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Dunedin (Ōtepoti in Maori) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the principal city of the region of Otago. It is New Zealand's fifth largest city in terms of population, it is the hub of the fifth-largest urban area and the largest in size of council boundary areas. For historical and cultural reasons, Dunedin is considered one of the country's four main centres.

The city stands on the hills and valleys surrounding the head of Otago Harbour. The harbour and hills are the remnants of an extinct volcano. It is the home of the University of Otago.

History

Main article: History of Dunedin

Modern archaeology favours a date round 1100 AD for the first human (Māori) occupation of New Zealand with population concentrated along the south east coast. A camp site at Kaikai's Beach, near Otago Heads, has been dated from about that time. There are numerous Archaic (moa hunter) sites in what is now Dunedin, several of them large and permanently occupied, particularly in the fourteenth century. Population contracted but expanded again with the evolution of the Classic culture which saw the building of several pa, fortified settlements, notably Pukekura at (Taiaroa Head), about 1650. There was a settlement in what is now central Dunedin (Ōtepoti) occupied as late as about 1785 but abandoned by 1826.

Maori tradition tells first of people called Kahui Tipua living in the area, then Te Rapuwai, semi-legendary but considered to be historical. The next arrivals were Waitaha followed by Kati Mamoe late in the sixteenth century and then Kai Tahu (Ngai Tahu in modern standard Māori) who arrived in the mid seventeenth century. These migration waves have often been represented as 'invasions' in European accounts but modern scholarship has cast doubt on that. They were probably migrations like those of the European which incidentally resulted in bloodshed.

The sealer John Boultbee recorded in the 1820s that the 'Kaika Otargo' (settlements around and near Otago Harbour) were the oldest and largest in the south.

Captain James Cook stood off what is now the coast of Dunedin between February 25 and March 5, 1770, naming Cape Saunders on the Otago Peninsula and Saddle Hill. He reported penguins and seals in the vicinity, which led sealers to visit from the beginning of the 19th century. The early years of sealing saw a feud between sealers and local Maori, from 1810-1823, sparked by an incident on Otago Harbour, but William Tucker became the first European to settle in the area in 1815. Permanent European occupation dates from 1831 when the Weller brothers founded their whaling station at Otago, modern Otakou on the Otago Harbour. Epidemics reduced the Maori population. By the late 1830s the harbour was an international whaling port. Johnny Jones established a farming settlement and a mission station, the South Island's first, at Waikouaiti in 1840.

The Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland founded Dunedin at the head of Otago Harbour in 1848 as the principal town of its Scottish settlement. The name comes from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. Charles Kettle the city's surveyor, instructed to emulate the characteristics of Edinburgh, produced a striking, 'Romantic' design. The result was both grand and quirky streets as the builders struggled and sometimes failed to construct his bold vision across the challenging landscape. Captain William Cargill, a veteran of the war against Napoleon, was the secular leader. The Reverend Thomas Burns, a nephew of the poet Robert Burns, was the spiritual guide.

In 1852, Dunedin became the capital of the Otago Province, the whole of New Zealand from the Waitaki south. In 1861 the discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully, to the southwest, led to a rapid influx of population and saw Dunedin become New Zealand's first city by growth of population in 1865. The new arrivals included many Irish, but also Italians, French, Germans, Jews and Chinese.

Dunedin and the region industrialised and consolidated, and the Main South Line connected the city with Christchurch in 1878 and Invercargill in 1879. The University of Otago, the oldest university in New Zealand, was founded in Dunedin in 1869. Otago Girls' High School (1871) is said to be the oldest state secondary school for girls in the Southern Hemisphere. Between 1881 and 1957, Dunedin was home to cable trams, being both one of the first and last such systems in the world. Early in the 1880s the inauguration of the frozen meat industry, with the first shipment leaving from Port Chalmers, saw the beginning of a later great national industry.

After ten years of gold rushes the economy slowed but Julius Vogel's immigration and development scheme brought thousands more especially to Dunedin and Otago before recession set in again in the 1880s. In these first times of prosperity many institutions and businesses were established, New Zealand's first daily newspaper, art school, medical school and public art gallery Dunedin Public Art Gallery among them. There was also a remarkable architectural flowering producing many substantial and ornamental buildings. R.A. Lawson's First Church of Otago and Knox Church are notable examples, as are buildings by Maxwell Bury and F.W. Petre. The other visual arts also flourished under the leadership of W.M. Hodgkins. The city's landscape and burgeoning townscape were vividly portrayed by George O'Brien 1821-1888. From the mid 1890s the economy revived. Institutions such as the Otago Settlers Museum and the Hocken Collections – the first of their kind in New Zealand – were founded. More notable buildings such as the Railway Station and Olveston were erected. New energy in the visual arts represented by G.P. Nerli culminated in the career of Frances Hodgkins.

By 1900, Dunedin was no longer the country's biggest city. Influence and activity moved north to the other centres ("the drift north"), a trend which continued for much of the following century. Despite this, the university continued to expand, and a student quarter became established. At the same time people started to notice Dunedin's mellowing, the ageing of its grand old buildings, with writers like E.H. McCormick pointing out its atmospheric charm. In the 1930s and early 1940s a new generation of artists such as M.T. (Toss) Woollaston, Doris Lusk, Anne Hamblett, Colin McCahon and Patrick Hayman once again represented the best of the country's talent. The Second World War saw the dispersal of these painters, but not before McCahon had met a very youthful poet, James K. Baxter, in a central city studio.