Emigration to Australia and New Zealand

Australia attracted Scottish emigrants from the end of the 18th century. Most of these were voluntary, attracted by trade and career prospects. Three of the first six governors of New South Wales were Scots; they included Lachlan Macquarie (1762-1824), sometimes called the ‘father of Australia’. 

Other emigrants were political prisoners: for example, the ‘Scottish martyrs’ of 1792, transported for the crime of sedition - their case inspired Robert Burns, in ‘Scots Wha Hae’; and the radicals of 1820 - whose three leaders were executed, with twenty others transported. Less than 5% of Australia’s ‘convict emigrants’ came from Scotland.

The New Zealand experience of Scottish emigration dates from the 1830s, and was heavily concentrated in the southern area of the South Island. Members of the Free Church of Scotland were prominent in the planning of the settlement of Dunedin, or ‘New Edinburgh’, first surveyed and laid out in 1846.

New Zealand placenames such as Oban, Invercargill, Lumsden, Glenorchy, Gillespies Point, Stewart Island and Lake Benmore show Scots influence.

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