130 Years
Sir Walter Scott and place names in Australia and New Zealand
On Thursday 2nd February 2017 we had a talk by Dr. Ewan Morris. He was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside:
Dr Ewan Morris is originally from Australia but has lived in New Zealand since 1999. He is a historian with a particular interest in ideas about national and ethnic identity, as revealed through debates about symbols such as flags, memorials and place names. He is the author of Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2005), and a co-author of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (second edition, 2008). He has also published a number of articles in Australian, Irish and New Zealand history, and is the immediate past President of the Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand. In New Zealand, he works as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. He is currently living temporarily in Edinburgh, where he is a Visiting Scholar in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His talk, the title previously mentioned, will no doubt feed on his connections with both Australia and New Zealand, and promises to offer members an interesting new insight into matters relating to Scott’s international legacy.
Synopsis: Across the English-speaking world, settler communities named towns and streets after Sir Walter Scott, but more particularly after the titles and characters of his novels and poems. The colonies of Australia and New Zealand were no exception. Scott was seen as an important part of these colonies' cultural inheritance from Britain in the nineteenth century, at the time when settlers were using place names to stake their claim to the land. This lecture explores the stories behind Scott-related names in New Zealand and Australia, and speculates on the reasons for such naming. Those reasons included Scott's fame, his status as a symbol of British culture, and the longing of immigrants (particularly Scots) for reminders of home. The lecture suggests that Scott’s stories provided templates through which settlers could imagine the experience of settlement (which in reality involved the brutal displacement of Indigenous peoples) in romantic and ultimately reassuring terms.
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