A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
Dunedin - Settler's Museum
The Settler's Museum in Dunedin is an archive of memorabilia related to the original settler's in Dunedin. One of it's more interesing displays is a collection of early portraits, but there are also many other bits and pieces of the lives of these hardy souls and the overall assembledge serves to give one a very good view of the individuals that built this community. Although the majority of the material relates to the Scottish and English settlers who came first, there is some information about the indigenous people and about other immigrant streams that arrived later as well.
It is thought that it was Captain Cook who brought the first sheep to New Zealand in 1773. By 1982, the New Zealand government estimated that there were about 70 million sheep in the country. Today, the number is estimated to be about 40 million. Many of those animals live in and around Dunedin and wool has been an important part of the local economy ever since the community was founded in the nineteenth century. Today, the shearing process is done with mechanical clippers, but in the pioneer's day it was done with a set of shearing clippers.
