Otago Sculpture Trust

In Site Library - Greater Dunedin: Scott Memorial (Port Chalmers) (1914)

In Site

Scott Memorial Cairn ..........Port Chalmers Reserve ....Robert Arthur Burnside (Architect)

When it was confirmed in February 1913 that Robert Falcon Scott and his party had indeed perished on their return journey from the South Pole the loss was felt throughout the British Empire. In Otago there was a personal connection. In 1901 when he sailed with the "Discovery" and in 1910 when he set out for the pole in the "Terra Nova", Captain Scott had called in at Port Chalmers at the invitation of a local man, John Mills, who had supplied him with coal.

For a time it seemed there would be a competition between the Port Chalmers and Dunedin City Corporations as to who would mount a memorial statue. In the event there was not sufficient public interest to raise a reasonable subscription in Dunedin and the port prevailed. A site on the Purakanui road, overlooking the harbour, was chosen.

The cairn is sited on an outcrop of rock and is built of local Port Chalmers stone. It was designed, for free, by a local architect Robert Arthur Burnside. It is a rusticated column, about 30 feet in height with a concrete anchor, signifying hope and steadfastness, on the top. A memorial plaque names the five men who died and a paragraph from Scott's last message is quoted along with a biblical passage which enquires "What mean these stones?"

This was a question posed by the Otago Daily Times in an editorial some months before when the writer suggested that such was their fame that these heroes might need no memorial. The virtues that the editorial found in Scott and his companions, "pluck and endurance, the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice, and the fortitude in the face of death", were soon to be in great demand. The newspapers of the time were full of nervous reports from the Balkans and within months the carnage of the 1914-18 War had begun.

Scott and his crew have left other marks on our local landscape. A monument was erected in Port Chalmers Cemetery in memory of Charles Bonner, a seaman accidentally killed on board Discovery in 1901, and two Dunedin streets bear the names of members of the Antarctic party. At the conjunction of these streets, just off Kaikorai Valley Road there is a marble plaque, unveiled in June 1939, on which an inscription explains that Falcon St. was named after Captain Scott and Oates St. after Captain Lawrence Oates. Curiously, like the Port Chalmers cairn, this modest memorial was unveiled on the eve of a major war. From 1939 to 1945  the virtues ascribed to Scott and Oates, endurance, fortitude and self sacrifice, would again be required of all New Zealanders. 

Richard Dingwall