‘Scots who ventured’

Edgar wrote in his proposal for the exhibition that ‘This exhibition is for those Scots who ventured …’ I have over the past few years been exploring the poetry of one of the first Scottish settlers to New Zealand, William Golder (1810-1876), who arrived in Wellington on the Bengal Merchant in 1840. In addition to the hard pioneering work of bush clearance he published 4 volumes of poetry³ before leaving New Zealand for his only visit back to Scotland, where he died shortly after arrival. His major poem, ‘The New Zealand Survey’ (1867), is an epic of the origin of New Zealand and its future prospects as a nation. He is buried in Strathaven, near Glasgow, where he was brought up, adjacent to the graves of two Covenanters, whose deaths he commemorated in an early poem⁴.

My own crossings between Scotland and New Zealand, like Golder’s, are an instance of the colonial history on which this exhibition reflects. I came to Edinburgh in the late 1960s to study for my doctorate, and carried out this work on the relations between puritanism and early modern science under the monitory presence of the statue of John Knox in the courtyard of New College. By the time I returned in 2002, the focus of my research had shifted to Golder, although issues in the relations between science and religion have remained prominent. A striking feature of Golder’s poetry and the knowledge which informs it is that it is drawn almost exclusively from Scottish sources, and I have become increasingly aware that my research is itself a further stage in the process of cultural transmission and modification which Golder for one set in motion when he was forced to emigrate. As with all cultural exchange, the process is not linear, but weaves times and texts together in strange and unexpected ways. Golder could not anticipate me as a reader (although he addressed the future generations who would have forgotten those who came before them), just as I was quite unaware for a large part of my life that Golder lay at my roots as a Pakeha New Zealander⁵.

In relation to ballast, there are four distinctive moments of personal cultural encounter in Scotland which I want to bring to bear upon it. The first is my ‘discovery’ of the Picts during my period of doctoral study; the second is Calum Colvin’s exhibition, Ossian. Fragments of Ancient Poetry, which by chance was on at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery when I arrived back in 2002; the third is the work of the poet, Rev Robert Pollok; and the fourth is the reading I have been able to do into the work of Hugh Miller, the stonemason geologist contemporary of Golder’s, on my latest visit in 2009.

In order to bring these moments together, I will refer to a letter from Lunaticus to the Editor which was published in The Press in Christchurch in 1863⁶. The two points of particular relevance here are that thinking differently is made possible by three factors, travel, conversation, and reading, and that the most critical technology humanity has invented is the material sign, but most especially the linguistic sign.

Lunaticus’s first premise is that: “the human mind is only developed in one way, i.e., by being placed under new circumstances, and it can only be placed under new circumstances by the body, and in one or another of these three ways, or by a compound of one or more, or all of them. These ways are, travel, conversation, or reading’ (197). However, all of these assume that minds can communicate. For Lunaticus, the history of communication begins ‘on a great white day [when] some naked savage …conceived the idea of making an intentional track for himself with a premeditated purpose of attracting the attention of others of his kind.’ The significance of this moment is that ‘no other animal but man has hit upon the intentional tacking of its mind onto matter, and without this no intellectual development and consequently no material development, is possible.’ The steps in this development involve: ‘making a mark’; then ‘render[ing] it permanent – for which purpose a heap of stones would soon suggest itself’; then an increase in accuracy through ‘hieroglyphics … possibly first effected roughly by an arrangement of stones, a stone for each man and so on’; then the development of ‘letters which were not more accurate but more decipherable’; and then paper and parchment, or the inscription rendered portable’⁷. Rev Stevenson Macgill, one of Pollok’s theological lecturers at the University of Glasgow, in a series of lectures on the critical importance of language and its recording in writing to human progress, affirms that ‘the first example of writing, on record, was on stone. This was that of the two tables of the moral law.’⁸