Otago Sculpture Trust

In Site Library - Greater Dunedin: Otago Centennial Memorial (Signal Hill) (1952-55)

InSite

Otago Centennial Memorial.......Signal Hill.......Francis Shurrock, Sculptor

The figures sit, Buddha-like, in windswept isolation on Signal Hill. Vulnerable to the attacks of vandals, they gaze, on our behalf, over one of the finest views of Dunedin City from any of its surrounding hills. Or they would had the artist Francis Shurrocks's symbolic programme not required that History gaze due West, his eyes forever fixed on Swampy Summit while his female companion stares in the opposite direction,  to the radio masts on the Otago Peninsula.

The sculptures were installed in 1955 and the commission completed in June 1957 when stone plaques by Shurrock were added to the cenotaph. These show the New Zealand fern, the Scottish thistle and the Otago Provincial seal.

Francis Shurrock was 63 years old and several years in retirement from his teaching position at the Canterbury College School of Art when in 1950 he undertook the commission to produce these two mammoth figures on the Signal Hill monument that celebrates the Centennial of the Province of Otago. The two seated figures, one male and female, represent Otago's past and its future. The male figure was named "The First One Hundred Years"  but became known as "Old Father History" and finally, simply "History". He gazes West, towards the setting sun and clasps in his hand a closed book with the dates of the century past on its spine : 1848 - 1948. His features are a homage to Shurrock's hero the great Italian Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo whose sculpture of Moses dominates the tomb in Rome of the warrior Pope, Julius. II. The female figure looks East, to the future, and holds in her lap the thread of life. Her features are modelled on those of the artist's wife, Elizabeth.

The construction of the figures was a complex business. After the models were approved by the Centennial Committee, Shurrock then scaled them up to half size, then repeated the process to produce full size plaster models which were sent to England to be cast in bronze. This was hard physical labour for a man in his sixties and he recruited an assistant, Fred Staub, to help him. Both men's names are on the finished work.

Richard Dingwall

Text Copyright Richard Dingwall