With an Otago family connection going back to 1848 and the gold rush of the 1860s, Scott was delighted to discover one of his ancestors had left a special legacy.
He never really knew his bachelor great-uncle Bob Duncan, who had been born in Naseby in 1898.
''I remember meeting him once, in the early 1960s, but thought nothing of it,'' he said.
Bob Duncan was what most people would describe as just one of those ordinary blokes of old Otago.
He had no family, he had drifted most of his life, like so many men - and women - who were the generation of the Great Depression.
''He may have seemed ordinary to me, but he was nothing like it. Many years after he had died, I found out this ordinary bloke was a poet,'' he said.
"The tin contained scraps of paper, bits of card, backs of old Croxley writing pads and even a flattened out Mintie box! All of this was covered in lead-pencil handwriting.
"Then there was a big sheet of printed paper - the 1939-1940 Shearers Award Rules and Regulations, and the back of that was also covered in the same handwriting. All of the writing on each scrap and sheet was poetry.''
Accompanying this was an old Warrior exercise book. The same poems had been copied into it with a preface.
''These verses are all my own work. While some have been published, none have been paid for, and no-one can claim any copyright. Robert William Duncan, December 1941.''
Published?
Yes, in 1941, the Otago Daily Times had printed many of them under the nom de plume ''The Tin Can Tourist''.
The poems are a journey through the rural Otago of 70 to 80 years earlier.
They are windows into a poor childhood, the shearing shed, a public works camp, the decline of gold towns and the death of old diggers, the unending search for work in the era of the Great Depression, and the unending search for personal fulfilment.
As such, the poems can stand alone in presentation and Scott has performed cycles of them several times at the Bards, Ballads and Bulldust festival.
The festival began in Naseby in 2008, bringing together musicians, poets and storytellers of the high country to perform in various venues around Central Otago's Maniototo district.
Scott has expanded this original piece into a more comprehensive show which will debut at the Globe as a fundraiser next month.
While Bob Duncan as the Tin Can Tourist is still the central figure, Scott has introduced other poets and stories.
Nearly all of the source material comes from the Central Otago newspapers of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
''There is an enormous amount of material to be found there and it shows that high country Otago had a rich and varied culture of vernacular poetry and storytelling.
"These are poems and yarns about shearers and swaggies, rouseabouts and rabbiters, shepherd's huts and sly grog tents, the bar girls and the so-called 'bad' women of the gold-rush towns.
"Put all that together and we have a vivid and varied portrayal of old Otago, the funny and the sad; an old Otago some of us may remember, but which most of us today no longer know,'' he said.
But the show is not all historical high jinks and heartache.
Scott also includes new works of New Zealand poets and writers to showcase the fact that not only do we have a rich high-country literary culture of the past here down south in the ''heartland'', but we are still creating it.
