We were just in Glasgow for a couple of months and my abiding impression is that it felt like home. There is a pretty obvious reason for this; the area where I grew up is called Dunedin and Dùn Èideann is the Scots-Gaelic name for Edinburgh. Scottish friends tell me that Edinburgh was not historically a Gaelic-speaking region. It has another name, Ōtepoti, because Māori were already living in the area and had been since about 1300 CE. These days both names are used interchangeably. But for a long time the colonist name won out.
Thinking about the city’s history reminds me of a scene from The Simpsons:
Groundskeeper Willy: Brothers and sisters are natural enemies. Like Englishmen and Scots, or Welshmen and Scots, or Japanese and Scots, or Scots and other Scots. Damn Scots! They ruined Scotland!
Principal Skinner: The Scots are certainly a contentious people.
Groundskeeper Willy [thumping Skinner’s desk and leaning towards him, snarling]: You’ve just made an enemy for life.
Dunedin is the result of a bitter argument between Scots. In 1843, the ‘Great Disruption’, split the Scottish Church in two. The bone of contention was who should have the right to control clerical positions and benefits. The evangelicals maintained that a parish should have the right to reject a minister nominated by its patron in favor of one of its own choosing; the moderates were afraid this would upset the British government because the patrons tended to be British landed gentry. The moderates won the day and 450 evangelical ministers stalked out of the hall and formed their own damned church.
In 1848 the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland founded a new city in New Zealand. Hilariously, they chose a spot that was almost exactly the antipodal point of Edinburgh—from pure spite they went the furthest possible point away to make their point (to be completely accurate the real antipode is Papatowai, two hours’ drive away). The Free Church wanted to create a new improved Edinburgh: more Gaelic, more Scottish, more free! Between 1855 and 1900 several boatloads of this particular brand of Protestant Calvinist landed in Otago Harbour.
So it was that down there, a stone’s throw from Antarctica, they built a kind of Puritanical Utopia where breakfast is porridge, bagpipes abound, and the local rugby team is called The Highlanders. The street plan is even a replica of Edinburgh’s historic district. Castle Street, Dunedin, is notorious for drunken student riots. On Saturday mornings you’re bound to see smoking couches on the sidewalk. Imagine my surprise on seeing that in Edinburgh Castle Street leads to an actual castle.
One thing that struck me about Scotland-Scotland compared to the New World version was that the Big Bug in literary terms was Sir Walter Scott. In Dunedin, Scott is pretty much ignored. The major figure, whose statue literally stands in the city’s center, is Robert Burns. Burns Night dinners (January 25) are still a big deal. This can probably be explained because one of Dunedin’s founders was Thomas Burns, the poet’s nephew and an evangelical minister.
There are other differences. The Scots-Scots have a thing for Elvis, for example, that seems baffling to me. They’re actually much friendlier than the New Scots and some of them speak actual Gaelic. Their swans are white, not black and shopkeepers call strangers ‘darling’ without being sarcastic.
One of my friends, Kay Mackenzie Cooke, has written a couple of absorbing novels that explore the historical and emotional ties between Scotland and New Zealand Craggan Dhu: Time Will Tell and its sequel Quick Blue Fire, written in an authentic Southern voice. Kay’s blog 11th Letter In also offers a window into Dunedin things and is enhanced by exquisite poetry and photography.
Next post I will talk more about some Scottish things we saw.
