"Jack's as Good as His Master": Scots and Print Culture in New Zealand, 1860-1900

Scots played a significant role in the general British colonial expansion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in the settling of New Zealand in particular. Between 1825 and 1940 an estimated 2.33 million people emigrated from Scottish shores. While most went to North America, there were significant short periods (1853-54, 1860-64, and 1875-77) when almost half of those departing came to Australia and New Zealand. As one study concludes, "Between 1861 and 1940 more than half the natural increase of population in Scotland left the country. In proportional terms this meant that the Scots were more emigration prone than any nation in Europe apart from the Irish." ¹

Prior to 1860, Scots could be found scattered in New Zealand Company settlements of Wellington (started in 1840), Wanganui (1840), New Plymouth (1841), and Nelson (1842). The colony's most distinctive Scottish settlement was the Free Church settlement of Otago, in 1848, which was dominated by Scots until the Otago gold rush of the 1860s. Of the immigrants who came to the Otago province between 1848 and 1860, 80 percent (4,978) were Scottish in origin, with the majority from towns and areas clustered around Glasgow and Edinburgh. ² A second Scots separa tist settlement was that of Waipu between 1855 and 1859, populated by more than nine hundred followers of Reverend Norman McLeod, whose restless migration to Nova Scotia in the first half of the nineteenth century concluded with a second move to New Zealand.

Such religiously influenced migrations were superseded in the 1870s by the more pragmatic and controlled immigration schemes of Julius Vogel's government. It is estimated that of the hundred thousand assisted immigrants who arrived in New Zealand in the 1870s, 19.5 percent were Scots. The New Zealand government made a special effort to recruit skilled Scots immigrant labor, employing seventy-three immigration agents in Scotland and advertising in more than 280 Scottish newspapers. ³ The result was a controlled, targeted mix of incomers, including agricultural laborers (31 percent), domestics (19 percent), general laborers (10 percent), and artisans (20 percent). The majority went to Otago (62 percent), suggesting the effectof "chain migration" common among emigrant communities (whereby successful settlers provided the necessary connections for other family members to follow in their wake), but significant numbers settled in Canterbury (18 percent) and Wellington (10 percent). ⁴

But what would have attracted Scots in the first place to New Zealand, a land several thousand miles away from their place of origin, and what might have kept them there? This essay offers some insight into what the trained Scottish printer in particular might have found on his arrival, and the role Scots and their expertise in printing and publishing played in encouraging regional identities and the establishment of an infrastructure for print culture activity in the first century of New Zealand's Pakeha (white) colonization.

Scots and Communication Networks

Of the circumstances that might have attracted skilled printers to New Zealand, some clues can be found in comments such as those made in the following letter from a Scots printer in 1852-53, describing life in the "New Edinburgh" of the antipodes. Used to cold Edinburgh days and long working weeks on low wages, the printer writes in glowing terms of his impressions of his new home in Dunedin, and of his working conditions:

We must say for ourselves that we are pretty comfortable. Our house is hardly three minutes walk away from the printing office, and I can go and come from the office when I like. All that is required is to get the paper out on the Saturday morning, and that we can do in less than a week counting 8 hours a day, which is the New Zealand hours of daily labour, although in Australia it is 10 hours a day.... As we can...