Cottage fit for a doctor

Location of the house in Pitt Street. Collection of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum

It was the house in the middle of nowhere, on what would become the corner of Pitt St, writes Sean Brosnahan.

It is 175 years ago this year since the first settlers of the New Edinburgh Settlement scheme arrived in Otago Harbour and began creating the city of Dunedin on the flat swampy land at the head of the harbour. They had been preceded two years earlier by Charles Kettle and his survey party, employed by the New Zealand Company to lay out the site of the planned township.

Kettle obviously gave some thought to where the settlement’s leader should live in anticipation of the arrival of the first party of settlers. His survey team erected a substantial house in the wattle-and-daub style, made by interlacing supplejacks with timber posts cut from the bush, then slathering a mix of clay and chopped flax to provide an exterior surface that would set hard in the sun. Totara was split to provide shingles, overlapped as its roofing material.

Dr William Purdie. Collection of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum

When that house was demolished in 1905, it was still in remarkably good condition and a section of one of its walls was donated to the Museum. It is on display beside our replica wattle-and-daub cottage in the New Edinburgh gallery and is the oldest surviving example of part of a pioneer Dunedin building in our collection. It is really a remarkable artefact, taking us right back to those very first days of the Dunedin settlement.

Ironically, the settlement’s leader, Captain William Cargill, never lived in the house, not even for a night. The surveyors had chosen a site for him at the corner of what became Pitt and London Sts, overlooking the North Dunedin flat. Today that might be a good place for Dunedin’s first citizen to live, affording a great view over much of the central city and proximity to many of its citizens. But not in 1848. The earliest settlers congregated far to the south — around the Māori waka landing place at the outlet of the Toitū stream.

On display at Toitū beside the replica wattle-and-daub cottage. Photo: Toitū

The house rejected by Captain Cargill sat empty for some time. A veranda cottage of three rooms, it was considerably larger than the average pioneer cottage. As such, it was the only vacant house of any size when Dr William Purdie arrived in the settlement on the Mooltan in December 1849, bringing his wife and six children. He was unperturbed by its isolation and moved in, naming it Woodside after the thick stands of trees and bush that surrounded it.

Dr Purdie’s cottage was for a long time the last lonely house between the village of Dunedin, effectively then all to the south of the Octagon, and those early pioneers who chose to settle in North East Valley, some two kilometres away across what was a swampy bog, covered with flax bushes and waterways. Its lights twinkling through the black of night were the only wayfaring sign for travellers crossing the North Dunedin swamp to head home to the valley in the 1850s.