Sir Walter Scott and place names in Australia and New Zealand
Thursday 2nd February 2017
Summary of the Talk:
This text explores the widespread influence of Sir Walter Scott’s work, particularly his novels and poems, on place naming in Australia and New Zealand. The talk discusses how various locations, including streets, towns, and properties in these countries, were named after Scott's characters, novels, and even his home, Abbotsford.
- Scott's Influence on Place Names: A significant number of places in Australia and New Zealand are named after Scott’s literary works rather than the author himself. This practice mirrors how Shakespeare’s characters have been used for place names in other parts of the world. In these countries, towns, streets, and even gold mines were named after characters like Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Kenilworth.
- Colonial Memory: The spread of Scott-related place names reflects the colonial relationship between Britain and its former colonies. Scott’s works provided settlers, especially the Scots, a literary connection to their homeland and its traditions. His novels were used as a framework to romanticize the colonial experience, blending the adventurous spirit of settlers with the themes of property, stability, and British cultural heritage.
- Waverley and Abbotsford: "Waverley" is the most common place name derived from Scott’s works, seen in locations across both Australia and New Zealand. The suburb of Waverley in Sydney and Melbourne’s Glen and Mount Waverley suburbs are examples of how Scott’s literary influence persisted in place names. Abbotsford, though seemingly named after Scott's home, often had different origins, such as being named after local settlers or surveyors.
- Scott’s Cultural Role: While Scott was highly regarded in the colonies, his fame did not always translate into widespread readership. For example, while Waverley was a popular title, other works like Ivanhoe had far fewer borrowings in libraries, suggesting that Scott’s legacy was more cultural than literary for many settlers.
- The Role of Scots Immigrants: Many of the settlers who named places after Scott were Scots themselves, aiming to recreate a sense of home and nostalgia in their new environments. Some of the naming was motivated by a desire to "domesticate" the foreign landscapes of Australia and New Zealand.
- Literary Romanticism in the Colonies: The naming of places in colonial Australia and New Zealand often carried an air of romantic adventure. This was tied to the settlers’ desire to reframe the challenges of colonial life into a more reassuring and heroic narrative, much like the plots in Scott's novels, which typically feature a final resolution of chaos into stability.
- Burns vs. Scott: While Burns enjoyed more formal public commemorations (like statues and clubs), Scott’s influence was primarily through place names. This may be because Burns was seen as a symbol of distinct Scottish identity, whereas Scott was more intertwined with British culture, making him a less central figure in public Scottish commemorations abroad.
In summary, the talk reveals how the names inspired by Scott’s works in Australia and New Zealand serve as both a testament to his literary legacy and a reflection of the colonial mindset. They reflect settlers’ desires to retain a sense of Britishness and continuity in new and unfamiliar lands.
Dr Ewan Morris is originally from Australia but has lived in New Zealand since 1999. He is a historian with a particular interest in ideas about national and ethnic identity, as revealed through debates about symbols such as flags, memorials and place names. He is the author of Our Own Devices: National Symbols and Political Conflict in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2005), and a co-author of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (second edition, 2008). He has also published a number of articles in Australian, Irish and New Zealand history, and is the immediate past President of the Professional Historians’ Association of New Zealand. In New Zealand, he works as a Senior Policy Adviser at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. He is currently living temporarily in Edinburgh, where he is a Visiting Scholar in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. His talk, the title previously mentioned, will no doubt feed on his connections with both Australia and New Zealand, and promises to offer members an interesting new insight into matters relating to Scott’s international legacy.
Synopsis: Across the English-speaking world, settler communities named towns and streets after Sir Walter Scott, but more particularly after the titles and characters of his novels and poems. The colonies of Australia and New Zealand were no exception. Scott was seen as an important part of these colonies' cultural inheritance from Britain in the nineteenth century, at the time when settlers were using place names to stake their claim to the land. This lecture explores the stories behind Scott-related names in New Zealand and Australia, and speculates on the reasons for such naming. Those reasons included Scott's fame, his status as a symbol of British culture, and the longing of immigrants (particularly Scots) for reminders of home. The lecture suggests that Scott’s stories provided templates through which settlers could imagine the experience of settlement (which in reality involved the brutal displacement of Indigenous peoples) in romantic and ultimately reassuring terms.
