When visitors are first confronted by the rows and rows of early settler portrait’s in Toitū’s Smith Gallery, the effect can be overwhelming. With over 400 stern faces glowering down from the walls, it is easy to accept that Otago was founded by a pretty tough bunch of Scottish Presbyterians. What is misleading, however, is the apparent age of the settlement’s founders. Taken at face value, the portrait collection seems to suggest that it was pairs of elderly couples who clambered down the gang plank from the Philip Laing and all the immigrant ships that followed. It seems reasonable to wonder how such ‘oldies’ could have managed all the hard graft of raw pioneering that was demanded of the first Otago settlers.
In fact, of course, there were very few elderly among Otago’s original pioneers. Men like Captain Cargill at 63 and Rev Thomas Burns at 52 stood out among those they had led to the ‘promised land’ in Otago. They were quite literally the patriarchs of early Dunedin, seeming venerable and wise to the broad mass of settlers who were generally in their 20s or early 30s. The two leaders were sought out for advice on all manner of topics. It didn’t hurt either that Thomas Burns was as much a practical man of the land as a minister, drawing on his farming background in Ayrshire.By the time the museum began collecting portraits in 1898, however, the first generation of settlers had indeed become ‘oldies’. Many portraits reflect the toil and hardships they had endured in their colonial careers. One set of three portraits was selected to demonstrate this ageing process. It offers a neat ‘time machine’ device to contrast ‘faces on arrival’ with ‘faces on collection’. The first shows Mrs Archibald Douglas (née Caroline Prentice) and her young daughters, Helen and Janet, at about the time they emigrated. The girls were ten and seven respectively when their widowed mother brought them to Otago. To left and right of this portrait are images of the mature women they became; Helen as Mrs David Con Hutton and Janet as Mrs Keith Ramsay. The faces are still clearly recognisable as the young girls who first stepped off the Jura in 1858 to make new, and ultimately very successful, lives in New Zealand.
Helen as Mrs David Con Hutton in later life.
Janet as Mrs Keith Ramsay.
Edinburgh widow Mrs Douglas with her daughters Helen and Janet, about 1858.