Missing memorial explored

Laying the foundation stone for the Rev Thomas Burns Memorial, October 3, 1891. Photo by Burton Bros, S07-279l. Hocken Collections, University Of Otago.

Precisely why not is the subject of this year's William Mathew Hodgkins Memorial Lecture, to be delivered by Rodney Hamel next week, entitled: ''Why Isn't It There?''For Mr Hamel, the lecture is the latest chapter in a series of inquiries into the stories surrounding some of the city's monuments, both existing and otherwise.

Yet, the mystery of the missing Burns monument did not initially enthuse the Dunedin historian. Not, in fact, until he came across an old photograph of the laying of the foundation stone, back in 1891.

''I wasn't really interested in this one but then I saw that photograph and was more interested,'' he says.

It strikes Mr Hamel that the photographer went to unusual lengths to secure his image, capturing as it does a gathering of settlers from the first four ships of organised European settlement, the ''Old Identities'', as they were known.

Within a decade, many of them would have been dead, Mr Hamel says, making the image that much more significant.

There they were, looking hale and hearty, well-dressed, well-fed, and apparently quite pleased with themselves, having made a success of the settlement of Dunedin against significant odds.

''They look very chuffed, prosperous.''

By the time the monument was pulled down in 1948, the citizens of Dunedin had perhaps lost the sense of the scale of achievement of the early European settlers, Mr Hamel says.

Victorian architecture became very unfashionable in the 1940s and '50s, he says.

''If anything fell off anything, you just ripped it down. It went through a very bad period.''

The destruction of the Burns memorial was an example of that.

Mr Hamel says he is interested in memory and social history, the way in which one generation builds something, and the next tears it down.

It is a pattern repeated, whether in the case of the Burns memorial or war memorials erected following 20th-century wars.

Be there
The William Mathew Hodgkins Memorial Lecture is at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery at 5.30pm next Thursday, September 26.