Burns at home in heart of church

Dunedin’s links to a historic disruption of Scottish life is captured in a remarkable picture, writes Sean Brosnahan.

One of the watershed events of 19th century Scottish history is the great rupture within the Presbyterian Church in 1843 known as the Disruption. This schism sent shockwaves through the country at a time when the church was a vital institution for many aspects of Scottish life beyond the strictly religious.

The ripples even extended as far away as Dunedin and Otago, though their development under those names was still in the future.

If not for the Disruption, however, and the participation of some key Otago figures in it, the idea of a Scottish settlement for Presbyterians in southern New Zealand would never have come to pass. Most important among these founding fathers was the Rev Thomas Burns.

In 1843, Burns was the 47-year-old Minister of Monkton parish in Ayrshire, wife of Clementina and father to a growing family living comfortably in a gracious manse and enjoying the considerable income of £400 per year.

He had just built a fine new church for his congregation and was in the prime of his ecclesiastical career. He had everything to gain by sticking with the status quo and much to lose by casting his lot with the Presbyterian rebels.

But in a great leap of faith, Burns joined those who broke from the established Scottish Church to form a new ‘‘Free Church’’. Within months he was also appointed to be minister to a planned Free Church colony in New Zealand. He devoted the rest of his life first to seeing the Otago settlement into existence and then to being its spiritual leader.

The history of Scottish theological disputes seems rather esoteric now. Few modern Dunedin residents could tell you how events that transpired 180 years ago and 18,000km away were pivotal to their living in New Zealand’s most Scottish-flavoured city today.

There is, however, a rather stunning pictorial record of the Presbyterian renegades who founded the Free Church. It was painted by Scottish artist David Hill over a 20-year period, based on portraits taken in 1843 with a novel technological process - calotype photography.

The original now hangs in the Free Church headquarters in central Edinburgh but lithographic copies of it were taken all around the world by Scottish Presbyterian emigrants.

We have several copies of the print at Toitu including one on display in the New Edinburgh gallery.

Some years ago I spent a long time doing a ‘‘Where’s Wally?’’ search with a magnifying glass, studying the faces of the hundreds of people depicted, looking for Otago’s founding patriarch - the Rev Thomas Burns. I failed to pick him out until, finally, we discovered that one of our other copies of the print had an annotation that identified him precisely.

Last year I was part of a film crew from Toitu that visited the Free Church Hall in Edinburgh and was given access to the painting for our documentary Journey to New Edinburgh.

It was hugely satisfying to finally see Burns at full size and in full colour, enshrined in glory amidst his peers in the historic heart of the Church he helped found.

• The documentary Journey to New  Edinburgh was released last week to mark Otago’s 175th anniversary.