Otago's First Century

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 5

Otago's First Century

XT week Otago will reach the end of its first century as an organised settlement, and the climax of its centennial celebrations. Though there were white men in the area before the arrival of the two ships from Scotland, it was the dropping of the John Wickliffe’s anchor on March 23, 1848, and the Philip Laing’s a few weeks later, that started Otago on the course it has held ever since. Nor is it careless to call it a continuous course. If it has not been a straight line it has been an unbroken line leading always in the same direction. It was plain enough, once gold had been discovered, ‘that the people would no longer remain Scottish; but the gold came and went, and the spirit of Scotland lived on. It is not profitable, not even desirable, to ask what proportion of the people of Otago and Southland are still Presbyterian; but there is no danger in pointing out that Presbyterianism is still the strongest moral force south of the Waitaki, and some danger in forgetting it. Otago is upright, cautious, and serious to a degree unknown in the northern provinces. To what extent it has financed northern enterprise is not very important (except to borrowers and retailers of stale jokes); but it is important to gauge the influence it has had on standards of character and conduct, and this, if it has sometimes been a little hard to bear, has been overwhelmingly beneficial. An Otago man is just as likely as a man from Canterbury or Auckland to be a humbug, a pretender, or a public nuisance; but he is a little less likely to be lazy, improvident, casual, or frivolous. Otago men have therefore had an influence out of proportion to their numbers. If they have sometimes seemed what one of their ministers said about the faces of the pioneers in the Early Settlers’ Hall-a little too resolute for the grace ef God -their resolution and the fear of God have left an indelible impression on. New Zealand's first century. |.