All good things must come to an end, and sadly this is the final episode of Journey to New Edinburgh. Fear not, however! We will be diving into the Settler Stories series that follows Journey to New Edinburgh in our next post.

It’s hard to imagine that at one point in time Dunedin was just an idea in the heads of a few Scots. We take for granted the amazing city we have down here at the bottom of the globe. It was built up over almost two centuries, becoming at times a central cog in the New Zealand wheelhouse.

These days, we’re a quiet but determined city, and I think that works well for us. Nobody bothers us, maybe nobody expects too much from us, and we just keep ourselves happy enjoying some of the best scenery that any city in NZ can offer. Plus the only traffic jam in Dunedin is the cars lined up at the terribly timed traffic lights outside Woolworths South D.

Dunedin began as a wee Scottish settlement, but it grew into so much more. We have those early Scottish pioneers to thank for kicking it off, and we have the ones who came after them to thank for keeping it going. Now it’s our turn to keep this city’s fires burning.

Today we finish with episode 8: The New Breed. As the profits from grass and gold offered unprecedented levels of provincial prosperity in the 1860s, the dream of an exclusively Free Church colony in Otago was finally laid to rest. The Scottish and Presbyterian roots endured, however, and ensured that Otago and Southland would remain New Zealand’s historic Scottish heartland.