"The Little Enemy"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 15

"The Little Enemy"

AS his subject in the Winter Course Talks from 4YA, on "The Roots of Otago," John Harris, the Otago University Librarian, chose to deal with "The Little Enemy." The title had me puzzled at first, until the speaker explained that this was the title applied in the early days of the province to all those who opposed the claims of the Scottish founders for a sort of "closed shop" wherein the only worthy settlers should be those adhering to the doctrine of the Free Church of Scotland. It all seems a dead enough issue nowadays, but there must have been acute heartburning over it in the time when Captain Cargill warned off the Wesleyan minister of Waikouaiti from preaching.

in the Scots community, thereby precipitating a large-scale newspaper controversy and antagonising the opposition into action. As Mr. Harris said in his talk, the Presbyterian influence in Otago remains to this day a hard inner core against which sparks can still be struck by the modern equivalent of the "Little Enemy." Under the heading of this talk he included all those non-Presbyterian, non-Scots elements which went to the making of Otago-the Polynesian migrants, the moa-hunting Maoris, the whalers and sealers, the gold-rush settlers, and the succeeding waves of new population from all over the world. Without this admixture of different races and creeds, customs and manners, Otago would have been a different kind of province and not a tenth as interesting. We must thank Mr. Harris for reminding us tactfully, during the 100th anniversary year of the Scots settlement in Otago, of people like Sir Robert Stout, W. M. Boult, Thomas Bracken, Mark Cohen, and von Tunzelman, some of the men of different ideas and nationality whose influence on the province’s history was so far-reaching in effect; and for reminding us that we are, in culture and custom, the result of the inter-action of many and varied forces, among which the Scots, though the most powerful, is not necessarily the only one worth reckoning with.