OTAGO EMERGES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26559, 6 September 1947, Page 6

OTAGO EMERGES

Seeking a New Land The statesmanlike schemes foe colonisation proposed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield were soon acted upon, though sometimes with undue baste and consequent disappointment, and by the time of the Free Church Disruption the New Zealand Company was a flourishing concern, with three settlements to its credit. Yet of seventy-six vessels despatched to these shores between 1839 and the middle of 1847, only three sailed from Scottish ports. Excellent colonist as the Scotsman undoubtedly is, and keen to find a place where he could get land enough for “a cow’s grass and a kail yard," he is yet credited with more caution than his brethren on the other side of the border, so perhaps he was " waiting to see.” Possibly another deterrent was the current notion of New Zealand found in the wild tales told. At a farewell dinner to the " Bengal Merchant” in 1839, for instance, verses written by the Poet Laureate, Southey, were read, which spoke of 1 . . . Zealand’s hills, where tigers /Steal along And the dread Indian chants a dismal song; Where human fiends on midnight errands walk And bathe in brains the murderous tomahawk.” Small wonder that the canny Scot waited! In 1842 came a new colonising scheme—for a settlement to be situated " on the eastern coast of the Middle Island.” Proposed by "an eminent agriculturist,” George Rennie, the new settlement was to be well planned. Surveys were to be made, wharves built, and land cleared before the emigrants arrived. Each emigrant would purchase an allotment including a quarter-acre town section, a twenty-acre suburban section, and an eighty-acre rural section. t The proposal met with considerable opposition, not least from the attitude of the Governor, who strongly objected to the wide dispersal of new settlements, and insisted that they should be near his capital whence they could be more easily governed. Not the last time, perhaps, that Otago has been considered too far from the centre of New Zealand’s affairs! —G. D.