A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE LEADING
INDUSTRIES OF DUNEDIN.
By Westley Overton.
F the early settlers of Otago—the "Pilgrim Fathers" of Dunedin—who arrived at Port Chalmers in the "John Wickliff" and the "Philip Laing," could have taken a peep into futurity and viewed our fair city of Dunedin to-day, with her numerous white buildings glittering amongst her verdant hills, and girdled around by her magnificent emerald "Belt," they well might have exclaimed, "Can such things ever be?"
In those early days of the settlement every man, if he intended to become prosperous, required to make himself a kind of "Jack of all trades." He was compelled to understand a little of bush carpentering, be competent to build a sod chimney, and be able to manufacture his own furniture, before he could make himself even tolerably comfortable in his hut. He, or his wife, if he was blessed with one, would have to repair all the clothes, and also put a patch on a boot when necessary, or he would probably find himself bare-footed.
Many other little offices, which are so much more conveniently arranged in the Dunedin of the present day had all to be performed as "home industries" in those early days, when a pig-hunter's hut was the only building where High street now runs, and the waves of the Bay washed over the present site of the Colonial Bank. And yet that time is less than fifty years ago. A man need not have arrived at the threescore and ten years of the Psalmist to have a recollection of that period.
Since then the various industries of Dunedin have advanced not only by strides but by leaps and bounds. In some of the large industrial centres of the mother country they profess to manufacture everything, "from a needle to an anchor." Dunedin cannot yet go quite so far as that. She can, however,
