accuracy. The resulting stories have been released to our Youtube channel without much fanfare and there are now 27 of the pioneer profiles available for viewing. The most recent, released last week, is for James Adam who readers will know is a big favourite of ours. 

There’s no real rhyme or reason to the sequence we’re releasing the stories in but we have tried to time some of them for descendant family events like reunions and other gatherings, as for the Aysons, the Pavletichs, and the Thomsons. We also put out David Dackers’ story early on so our good friend Bill Dacker could see it before he died after a long illness in March. Despite the randomness the stories provide a lot of variety and we’ve had some great feedback, most pleasingly from some of those descendants who have been happy with how we presented their forbears’ stories. 

Still over 70 more to come too, which offers lots more to add to the interpretation of Otago’s pioneer history provided by our project next year. We also have a teeny bit more location filming to do and actually got back on the road as a film crew this morning for the first time in ages to do some key pieces on the Otago Peninsula for the Mathieson, Riddell and Christies stories. We were supposed to do this back in May but my broken ankle put paid to that at the time. The delay proved quite fortunate as it turned out because it meant that our filming of the Pukehiki church was delayed until after the tremendous recent refurbishment project on that historic church was completed. 

Will had arranged access to the church so we were able to see the fruits of the restoration project inside and out and it was really very impressive to see this gorgeous little country church so lovingly cared for. Our subjects – Walter and Wilhelmina Riddell, and John and Catherine Mathieson – were intimately involved with the church’s construction and have been nicely acknowledged in the restoration. The weather wasn’t quite as hoped for but the wind and showers added a certain ‘Scottish’ quality to the magnificent views over the harbour. 

We then went to Springhill farm at Highcliff which is where the first experiments in cheesemaking fed into the establishment of the nearby Peninsula dairy factory which was the first established in New Zealand in 1871. This was another of those magnificent locations not normally open to public access that are such a privilege of our work to visit. The stone farmhouse is one of the oldest pioneer buildings on the Peninsula and a rare surviving example of a Scottish stone farmhouse in New Zealand. It was in their kitchen here and in the stone sheds behind the house where the Mathiesons undertook those first experiments that began commercial cheese production in New Zealand. Again, the view over the harbour was magnificent even on a dour Scottish type of Dunedin day.

For those people who read this and might have missed the Pioneer stories low-key release on Youtube here is a link to the whole playlist as it stands, and this is a list of all the stories released to date:

• Mary and Thomas Cuddie
• William and Mary Duff
• John Turnbull Thomson
• Peter and Janet McBean
• Peter and Caroline Dunlop
• Rev Donald McNaughton Stuart
• Caroline Douglas
• Robert and Margaret Duckworth
• Mary Ann Strain
• William Cargill
• Peter Crawford
• George and Isabella McLean
• David Dackers
• John De La Condamine Carnegie
• James MacKenzie (the sheepstealer)
• Robert Lawson
• Peter and Douglas Ayson
• Job Wain
• John Barr
• Ann Pavletich
• John and Margaret Buchanan
• Minnie Dean
• Finlay Murchison
• Rev Thomas Burns
• Arthur Beverly
• The Borries of West Taieri
• James Adam

Here’s a hyperlink to the playlist. Just click it and you should be taken to the relevant section of our Youtube channel:

Pioneers of Southern New Zealand playlist

This time it’s personal

Tuesday 27 June 2023

Over the weekend the final two episodes of Journey to New Edinburgh were released thus completing the project as far as that main production is concerned. I held off on doing a teaser post on Friday because of the previous two weekends’ experiences where the clips did not actually become available on the Toitū website as promised on schedule. I found that a bit embarrassing and hope that no-one reading my previous posts went looking on a Saturday morning and then never came back when they couldn’t access the clips as per my postings. I was glad I hadn’t sent out a teaser post for this one too as the Toitū website was actually down for some reason and completely inaccessible over the entire weekend. Both clips were released on Youtube, however, and all eight can now be found there as well. That’s also where you will be able to find the 100 pioneer stories clips that are being released without fanfare incrementally. So far there are three already available on the Toitū Youtube channel.

Here are the links:

Episode 7: The Greening of Otago is a bit special to me as you’ll see when you watch it. It tells the story of the coming of Irish Catholics to pioneer Otago from the mid-1850s and their subsequent spread to Southland. That is essentially my family story so it might not be so surprising that we focus on one of my sets of great great grandparents, William and Annie Scully, to personalise the migrant flow from Annaghdown in County Galway on the west coast of Ireland to southern New Zealand. Personal connections were really important in that particular migration stream, which was very much powered by extended family and parish-based migration chains. Modern day connections also gave us a great head start in locating the documentary scenes in the right spots in both Galway and Southland. I’d like to acknowledge the Annaghdown Heritage Society and especially Irene McGoldrick who actually owns the very cottage from which the first Otago-bound Galway migrant set forth and let us film there.

The road to Otago started here at Coteenty, Annaghdown.

So hopefully you’ll agree it was fair enough to draw on those family connections and anecdotes for the Galway story. Pushing on to County Kerry and telling the story of a similar chain-based migration flow from there to South Canterbury in the 1860s – the Brosnahan experience – might seem a bit cheeky. Members of my family have been teasing me about it since the release. In my defence, I’d make the point that the way in which that migration chain was first established, setting down its anchor point if you like, is an Otago story and one, moreover, that illustrates a point we’ve been trying to emphasis throughout JTNE. That is to say that every one of the migrants that reached these shores in the mid-19th century did so against the broader patterns of Irish and Scottish and English emigration. The New Zealand colonies were the last to be established, the furthest away, and the most difficult and expensive to reach.

There are plenty of Otago connections in the Annaghdown graveyard

Explaining exactly how any particular person or family ended up here, rather than in North America where the vast majority of the migration was directed, often turns on some tiny chance event or encounter. We have tried to pinpoint some of those critical chance encounters throughout JTNE, pushing back against the inevitable sense that the way things happened was just the way they were always going to happen. History only looks that way because we have to look at the past in retrospect, which gives a misleading sense of inevitability. If we can place ourselves imaginatively back in time and look forward, with all the uncertainty that faced our ancestors when they made their life choices, including migration choices, then we can put more emphasis on how important luck and chance were, alongside wisdom and good management (or their opposites).

Brosnan, Brosnan, Brosnahan, Brosnan, Brosnan, and … McKee, in Tralee.

Telling the Kerrytown story from South Canterbury through an Otago starting point hopefully makes the point that one such chance event – Richard Hoare from East Kerry taking a migrant ship from Glasgow to Otago, then finding work on the Levels Station in South Canterbury, is the critical pre-condition for all those subsequent Canterbury assisted immigrants from his home province finding their way to new lives in New Zealand. I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t done and nor would tens of thousands of other descendants of the Kerrytown pioneers. The fact that I ended up being appointed the Ceann Fine (clan chieftain) of Clan Brosnan worldwide in 2013 is also a wee part of that story, though not one we delve into in the documentary. But if I need to defend the personal elements in Episode 7, I hope that covers it.

Kerrytown pioneers, South Canterbury.

Full Circle

15 June 2023

Another afternoon’s filming around Dunedin on Wednesday, filling in some of the last blanks in our “S” stories; that is the profiles of 100 individual pioneer settlers (or couples). Today that included Thomas Heffernan’s profile and when I checked my diary I realised that it was exactly one year ago today that we were in Heff’s birthplace, Faulmore, County Mayo, on the westernmost point of mainland Ireland. On Wednesday, the day we were filming, it was one year since 14 June 2022, when we filmed in three different ‘countries’ in one day, starting in Scotland, crossing to Ulster (“Northern Ireland”) and finishing in the Republic of Ireland. No such distances to cover today but interesting to think of the circle that was being joined, and the huge distances that were part of Tom Heffernan’s emigrant story. From one of the poorest and most undeveloped areas of Ireland, to prosperity and wealth in South Dunedin via his successful hotel-keeping career at the eponymous Heffernans Hotel (Heff’s).

Faulmore, Co Mayo: next stop America.

Heffernans Hotel, South Dunedin

Thomas and Margaret Heffernan and their children

We also roamed across the St Clair Golf Course high above the St Clair hills, grateful for the golf buggy that we were allowed to borrow to get me and my crutches to Hole 14. What’s so significant about Hole 14? It’s all in its name “Kenmore”, bestowed by its original owners, Peter and Janet McLaren, who arrived in Otago on the “Mariner” in 1849. They named their property here for Peter’s home in Perthshire. Peter grew up on a croft at Glenquaich, high up on the hills above Loch Freuchie in Kenmore parish. That probably explains why he was attracted to this lonely spot at St Clair, so challenging to access from pioneer Dunedin and constantly buffeted by winds coming off the southern ocean. Peter was able to put his skills as a mason to good effect, constructing a beautiful two-storey cottage from the bluestone outcrops in his fields. It survived intact until 1960 when some idiots burned it down but the remnants of some of Peter’s stone outbuildings survive, as does the name.

Kenmore Cottage

Hole 14: “Kenmore” and some surviving outbuildings of the McLaren’s farm

Looking south over Tunnel Beach from “Kenmore” but no pointer back to Scotland

Our last story of the day was also for a Highland immigrant but unlike the McLarens, Christina Chapman née Finlayson, came from a wealthy background in Sutherlandshire where her grandfather had been the Laird of Sciberscross and a tacksman to the Duke of Sutherland. She was born at Cullisse House near Nigg in Ross-shire but grew up in London and Edinburgh after her family had a falling out with the clan chief over his land clearance policy. There she married an up-and-coming lawyer from Aberdeen, Robert Chapman, and sailed with him to Otago on the “Blundell” in 1848. Robert became a key player in Otago’s civic elite in the years that followed and invested successfully in land. In 1876 they built a fine mansion “Dunottar” in an area of Roslyn that became known as Chapman’s Paddock.

The house burnt down in 1920 unfortunately but Chapman’s Paddock was successfully developed into Dunottar township, one of the most desireable residential areas in Dunedin in the early 20th century, as it remains today. Another of the Chapman’s property developments was the row of terrace houses in Stuart Street that they erected in the early 1880s and which still bear their name; Chapmans Terrace. At about the same time, Christina inherited a massive sum from the estate of her uncle back in Scotland, General William Sutherland. This undoubtedly made the already wealthy Christina perhaps the most successful of all the pioneers of the 1840s in purely material terms.

Robert and Christina Chapman

Chapman’s Terrace in Stuart Street: the right one this time

And just a wee confession: we had already filmed the piece about Chapmans Terrace a year or more ago. Unfortunately we had filmed outside the wrong set of terraced houses, erroneously thinking it was the set one block lower on Stuart Street. In our defence there was scaffolding up at the time, obscuring what we thought was the name on the parapet of the building. Fortunately I was walking that block a few weeks later and realised our mistake. So another circle joined today as we returned to the correct Stuart Street row.

Hardly any filming left to do now so the project is winding down considerably, although there’s still a bit to do on the production and technical side. Then the stories should start rolling out in a steady stream … all 100 of them. Meanwhile, the next two episodes of the main documentary will be available this weekend, both in the Toitū auditorium as per the sessions advertised on our Facebook page, and also on our website via the “What’s On”, then “Watch” options. We have had some wonderful feedback for Episodes 3 & 4 that came out last week. If you liked them, please spread the word and share the links as all our effort will be in vain if nobody watches the film. Some word-of-mouth promotion would be very welcome.

Hopefully, you’ll also enjoy Episodes 5 & 6:

Episode 5:  Making It Work

With the establishment of a provincial government in 1853, things slowly got back on track.  Immigration was revived on a much-expanded scale and surveying and mapping began to open up Otago’s vast inland areas for closer settlement.

Episode 6:  Highlanders

To begin with, Otago was settled by Scots who were overwhelmingly from the Lowlands.  In the mid-1850s, however, as a new economic focus on pastoral farming developed, Highlanders came into their own.  Their specialised skills in sheep management were now in high demand. 

The next instalments

8 June 2023

Great to see the scheduled releases of the remaining six episodes of Journey to New Edinburgh announced on the Museum’s Facebook page the other day. In case you missed it, here are the dates and times:

Even as the final products begin rolling off the assembly line here at Toitū, we are still completing work on some of the 100 individual stories. That mostly involves editing and technical production but there are just a few last bits of filming to be completed as well. So yesterday afternoon the team got back on the road for a quick sweep around Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula for our stories about John and Marion Withers, William Tolmie, John Mathieson, James Seaton, Archibald Anderson, James Macandrew, David Con Hutton, John Hill, and Isabella Trotter. It was a beautiful crisp Dunedin winter’s day and we visited some lovely spots as you can see below.

There were six pages of script to perform and even after all this time, it always feels a little a daunting to be faced with all those words when I haven’t done it for a while. Matters were complicated a little as well by my present limited mobility. I had a little accident seven weeks ago and broke my leg. Fortunately I got my cast off last week and am now in a moon boot. I’m still not allowed to put any weight on the damaged limb but I’ve gotten pretty good at getting around on crutches. It did mean that all of the shots had to be framed up to only show my upper body but Chris didn’t seem too phased by that. And Will positioned me in most cases so I could lean against something for support.

Andersons Bay Presbyterian Church where the Withers worshipped

Near Grants Braes where the Mathiesons farmed

Looking towards Harbour Cone/Hereweka, site of Archie Anderson’s Kevingrove farm

Portobello Jetty with the township where the Seatons lived behind

Colinswood, James Macandrew’s final family home

Visiting James Macandrew’s home was a real highlight. The present owners were very hospitable in giving us permission and access, continuing the strong support we have experienced from the owners of historic properties both here and overseas. Macandrew is such a complex character, with so many highs and some pretty significant lows in his colonial life. Having been to his birthplace in Aberdeen, his childhood home in Fortrose, his early business neighbourhood in central London, and the location of Carisbrook, his original property in Dunedin, it was good to complete the circle with this, his final home.

And just along the hillside at Macandrew Bay, which name of course commemorates it famous early inhabitant, is the location where he met with the fatal carriage accident that claimed his life in 1887. It’s quite amazing to remember that this key figure in early Otago history, who did so much, and was involved with so much more, was only 67 when he died. Wending our way around Marion Street, with its hairpin bends, obscured corners and, yesterday, a rubbish truck doing its rounds, traffic safety was easy to have front of mind. Pulling out onto Portobello Road at the base of the hill is not an exercise for the fainthearted either, Will needing to crane his neck at a sharp angle over the right shoulder to see traffic rushing along the Peninsula road.

A tricky spot for traffic, then and now.

Macandrew’s final resting place is tucked away behind a hedge amongst the shops and cafes at the Bay, with an entrance between Bellamys Gallery and The Duck cafe. It feels like an oasis of calm, with Macandrew’s grave right there. Wouldn’t you know it though, the minute we set up to take our shot, the screaming whine of a circular saw shattered the quiet as a neighbour got stuck into some DIY right over the adjacent fence. How many times have we struck this sort of noise pollution already? We waited … and waited … but he seemed to have an awful lot of sawing to get through. Then there was a moment’s quiet. But no, as soon as I opened my mouth, away went the saw. “Do it anyway”, said Chris. A moment’s calm, so we quickly did three takes, interspersed with the intermittent whine of the saw. And then we were off, leaving Macandrew’s impressive headstone to enjoy the cacophony.

The Macandrew headstone

One Year On

Tuesday 16 May 2023

Exactly one year ago today we set off from Dunedin airport on our epic mission to film the overseas component of Journey to New Edinburgh. We set off with high hopes and big expectations, as well as a few quiet worries about what might await us on the road (and in the air). Fortune smiled on the expedition throughout, however, and we were especially blessed with the weather, which only on a very few occasions impacted our ability to film outdoors. We were also super lucky with the various ferry sailings that were part of the journey, especially the 12-hour one up to Shetland. Those seas are well known for their often-stormy nature so we were very thankful to experience millpond-like conditions on that and every other sea route we took.

One year ago today, at Dunedin airport and ready to roll.

The other thing I’m really grateful for in retrospect is that we didn’t have any unforeseen accidents on the way. Having had a really simple fall recently that saw me end up with a broken leg and dislocated ankle (and on crutches for ten weeks), I realise that if something similar had happened at the same time last year, I couldn’t have even gone on the trip. And we did in fact have a little whoopsie on Arthurs Seat on our first day in Edinburgh where I slipped and landed flat on my back. I took a very sore elbow away from that incident but it could just as easily have left me with a more serious impairment on a par with the one I’m enduring right now. As Fred Dagg used to remind us, “You don’t know how lucky you are”.

Meanwhile, one year on, we can wallow in the satisfaction of getting our story completed after a huge editing and production effort from Will and Chris. Episodes 1 & 2 have been shared with an enthusiastic audience – including at the gala showing at the Rialto cinema on 22 March. We’ve been really gratified with the feedback we have received and look forward to the release of the next episode which must be imminent. I was working on the final subtitles for it yesterday so hopefully you’ll be able to see Episode 3 very soon. The remaining five episodes of the main story won’t be too far behind, and then we should have the first of the 100 pioneer short stories ready to roll out very soon as well. It’s a pretty impressive output all told and one that the team is very proud of.

The JTNE team at the OSA Garden Party at Olveston on 26 March.

We really enjoyed meeting with members of the Otago Settlers Association at their recent Garden Part at Olveston to mark the Association’s 125th anniversary, giving us a chance to personally acknowledge the Association’s financial and moral support which was so important to getting us overseas last year. Today, it was good to pause for a moment over afternoon tea at the Toitū cafe and look back, sharing our memories of the trip and looking ahead to further adventures in film perhaps. The JTNE trip was a fantastic experience, really challenging with the long hours and hard work but also highly memorable and one of the highlights of my long career at the museum. And what great companions to have on the road.

A moment to remember and be grateful.

Happy 175th Otago Anniversary Day

23 March 2023

The Toitū filming team at the launch: Will, Seán and Chris

Well the big day has finally arrived. After a wonderful launch at the Rialto cinema in Dunedin last night, the first two episodes of Journey to New Edinburgh are now available for viewing on the Toitū website:

http://www.toituosm.com/whats-on/watch

This seems a great way to mark the 175th anniversary of the arrival at Port Chalmers of the John Wickliffe and with it the formal beginning of the Otago settlement scheme. There had been a lot of challenges and struggles to get to that point – as we show in the film – and a lot more to come for those audacious characters who chanced their fortunes on the dream of a new and ideal society in the South Seas. It may not have come to pass quite as they envisaged it but the magnificent city of Dunedin and the wonderful province of Otago that we relish living in today owe so much to those stalwart pioneers of 1848 and all those who followed them. So what better way to mark the occasion than to set aside an hour to watch the story of their endeavours. And more to come when the other six episodes are released, hopefully soon.

Beyond that, we have also taken on the stories of 100 different pioneers and those stories, short clips of 4-10 minutes in length, should also start appearing quite soon. Tracking their origins was a large part of our expedition and what took us so far and wide across Scotland, Ireland, England and even Wales last year. There’s a far bit of variety involved, although inevitably given the constraints of the available evidence there are more men than women, and more ‘successes’ than ‘failures’ in the line-up but we did try to broaden the focus as much as we could. We also tried whenever we had a contact to check the stories with descendants but in many cases this wasn’t possible. As a result, I expect we will have made more inadvertent errors in these stories than anywhere else so apologies in advance for anything we didn’t get quite right. We did our best.

Here they are in alphabetical order:

Adam, James
Allan, Colin
Anderson, Archie
Ayson, Peter and Douglas (nee Lamont)
Barr, John
Beverly, Arthur
Blackie, William, Captain
Borrie, David
Borrie, James and Janet (nee Borrie)
Brydone, Thomas
Buchanan, John and Margaret (nee McCulloch)
Burns, Clementina (nee Grant)
Burns, Thomas
Cargill, William
Carnegie, John de la Condamine
Chalmers, Nathanael
Chalmers, Robert & Janet (nee Fyfe)
Chapman, Christina (née Finlayson)
Christie, James
Cowie, Robert, Dr
Crawford, Peter
Cuddie, Thomas and Mary (nee Parkinson)
Dackers, David
Dallas, William
Dalrymple, Learmonth Miss
Dean, Minnie (nee McCulloch)
Douglas, Caroline (nee Prentice)
Dow, John
Duckworth, Robert and Margaret (nee Humphrey)
Duff, William and Mary (nee Boyd)
Duke, Charles and Elizabeth (nee Beck)
Dunlop, Peter and Caroline (nee Thomson)
Elles, Andrew
Fenwick, George, Sir
Fulton, James
Gillies, John
Harris, John Hyde
Heffernan, Thomas
Hepburn, George
Hill, John
Hosty, Mary (nee Desmond)
Hutton, David Con
Irvine, John
Jaffray, William
Johnston, Adam
Lawson, Robert
Leitch, Peter & Elizabeth (nee Adam)
Macandrew, James
MacDonell, Alexander Ranaldson (17th Chief of Glengarry)
MacGibbon, John and Jane (nee McConachy)
Mackenzie, John or James (Jock)
Malloch, Donald and Elizabeth (nee Wright)
Martin, William
Mathieson, John
Matthews, George
McBean, Peter and Jane (nee Clunas)
McGlashan, John and Isabella (nee McEwan)
McKegg, Amos
McKegg, Catherine (nee Murray)
McKenzie, John
McKenzie, Murdoch
McKerrow, James
McLaren, Peter and Janet (nee McGregor)
McLean, George, Sir
Mieville, Frederic
Murchison, Finlay
Paterson, William
Pavletich, Ann (nee Connell)
Poppelwell, William and Catherine (nee McLaughlan)
Purdie, William, Dr
Ramsay, Keith
Rattray, James
Rees, William and Frances (nee Gilbert)
Reeves, Charles Stephen
Reid, Donald
Reid, John (Stirling)
Reid, John (Longside)
Riddell, Walter and Wilhelmina (nee Glendinning)
Roberts John, Sir
Ross, John
Scott, Alison (nee Langlands)
Seaton, James
Shand, Barbara (nee Angus)
Shennan, Watson
Stout, Robert
Strain, Mary Anne Miss
Stuart, Donald McNaughton, Rev Dr
Sutherland, Duncan
Sutherland, Robert
Thomson, John Turnbull
Tolmie, William
Trotter, William Sinclair
Trotter, Isabella Jardine (nee Dalrymple)
Valpy, William, Judge
Vogel, Julius Sir
Wain, Job
Will William, Rev
Williams, Robert Dr
Williamson, James
Wither, John and Marion (nee McHarg)
Wright, Adam

I was very fortunate last night to have almost all of my children with me for the launch, as well as my 92-year-old father. It was fortuitous really; my oldest son Hugh has been home on a visit from Germany but leaves again on Friday. We had all gathered at the weekend (including my daughter Lorna) to celebrate my middle son Joseph’s 30th birthday and my Dad came down on the bus from Timaru for that celebration. He was happy to stay on a few more days for this event. Joseph was the cameraman for our very first Toitū filming adventure when we made Journey of the Otagos in 2014. It was just he and I travelling across the battlefields to film material for that documentary so it was good to have him on hand to see the latest venture launched into the world.

The Brosnahan support team at the launch

Remembering as well today my mother who would have been very proud of this project and whose Galway ancestors’ story forms a key component of our Irish episode. She died on 23 March nine years ago which has made Otago’s Anniversary Day something of a bittersweet commemoration for me ever since. The whole family will be thinking of her today and it will be a lonely ride home on the bus for Dad. But in fact he won’t be alone and memories of the love of his life will sustain him today as they do every day.

Helen Brosnahan nee Scully, 28 March 1931 – 23 March 2014

Countdown to launch!

Wednesday 15 March 2023

For anyone who has been following this project over the past few years, we are now approaching the big reveal. The first two episodes (of eight) will be launched via the Toitū website next Thursday, 23 March, which also happens to be the 175th anniversary of the arrival of the John Wickliffe and thus Otago’s official anniversary day. What a great way to mark the occasion! At the same time, for those in Dunedin, you will also be able to watch this first hour of our epic on a big screen at Toitū daily from 23-26 March at 10.30am, 12.30pm and 2.30pm. The other six episodes will follow in due course. As will the 100 stories of individual pioneers which is the second strand of our work. We don’t know yet how exactly they will appear, or when, but I will keep you ‘posted’ when we do.

Meanwhile, we were delighted last week to get an invitation from David, the owner of John Boyle Todd’s inner-city cottage off Graham Street, the original portion of which we reckon is probably the second-oldest house in Dunedin. You will recall from an earlier post that we were up there filming the cottage from the outside late last year. Last week David was doing some maintenance work on the interior and kindly gave us the opportunity to have a look around inside while he did. It was really something to see a snug little home that goes right back to Dunedin’s earliest days and – with a number of later additions and sympathetic renovations – has survived right up to the present.

We didn’t take the cameras this time but really appreciated the opportunity to have a look at this wonderful relic of pioneer Dunedin. It also enabled Will and I to tick this house off our list of special places that we have been privileged to access through this project. There was the absolutely oldest house, Ferntree House in Wakari, then this one as No 2 on that ‘oldest house in Dunedin’ list and finally the Brown house in Lundie Street that is the oldest surviving residence in Roslyn. In each case, we have been delighted to find owners who take seriously their role as custodians of these pieces of Dunedin’s built heritage and are working hard to preserve them into the future.

Likewise for all the other locations associated with Otago’s pioneers that we have been lucky enough to visit during our various travels here and overseas and the warm welcome we have received from owners and descendants in every case. So as things wrap up from the production end, we’d like to extend our deepest appreciation for all the friends and supporters of Journey to New Edinburgh. It has been a tremendous privilege and an enormous pleasure to work for so long on this epic production. As we sign off and hand it over to you, the audience it was intended for, we hope you will enjoy it and feel we have done justice to this wonderful story of the founders and foundresses of Otago.

And apologies for any errors or omissions.

We did our best.

Tell your friends.

The Last ‘M’s

Monday 28 November 2022

Yesterday afternoon we made our last big swoop of the year, driving down to the Tokomairiro and locating some pretty amazing spots. The big landmark today was that we were filming the very last of our ‘M’ stories, which is to say script sections for the main documentary. From now on it will be the ‘smaller’ stories of 100 individual pioneers – the ‘S’ stories that remain to be filmed. We already have lots of those, or large parts of them, in the can but there isn’t the same time pressure for us to complete them. The main documentary though will be launched for Otago’s 175th anniversary day in March so the clock is ticking on that and there is a lot of editing and production required to cut it all together. Will has been working intensively on all of that but soon he is heading back to Scotland with his family for a Christmas visit and he then passes the project on to Chris to work some of his techno magic on it. I don’t have much of a role, apart from finding visual material on demand for Will, or recording voice-overs so my involvement reduces markedly.

But not quite yet! Still some location filming to do – including these last ‘M’s – and as I’ve said before it is so exciting to actually visit some of the historic locations that I have talked or written about for years. Yesterday it was a real thrill first up to be at ‘Sunwick’, or at least where that very special place used to be. I first wrote about ‘Sunwick’ way back in 1998 in a paper called “The Greening of Otago” I delivered to the New Zealand Society of Genealogists” conference, held that year in Dunedin. It was subsequently published [copy available from this link on my website] and has proven to be one of my more influential pieces of historical work, outlining the process by which the first Irish Catholic immigrants arrived in Scottish Presbyterian Otago in the 1850s. My research had identified the important role of support for those pioneer Irish arrivals by the Scottish Catholic William Poppelwell at his Tokomairiro farm ‘Sunwick’.

Back in May, of course, we visited the original ‘Sunwick’ on the Scottish border and were very hospitably received by its present owners. There, it was still the same house that William had grown up in before embarking on a career as a mariner that saw him come to New Zealand and indeed deliver a boat to Ngai Tahu chief Tuhawaiki that made him familiar with the Otago harbour long before most Scots had heard of it. He had then returned to Scotland in 1846 with the Highland bride he had married in Wellington, going home to ‘Sunwick’ to learn the farming skills he would need to succeed in New Zealand. The Poppelwells subsequently decided to emigrate to Otago to join the Scottish settlement there, arriving on the Blundell in 1848. As a Catholic William was something of an odd man out in the pioneer settlement and, after a brief period farming in North East Valley, he was one of the first to push out beyond the tight confines of the initial settlement zone, bringing his family to this spot by the Tokomairiro river, just to the east of modern-day Milton.

Newspaper stories recording the Poppelwell’s move south in 1853.

Unlike in Scotland, there is no sign now of the house that the Poppelwells built at this Otago version of ‘Sunwick’ but rows of oak trees endure to mark the spot. This is where many of the early Galway migrants – poor, Irish, Catholic, many of them illiterate, and with Gaelic as their first language – found a welcome and often a job at the start of their lives in New Zealand. It was also a place where Catholic religious practices flourished, both the regular lay liturgies led by William Poppelwell, and the big celebrations of weddings and baptisms when the French Marist priests made their occasional visitations to the south from their base in Wellington. ‘Sunwick’ was where they were based on these visits and it is fair to say that it was the centre of Catholic life in Otago during the 1850s, a period when the embryonic Catholic church in this region was Scottish, English and French, as much if not more than it was Irish.

‘Sunwick’ at Tokomairiro

The significance of this spot to Otago Catholic history has been pretty much forgotten, however, so it was really something to actually locate it after all these years, thanks to some diligent ferreting by Will and some great help by locals from the Tokomairiro Historical Society and the current owners of the property. This is really the best thing about Journey to New Edinburgh and the other films we have made in recent years: going to the actual places where things happened and making that nitty gritty reality available vicariously to our audiences. I count it a huge privilege personally and all three of us on the team get pretty excited when a location really rocks like this one did. It is a lovely spot; green fields sheltered by the bend in the river and with sheltering hills between it and the ocean. But it’s also worth recalling that getting here back in 1853 when the Poppelwells made the journey (their heavily loaded dray the first wheeled vehicle to cross the Tokomairiro plain) it was quite the epic expedition. It took them nine days to bump their way the 60 kilometres from Dunedin, a distance we covered in about 45 minutes.

We then had another of the many headstone hunts that have been part of JTNE. This time it was in the Fairfax cemetery, not far from ‘Sunwick’ and another lovely little country cemetery that seems pretty well cared for. We had a block and plot number to locate the Poppelwell grave but those guides only really work when the graves themselves are numbered, which did not seem to be the case here. So we fanned out, tramping up and down the rows to find the spot. In this case our information was that there was no actual headstone on the Poppelwell grave so we were looking for the headstones on either side of it. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that it was Will who found it first; he seems to have a real knack with cemetery hunts. The big surprise though was that there was indeed a headstone, obviously a recent one that shows that someone – presumably descendants – cares enough to mark William and Catherine Poppelwells’ final resting place.

It would be hard to top the finding and filming of ‘Sunwick’ for me but actually the next spot almost did. This will be our last location relating to James Adam, another largely forgotten figure that JTNE will hopefully return to greater historical prominence. And this was also a location that involved a grave that was apparently no more; the family ‘vault’ at Adam’s Tokomairiro estate of ‘Bon Accord’. I have described in previous posts just how important James Adam was to the peopling of pioneer Otago. Hailing from Aberdeen, he had proven to be the ideal early settler himself, a man with a real can-do attitude. This saw him leave the “Philip Laing” pretty much as soon as it berthed at Port Chalmers, make his way to Dunedin and get stuck in building a little whare for his family on the site now occupied by the Dunedin Casino on Princes/High Streets. We have of course already filmed there, as well as all around his native Aberdeen.

James Adam’s ‘Bon Accord’.

Today the story shifted to ‘Bon Accord’, so named for the Aberdeen neighbourhood that James Adam’s family had lived in before emigrating but also the motto of Aberdeen itself. Adam had been a ship’s carpenter by trade – a very useful man to have in a pioneer settlement – but he had aspirations to become a farmer in Otago. When he embarked on his great recruiting mission for the Otago settlement as its emigration agent in 1857-58, he apparently took his payment in land, thereby acquiring a decent acreage at what is now called Adam’s Flat, on the road inland from Tokomairiro to Tuapeka. That proved to be not so good a location once gold was discovered though and hordes of hungry miners crossed his farm on their way to the diggings. Undeterred, Adam swapped that farm for another area twice as large a little bit to the south of Milton near Moneymore. There he established a substantial property, including an impressive house, and lived out his days (after doing a second stint as an emigrant recruiter in the 1870s).

Adam’s big house is no more, unfortunately, and its exact location had taken a bit of detective work (and generous help from the locals) to pin down. But here we were at last, flanked by large bluegums that he had undoubtedly planted to shelter his residence and looking down from its elevated position over the fertile acres of the Tokomairiro plain. We also understood that the family mausoleum on Bon Accord had been demolished for safety reasons in the 20th century so we were not even looking for that. But as we wrapped up our shot underneath the bluegums Will spotted something that looked awfully like a classic 19th-century headstone on the brow of the hill in the foreground. And so it proved to be; the vault may have been taken down but remnants of it were easy to find and the whole edifice still topped by the big headstone commemorating our man and his family. What a bonus and what a great way to finish the story of James Adam.

The Adam family mausoleum at ‘Bon Accord’.

All the ‘M’s done and dusted.

Woodside and Ravenscliffe: the benefits of local knowledge

Friday 18 November 2022

Today we had a busy morning touring around West Taieri, a trip we have been planning for a while but we had to wait for weather and welcome to align. Both came together perfectly today: the weather with showers threatening but holding off and providing some good subdued light under cloudy grey skies; and the welcome being very warm for our principal host Ray who is another quiet champion of heritage preservation in his own little fiefdom on the western side of the Taieri Plain. Our first subject today was the redoubtable Francis McDiarmid who came to Otago on the first ship from Scotland (the Philip Laing) with his nephew. Francis was originally from Clackmannanshire but his last known location before emigration was at Thornhill just to the northwest of Stirling where he was a tenant farmer of reasonable means. We know that because during the voyage he asked Rev Thomas Burns to look after the 126 gold sovereigns he was taking with him to Otago as his set-up money. It’s hard to pin down exactly what that would be in today’s money but we worked out it must have been well over $20,000. Not a fortune, but not a bad rainy day fund either.

Francis was also a bit unusual in that he was 47 years old and a bachelor. That’s quite late in life to make a big move such as emigration but it suggests that Francis recognised the potential for an experienced farmer like him in a new place like Otago. After a lifetime of farm tenancies where he had to move from place to place around Scotland without ever really getting on, here was a chance to actually own some land in his own name. In any case he purchased one of the New Zealand Company land packages that gave he and his nephew free passages to Otago and off they went. It seems that he also had an eye to starting a family as well, since on the voyage out he did enough to win the hand of fellow passenger 27-year-old Janet Milne. She was the sister of James Adam’s wife and you might recall that it was her agreeing to accompany her sister Margaret to the colony that solved James Adam’s domestic challenges when Margaret tried to stop his emigration plan.

Francis and Janet didn’t waste much time after their wedding in getting out to the Taieri to begin developing his rural land allotment. In fact, they were pretty much the first to do so in the West Taieri area, on the far side of the plain from Dunedin, a place where the land’s potential was cloaked by its boggy nature in its natural state. There was still a substantial podocarp forest on the land stretching up over the foothills behind it. This is where Francis and Janet set up in 1848, first in a very basic whare, then in a wattle and daub hut. Francis called his property “Woodside”, a fairly descriptive name for its situation when he got there. Sawmilling would later be a main driver of development in the neighbourhood. Before then, however, there was a lot to do and some real challenges to living in such an isolated spot. Family stories tell of Francis tramping the 35 km back to Dunedin for supplies, carrying them back to Woodside on his back. Supposedly this was often a one-day mission, with Janet at his side and a baby on her hip. I take that tales like this with a grain of salt to be honest but it does convey the quintessential challenges involved in being the first European settlers in a remote spot.

Not the first to live there though. Not far away was Maitapapa, the substantial Maori kaik at what is now Henley. There were occasions indeed when the McDiarmids were cut off by floods, ran out of food, and had to wade through waist-deep water to borrow some food from these nearest neighbours. They were willingly supplied with eels and muttonbirds to keep them going. In 1849, they were joined at Woodside by the Fulton brothers, the teenagers born in India but with family roots in County Antrim whose story we have also been following. Like the McDiarmids they began their life on the land here in very basic conditions, living in a fern tree hut that had bunks around a central fireplace, while they looked after a sheep flock for another pioneer settler. Of course, the Fultons were from the gentry class and didn’t have to ‘slum it’ in these conditions for long. In fact, James Fulton soon married Catherine Valpy, daughter of the wealthiest man in the colony, and they were to develop a substantial farming estate here with a very nice house and a magnificent garden.

The Fulton’s fern tree house

“Ravenscliffe” in its prime

We knew that the Fulton house – “Ravenscliffe” – was long gone but Francis and Janet McDiarmid also built a fine house for themselves once their farming enterprise began to prosper in the gold rush era. The main road to the gold fields went right past their property and like most of the pioneers out here they did very well by supplying food to the diggers. In 1866 Francis commissioned the stonemason brothers John and James Dow to build him a fine brick house at Woodside. It was subsequently occupied by three generations of McDiarmids over the succeeding century but is now in the hands of Ray, and he was our host today. Ray is someone who really appreciates old and beautiful things and is lucky enough to have a wife who shares this passion. Together they are wonderful custodians of one of the oldest farm houses on the Taieri and energetic heritage advocates on many fronts.

We quickly knocked off the scripted stories on the McDiarmids – Ray helpfully correcting a minor infelicity in our story – and then set off down the road to find some other locations in the neighbourhood with him as our guide. It was fortunate to have his detailed local knowledge. Without it we would never have realised that a section of David Dackers’ West Taieri flourmill survives. The final part of our Dackers biography, we hadn’t expected to find any remnant of the mill here as we knew it burnt down in 1884, leading to David’s subsequent bankruptcy. He made a comeback later with another flourmill in Tapanui, where we have already filmed, but ironically it is the old flour mill at Balbirnie in Scotland where he had served his milling apprenticeship which is the only one of those three mills that is still largely intact today.

At Woodside, it was easy to see where the mill had been, with Ray’s helpful insights into how it had been set up and fed with water. But best of all, hidden away down a bank and covered with foliage like the princess’s castle in Sleeping Beauty, was the mill’s original kiln. Ray reckoned it was a defect in the kiln that had led to the 1884 fire. For our purposes, however, he was more than happy for Will to tear down the vines and break off the sycamore branches that obscured the kiln’s stone wall from view. That’s why it’s always good to work with property owners – you’d never feel justified in wreaking havoc with the vegetation like this without their encouragement. But with the wall exposed, it was a nice finishing touch to our Dacker story, with a satisfying precision as to location and the added bonus of having something tangible from the past to see.

The old flourmill’s kiln

Not so fortunate with “Ravenscliffe” unfortunately but we did know that a waterwheel from the house’s plant did survive, if only we could find it. No problem with some local knowledge, of course, so it was down the road, around the corner and there it was. Not much to look at to be honest but sometimes you just have to make do with what history has left behind when you’re telling stories like ours.

A remnant of “Ravenscliffe”