Missionaries, Memory, and Natural History in Dunedin

This post is by Dr Sarah Qidwai, an ECLAS post-doctoral researcher at the University of York. It is the second of a three-part series reflecting on the interaction between science, religion, and place through history.

Following my research trip in Singapore last year, I travelled to the city of Dunedin in New Zealand to attend a conference and continue researching the relationship between missionaries, locals, and the development of various scientific disciplines. If Singapore’s history was shaped by natural history and imperial commerce, Dunedin’s was shaped by scripture and sediment.

Founded in 1848 as a Free Church of Scotland settlement, the city, whose name derives from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic word for Edinburgh, was envisioned as a moral colony as much as a commercial one. Presbyterian planners imagined building in the Otago region (the wider southeastern area of New Zealand in which Dunedin is located) a disciplined Christian community at the edge of empire, ordered by faith, education, and improvement.

Yet, long before the arrival of Scottish settlers, the Māori inhabited the Otago region from between 1250 and 1300 AD. They developed sophisticated cosmological and environmental knowledge systems. As Cleve Barlow explains in Tikanga Whakaaro (1991), mountains, rivers, and other natural features were understood not as inert matter but as kin, embedded within spiritual lineage.

When missionaries and settlers arrived, they encountered not wilderness, but a landscape already understood. James Watkin (1806-1886), a Wesleyan missionary, was Otago’s first Christian missionary. He arrived at Waikouaiti in 1840 from Sydney at the request of local Māori leaders. His mission combined preaching with literacy and translation. Although Dunedin was founded as a Presbyterian stronghold, Anglicanism quickly established its own institutional authority. At the centre of the Octagon stands St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral, built in 1915.

Left: St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Dunedin, photo by me. Right: Dunedin from First Church Spire, 1874, Dunedin, by Burton Brothers studio

Linking Science and Religion in Dunedin

Missionaries actively participated in scientific research by collecting specimens and recording observations in the area, sending their results to scientists around the world (Stenhouse 2020). By doing science, many of these missionaries believed they came closer to understanding the Creator’s mind. In his more recent work on evolution and racial politics (2023), Stenhouse argues that science also served a more problematic purpose, creating evolutionary narratives that placed Māori people on the lower rungs of development, and suggesting they could not be integrated with ‘civilised’ whites. Sciences such as geology and evolutionary biology were not neutral sciences; they were entangled with imperial hierarchies. Scientific language could reinforce racial categorisation even as liberal theologians accommodated Darwinian ideas within Christian frameworks.

In 1861, gold was discovered to the southwest of Dunedin, which predictably led to a gold rush. The arrival of Irish Catholics, English Anglicans, Chinese miners, and others led to a demographic shift and a boom. The gold rush did more than transform Dunedin’s economy. It reshaped how the land itself was understood. Otago’s sedimentary formation and mineral locations became objects of scientific scrutiny and economic extraction. With the rush for gold came an intensification of scientific activity, which also aided in establishing the University of Otago in 1869. The gold rush deepened the intellectual stakes of natural history in a colonial society already structured by missionary Christianity.

Conclusion

Dunedin hosted the 27th International Congress for the History of Science and Technology at the University of Otago. At the meeting, I presented a paper on Islam, geology, and colonialism in nineteenth-century South Asia, examining how Muslim scholars engaged geological theory under imperial conditions.

Dunedin makes visible what is often obscured in broader narratives about science and religion: their development was not oppositional but entangled. Just as geological formations are composed of layered sediments, the intellectual and cultural history of the city is stratified through overlapping systems of knowledge.

Walking through Dunedin today, one encounters murals depicting world religions alongside images of extinct species. These visual juxtapositions collapse sacred history and ecological memory into shared urban space.

Dunedin’s history reveals that religion and natural history developed in tandem, each influenced by the other. Christianity in New Zealand adapted to scientific modernity even as science became implicated in colonial hierarchy. The tension between Scripture and sediment was never merely intellectual. It was political, racial, and institutional.

Street Art. Left: The Gods are watching us. Right: Legendary Birds [Photos by me]

References

Barlow, Cleve. Tikanga Whakaaro: Key Concepts in Māori Culture. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Stenhouse, J. (2020). Missionary science. In H. R. Slotten, R. L. Numbers & D. N. Livingstone (Eds.), The Cambridge history of science (Vol. 8): Modern science in national, transnational, and global context. (pp. 90-107). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi: 10.1017/9781139044301.008

Stenhouse, J. (2023). Evolution, religion, and racial politics in New Zealand, 1814-1930. In B. Lightman & S. Qidwai (Eds.), Evolutionary theories and religious traditions: National, transnational, and global perspectives, 1800-1920. (pp. 166-192). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.