Breton and Scots harpists and contemporary folk group Rallion will play in an international concert Continue reading
Tag Archives: Canada
Oronsay back in the news with arrival of 2000 mile message-in-a-bottle
Colonsay‘s satellite island of Oronsay is back in the news already. Continue reading
New BBC ALBA schedules span Bhopal disaster to wild swimming
BBC ALBA has just launched its autumn/winter schedule with some real surprises Continue reading
The other Rothesay
Argyll’s Rothesay on the Isle of Bute is, of course, ‘the other Rothesay’ if you’re living in the Rothesay in New Brunswick in Canada. But since we’re here in Argyll in Scotland and we’ve been galvanised by the This Is Who We Are exhibition which we may see in Argyll, , it seems fun to take a look at our ‘other Rothesay’.
The New Brunswick town is culturally rich. Its gene pool encompasses its earliest inhabitants, the First Nation Maliseet and Mi`kmaq, French colonists and English settlers.
Rothesay in New Brunswick was so named by a whim of the then Prince of Wales,who later became King Edward VII, because it reminded him of Rothesay in Bute. The current Prince of Wales of course goes undet the title of Duke of Rothesay when he crosses the border from England into Scotland. The affection for Rothesay on Bute is clearly a family legacy enshrined in this title.
New Brunswick’s Rothesay developed as a centre for shipbuilding and later became a summer watering hole for the wealthy elite of the nearby city of St John’s, supported by the launch of the European and North American Railway in 1853. (The track is visible in this photograph.) There is a sort of a parallel here wiht Rothesay in Bute – but with a class difference. Day trips to Rothesay in Bute and summer holidays there became the tribal holiday pastime for the working class in the city of Glasgow to whom Rothesay was ‘doon the watter’. Rothesay’s seaside resort history is recorded in many of the films in the Scottish Screen Archive.
The history of Rothesay, New Brunswick, shows in the pre-Canadian Confederation nature of some of its houses. The Victorian and Edwardian past of Rothesay on Bute is also evident in many of its buildings from the Victorian neo-gothic glories of Mount Stuart House to the delights of the Victorian lavatories on Rothesay Harbour.
The New Brunswick town is home to a notable private school, Rothesay Netherwood School. The school on Rothesay is Rothesay Academy, part of a new joint campus created by Argyll and Bute Council’s education department.
Rothesay Netherwood School has the distinction of having been home to John Peters Humphrey. Humphrey was educated at Rothesay Collegiate School, later Rothesay Netherwood School. He went on to study law at Canada’s renowned McGill University and then became a member of its law faculty.
He was appointed as the first Director of the Human Rights Division in the United Nations Secretariat after the second World War in 1946 and was a principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights published in 1948.
While Rothesay in New Brunswick is almost twice the size of Rothesay in Bute – with a population of around 11,600 as opposed to 6,000 and, as an equally easy going town, is only ten minutes away from the city of St John, the two Rothesays share some similarities.
Both are attractive waterfront towns – Rothesay in Bute on the great Clyde waterway and Rothesay New Brunswick on the majestic and evocatively named Kennebecasis River. Rothesay in Bute is almost a single community with neighbouring Port Bannatyne. And in 1998 the township of Rothesay in New Brunswick became the town of Rothesay, meged with its neighbouring communities of East Riverside-Kingshurst, Fairvale, Renforth and Wells.
There is a lovely piece of public sculpture in Rothesay New Brunswick, commemorating their rowing victory at the 1867 World Exposition in Paris, defeating England’s famed Tyne Crew on the Kennebecasis River.
One phemenomenon the two towns do not share – yet – is economic growth. Rothesay New Brunswick. The Canadian town has see almost 15,000 square metres of commercial development over the last two years and in planning are developments that will add a further 10,000+ square metres. The area describes is work force as highly educated and rapidly growing.
There is, of course, another link for both the Scottish and Canadian Rothesay’s to explore. New Zealand’s North Island has Rothesay Bay, another waterfront community and part of North Shore in Auckland on its east coast. The This Is Who We Are exhibition’s organisers might well be interested in a tripartite exchange, opening all three sets of doors.
Some additional links are:
Photographs
The photographs accompanying this article are reproduced by permission and have been given to For Argyll to use by Mary Jane Banks, Director of Administrative Services at Rothesay, New Brunswick.
They show, from the top:
- The Town Hall at Rothesay, New Brunswick
- The old Station House with the track of the European and North American railway in the foreground
- Rothesay Netherwood School and the School’s Chapel
- The annual Dragon Boat Festival at Renforth Wharf on the Kennebecasis River
- The sculpture commemorating the Paris rowing victory over England’s Tyne crew in 1867
- Dusk at Renforth Boat Club on the Kennebecasis River, underlinging the common waterfront lifestle of the two – the three – Rothesays.
Winner of ‘guess the location of the photograph’ – and the answer
We said there was a twist to this one. and there was.
It’s the Yacht Cub at Rothesay at New Brunswick in Canada – the other Rothesay. We were struck by how easily it could be here and wanted to find a way of seeing if you felt the same.
You did. We were offered: Kerrera, Tighnabruaich, Colonsay, Tiree, Strachur and some others too impossible to mention.
Unsurprisingly, no one got the right answer.
But Margaret Purdie from Lochgilphead came up witih a series of surprises. She rang up rather than email and just said: ‘Is it Port Bannatyne?’ Anyone who knows Bute knows that Port Bannatyne and Rothesay go cheek by jowl. When we said ‘Sorry, it’s not’, Margaret then demanded: ‘Well, is it Bute?’
Wherever her inspiration was coming from, she was at once the farthest away from and the closest to the answer – and she is the winner.
She will now tell us what she would like to see us feature or whose life story she would like to see us write and publish. We’ll let you know what she chooses – and we’re looking forward to finding out ourselves.
And below, to show you how close the Tighnabruaich answers also were, is a photograph by Phillippa Elliott of boats at their moorings there. Phillippa was also the photographer behind our recent photo-journalism on a contemporary lost township in Argyll – Polphail.
Both photographs are reproduced here with permission, Copyright to the Tighnabruiach photograph (just above) is owned by the photographer, Philippa Elliott.
This Is Who We Are – opportunity for Rothesay, Campbeltown, Calgary, Tobermory and Lismore
The organisers of the This Is Who We Are exhibition are making contact with places in Canada sharing these names. This means that both the Scottish and Canadian places will be featured in the evolving exhibition – if they want to get involved.
The interest is huge. Rothesay in New Brunswick came straight back at the organisers with an instant response. It is very enthusiastic about being involved and interestingly, next year – 2010 – is its 150th anniversary. Good connections made between the two Rothesays now could lead to exciting developments for both next year. For Argyll is already on to this and will be covering what happens next.
Campbellton (slightly different spelling) is also in New Brunswick. Lismore, as mentioned in the feature article on This Is Who We Are, is in Nova Scotia. The organisers are making contacts there at the moment. Calgary – the massive oil and gas metropolis – is in Alberta and is already involved in the project. Tobermory is in Ontario, on the Bruce Peninsula and is a lakeside resort with a very active scuba diving community.
What happens is that people in both communities simply take photographs representing their own lives in their own place. Sequences from both communities are then exhibited in the visual conversation that is This Is Who We Are. Suddenly we are no longer strange to each other. We have the sort of knowledge that enables us to go on to renew, make and develop our own contacts, individually and as communities.
This project extends everyone’s reach and its consequences can be enduring if the opportunities are seized with interest on both sides.
SO – Rothesay, Campeltown, Lismore, Tobermory and Calgary, over to you. The organisers have asked us to pass on a direct invitation to you to become a part of this.
You don’t even need a central organisation – although community groups and community councils can get organised collectively and get the images rolling in. Individuals in these four communities can start taking photographs on their own initiative now. In both cases - email your images direct to Graeme Murdoch at: graeme@culturalconnectscotland.com
If there are other communities in Argyll and the Islands who are aware of places in Canada that share their name – email that information to Graeme and Harry at the email address above.
And you may want to know about the image accompanying this article – it’s the neat logo for Cultural Connect Scotland, Graeme and Harry’s organisation that is creating this project. (If you click on the link above, you’ll see how this image works live and how it says what it means.)
The project will over time, be extended to other parts of the world with Scottish connections. We understand that New Zealand may be the next target – so if you know that your community has a counterpart there, start taking your photographs now and let the organisers know.
Lines of communication open between Argyll and Bute arts department and This Is Who We Are
The organisers of the This Is Who We Are exhibition feel that there is now a will to bring this exhibition to Argyll, which is what they themselves want to do. They welcome open communications and are hoping for a fast proposal to which they can respond quickly.
More good news is that the initial list of possible venues that For Argyll put together yesterday was extended today by additional suggestions received:
- Easdale Island has a great hall, a culturally lively community and is interested in the exhibition
- Islay would also be interested in the talk and slide show
- An Tobar in Tobermory has its exhibition programme booked up for this year already but, liking the sound of the exhibition suggested other possible venues: Glengorm Castle has a small gallery space just north of Tobermory and Calgary Art In Nature also has a gallery space at Calgary
- Helensburgh’s Victoria Hall – hosting a Food Fair as part of the town’s Franco-Scottish week at the end of July – is another possibility
Islay’s interest in the talk-and-slide-show programme may be of interest to other places too. It is ideally suited to smaller venues and this format enables the project to reach dispersed audiences.
It may be that a single appropriate venue for what is a very undemanding exhibition, coupled wiht a tour of the talk-and-slide-show programme would respond best to the manifest widespread interest in this project across Argyll.
Invitation to Argyll
For Argyll has just published a series of articles to do with the powerful This Is Who We Are photographic exhibition, exploring life in places in Canada and Scotland linked by similar names.
The creators of the exhibition, Graeme Murdoch and Harry McGrath have now issued an invitation to all Argyll communities whose names are echoed in places in Canada – we have already mentioned a Rothesay, a Campbelltown (yes, two ls), a Lismore,, an Iona, a Calgary … and there are many others.
The invitation is to take your own photographs in and of your place – photographs which tell abut the life you lead. What happens in your place? Where does its heart beat? What are its special places? What are its important occasions? Who’s around?
Graeme and Harry want your own individual views – literally – of where you live and what it’s like to be there.
This project has the capacity to build living and productive links between Argyll places and, initially, places in Canada with whom they share a name. The project is intended to move on to other parts of the world where there are Scottish connections of all kinds. These guys will literally trail the presence of Scotland across the globe. The mutual advantages in this are endless and as much profound as practical.
Practically, the project will provide names of people to talk to and places to go and see for people travelling in both directions. Above all things, this stops anyone feeling a stranger in the other’s place..
More profoundly, it will develop a modern belonging – in both directions. We tend to think of people elsewhere belonging here – but they inhabit another Scotland – many other Scotlands – we can discover and belong to.
All it takes is to open communications – share information and images. So get clicking now while the idea’s hot and email your photographs to Graeme at: graeme@culturalconnectscotland.com
The photograph above is of Grame (centre front, kilt) and Harry (dark sweatshirt, behind Graeme) at a Lil’wat First Nation powwow at Mount Currie on their recent travels on this project. Our feature article on This Is Who We Are looks at the curious fact that the surname Wallace is one of the major Lil’wat names.
This Is Who We Are – photographs from the journeys to find out
For Argyll has published a feature article – This Is Who We Are – on the exhibition of that name, the most inspirational of the main Homecoming Scotland 2009 commissions. Its creators are Graeme Murdoch, a photographer and former art director for a series of national newspapers and Harry McGrath, an academic and Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (pictured left, with Harry on the left and Graeme on the right).
The exhibition brings together images from a selection of Scottish diaspora communities in Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia.
The journey described in the feature – from Vancouver to Calgary, Airdrie, Canmore, Banff, Craigellachie, Coldstream, Mont Currie and back to Vancouver – was one of several the two men made in putting this exhibition together.
What follows here is a series of photographs taken on these journeys by Graeme Murdoch and captioned by him. Together they catch something of the flavour of the rich variety of experiences the two men encountered as they tracked the seeds planted by the Scots in Canada.
THE ROAD EAST: after a long flight from Edinburgh we headed east from Vancouver. Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
CALGARY, ALBERTA: the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. The day after we hit town we appeared on CTV live noon news. ‘I had no idea that Calgary was named after a place in Scotland’, said Ian White, CTV anchor man. Our story was launched. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
AIRDRIE: the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. (Photo: Kori Sych)
BEAR CUB: we were eager to see bears, and did in British Columbia, but our friend Pam Doyle, the writer/photographer on the Canmore Leader sent us this picture of a bear cub making a dash for the woods. (Photo by Pam Doyle)
IONA: East Bay, near Iona. This was the first major Scottish Settlement on Cape Breton Island (Photo by Derek Campbell)
CAPE BRETON CHURCH: snowy kirkyard in Inverness County, Cape Breton. (Photo: Derek Campbell)
SIGNS: Scotland is everywhere in Canada. This is the north shore road in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. One name not on the sign is Knoydart which is a small hamlet near Lismore. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
LISMORE, NOVA SCOTIA: The sun lit church cemetery of ST Mary’s RC church. Two lines from a poem on a panel by the church state:
“A narrow creed drove Scotmen o’er the sea,
Their hearts were Mary’s and they would be free.”
by Rev. A. A. MacKinnon
Lismore was once called Bailey’s Brook after John Baillie, a disbanded soldier from the 82nd Regiment, who settled at the mouth of the brook. It is a settlement of Highland Catholics beginning in 1788. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
PICTOU: It is 5.30am and I wake to the first clear sky since we arrived in Nova Scotia. This is the graveyard on the point outside town where many of the descendants of the settlers who arrived on the Hector in 1773 are buried. The names on the headstones are testimony to Pictou’s motto: “The Birthplace of New Scotland”. There are Grants, Frasers, MacDonalds, Mackintoshes laid to rest here. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
Copy right on all the photographs above resides with the named photogrtaphers and are reproduced here with permission.
This Is Who We Are
We’re about to describe a journey so start seeing it in your head. The first step is a drive east to Calgary, then north to Airdrie, back south to Calgary, then north west to Banff and south west through Craigellachie to Coldstream.
Much of this is familiar but something’s not quite right. If you drove east to Calgary you’d be starting in the Atlantic. If you went north from Calgary looking for Airdrie you’d be hard put to find it – and if you struck north west from Calgary to Banff you’d land on Barra first.
We’re not in Scotland, of course. We’re in Canada, travelling with two inventive and creative Scots. One is photographer and former national newspaper art director, Graeme Murdoch, who has worked with some of the world’s leading photographers and ‘done time at The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday’. His colleague is academic, Harry McGrath, who has lived in Canada for 25 years and has been Coordinator of the Centre for Scottish Studies at Simon Fraser University – a name known to every piper in the world and whose pipe band is the current Grade 1 World Champions.
Graeme and Harry are here in pursuit of the most exciting and productive of the inspirations to be stimulated by the Homecoming Scotland 2009 initiative. They’re exploring the other Scotland, out west – and finding out who we are, whichever of the Scotlands we live in just now.
The route travelled on the journey above, one of many on this odyssey, says everything about what the two men are doing. They are taking a set of what we receive as familiar places, then throwing them into an entirely different relationship to each other and to us – and the result is disturbing and oddly exciting. They then reveal ‘the other’, something we know and do not know at the same time.
All of this starts to put a picture together, to show us who we are. As Graeme says, you don’t have to be a native Scot to be of Scotland. An article in Hidden Europe said of Argyll, ‘Argyll is a state of mind’. This is as equally true of Scotland as it is of any place that matters to anyone.
The top photograph is of the Bay at the original Calgary in the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull. (Photo:Scottish Viewpoint) The lower photograph is of Calgary, Alberta - the petro-capital of western Canada. The original settlement became a post of the North-West Mounted Police (now the RCMP). Originally named Fort Brisebois, after NWMP officer Éphrem A Brisebois, it was renamed Fort Calgary in 1876 by Colonel James Macleod after his home on Mull. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
One place and another
Look at what happens if you superimpose the two maps.
Vancouver looks east to Canada’s Calgary and further east to the first Calgary on the north west of Argyll’s Isle of Mull – looking chronologically from the newer development to its source. It’s a reverse experience of standing at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, looking up the Champs Elysees through the Arc de Triomph and out to La Defense where the modern Grande Arche – the imperative of the future, dominates the horizon.
And talking of reversals, this is a world where Knoydart is a hamlet near Lismore.
Scotland’s first Airdrie can put itself in the position of its newer namesake (the photograph above shows the open plains of Airdrie in Alberta. Photo: Kori Sych ) and feel the pull of the mighty Calgary to its south.
All of this drives you to interrogate your orientation and to explore the impact of different relationships. There’s nothing so liberating as ‘What if…’.
Harry and Graeme put their journey plans together and then took off. Graeme describes them both as ‘media tarts’ so when they hit each place on their route, they make for the TV and radio stations and the local papers. It doesn’t take long for the old arterial connections they are after to start running free again.
On one occasion they were on CTV’s noon news bulletin in Calgary after what Graeme describes as: ‘… a 14 hour flight from Edinburgh via Amsterdam to Vancouver, then a 480 mile drive across the Rockies and looking like we’d been up all night, which was not far from the truth’. During the five minute interview, Ian White the anchorman, admitted he hadn’t known that Canada’s great oil and gas metropolis was named after a tiny settlement on the west coast of Mull. He does now – and so do his viewers.
This Is Who We Are
Graeme Murdoch says of the photo below: Now we are in Western Canada driving hundreds of miles on the Trans Canada Highway through rainforests, snow capped mountains, and arid plains to places where Scots have been before and left a trail of toponyms – Calgary, Banff, Airdrie, Coldstream, Craigallachie, Abbotsford – for us to follow. Ahead of us is Mount MacDonald, named after John MacDonald, Canada’s first premier. Beyond, the Rockies, and our destination, Calgary. (Photo: Graeme Murdoch)
In each community in their tours of Canada – in Nova Scotia, Alberta and British Columbia – the two initiate a photography project among the local people. What they produce will eventually link back to the places in Scotland with the same names and is gradually creating a digital archive of images of the Scottish diaspora.
Graeme and Harry are shaping an exhibition from all of this. It will never be finished because there are so many Scotlands across the world to be connected with each other. But it already has a strong identity. This Is Who We Are is the title of their initial exhibition. It was launched by then Environment now Culture Minister, Michael Russell, at Dumfries on Burns Night and will complete its current cycle in an exhibition at the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood on St Andrews Day.
There can be no stronger statement about the perceived value of this work than that it has opened and will close Homecoming Scotland 2009. It is and will be the gatekeeper, the junction, the exchange of experiences, the melting pot, the new Scottish alchemy. It makes it possible for Scots everywhere to see backwards and forwards in a single gaze.
What it has already done is extraordinary. These two men have flown, driven and walked the line between Scotlands. They have been a physical and present link between them. You could legitimately use the word ‘ambassadorial’ but that word summons something more self important than life enhancing. This work articulates the incoherent heart of Homecoming Scotland, giving it meaning, dignity – freeing it to soar.
Discoveries
The men have entered the maelstrom of the diaspora and emerged clutching treasures from the deep past.
One of these was the discovery that many of the Lil’wat First Nation community in Mount Currie, near Whistler – host to the 2010 Winter Olympics – carry the surname Wallace. One of the Lil’wat Wallaces, now a friend, Stan Wallace, told how he thought they had come to have the name.
He believes that Government Indian agents went through the valley to register native people and ‘either couldn’t spell our Indian names or didn’t want to and so assigned us random names’. It seems likely that one of these agents was a Scot who used the iconic Wallace name as one of the ‘random’ names to be chosen.
Harry points out: ‘Renaming First Nation people was common practice and part of a form of cultural denigration that included banning of cultural practices like potlach and longhouses and eventually the taking away of children and placing them in residential schools far from their community. The latter happened to Stan who was taken as a child by the Oblate Fathers and put in residential school three hundred miles away near Prince George’.
Stan’s wife, Shawn Wallace who is the main continuing contact for Harry and Graeme, has her own more direct Scottish connection. Her Great Great Grandfather came from Orkney and was called Bruce – so in her life she has been both Bruce and Wallace.
Harry also says that the youth soccer team from Mount Currie has been to Scotland to play, brought here by Jim Easton who was a professional with Hibs in the 1960s and now lives in Vancouver. The most recent connection with Mount Currie is the This Is Who We Are project.
The photograph above shows Frank Wallace, a Lil’wat traditional dancer (Photo by ShawnWallace, wife of Stan Wallce whose theory about the origins of the Wallace name in the Lil’wat First Nation is above.)
Art for life’s sake
This article reflects only a fragment of the interconnections Graeme (on the right in this photograph) and Harry (on the left) have unearthed and reinvigorated and it makes you impatient and hungry for more.
The exhibition in not the sort of art that any Duke of Sutherland will ever sell to the nation for £50million for passive viewing.
This is an art that we are a part of making, that encompasses us, that shows us to ourselves in new ways, that opens doors to possibilities of all kinds. It is a fluid and living art, responsive to its circumstances, never complete. It deals in the territory between the moment and the infinite. It is not a fixed and unchanging art that draws its audiences to its own certainties.
As he opened the exhibition at its launch, Culture Minister Michael Russell said: ‘This exhibition brings us closer to the real idea of homecoming: it presents the link that is made by people who are like us but who have faced different challenges. It is an exhibition that is not only visually exciting but also one that stirs emotions and thoughts’.
Jim Mather, Enterprise, Energy and Tourism Minister and Argyll’s MSP, said of the project: ‘This is a truly magical project that uses the power of photography to connect and lift the spirits of people in Scotland and Canada. For many of us on this side of the Atlantic we now have the evidence that not just hearts are Highland and Scottish but so too is the warmth of many modern photographed Canadians. Equally, these photographs confirm the great affinity between our peoples whether there are genetic links or not. The photos also show we share values and attitudes and my wish is that long may they continue to bind us together’.
It would be a privilege for Argyll to have the opportunity to be a part of this most galvanic of the Homecoming Scotland events and to engage in this conversation between Scotlands. It has to be possible and it has to be made possible.
The photograph above shows Harry McGrath on the left and Graeme Murdoch on the right.
Footnotes:
See and read the companion story to this feature under Homecoming Argyll in the top menu of this site – This Is Who We Are: photographs from the journeys to find out - a piece of photo-journalism by Graeme Murdoch on the his and Harry McGrath’s journeys and experiences across Canada, treading in the footsteps of those whose forefathers footsteps had once imprinted on the hills and glens of Scotland.
See and read too the articles below, from the media in the UK, Canada and Scotland, describing and reflecting on This Is Who We Are. There is little duplication. Each of these adds to what you see and discover about this adventure in Scottish conversations.
- Scots Canadians tell mither country who they are (Times Online)
- Photo project unites Scotland with Canada (Canmore Leader)
- The Scots in Canada (Video news onThis Is Who We Are: The Herald on Sunday)
- Scots connect the dots via Photos (Canada.com)
- Photo project connects with Scotland (The Advocate – Nova Scotia)
Copyright on all photographs above resides with the named photographer and are reprodced here with permission.