Last week’s speaker was Seán Brosnahan who is the history curator at Toitῡ Otago Settlers Museum.He was talking to us about his current research project in which he and his small team are gathering stories of the early pioneer families who settled in Otago.
This project will culminate in an exhibition called “Journey to New Edinburgh” which will open at the museum on the 22nd of March, 2023 on the eve of Dunedin’s 175th Anniversary.
The exhibition will explore the reasons for these Early Settlers leaving Scotland, Ireland and England- why they left, how they came to Otago and how it played out for them. The story will be explored through film and narrative.
Following two years of research while in lockdown and the borders were closed, the project team has now been able to travel to the United Kingdom and have driven approximately 8,500 miles to trace the history and origins of these settlers and lock in the stories on film of these people.
This current project follows two earlier very successful exhibitions tracing the stories of the Otago Battalion soldiers that left our shores to fight in the First World War, and the stories of the Otago’s pioneering Chinese settlers.
