A Sting In The Tale

I did a spot of time-travelling this lunchtime and wandered from a mid nineteenth century bedroom and into a kitchen from the nineteen sixties.

Each room - recreated with painstaking attention to detail - is part of a new exhibition in the Inverness Museum. It described the three main periods of Scottish migration from the time of the Highland Clearances , through the 30's Depression and then the stories of the ten pound pomes who were enticed down under with cheap sailings subsidised by the Australian government.

One display told the story of an Inverness family who went to Adelaide to escape the cold Highland winters. Trouble was they couldn't stand the hot Australian summers so returned within a year. That meant they had to pay the full cost of their outward fare as well as the price of the return voyage.

The number of poisonous snakes in Australia was also cited as a reason that so many Scots decided that Oz was not so wonderful after all.

It reminded me of the day that Gary Robertson was hosting the morning phone-in and he invited listeners to call in and tell him everything that was good about living in Scotland. People talked about the culture, the friendliness, the health care and the education system.
Then one man came on the line with an unexpected point of view.

"In these other countries," he said, "they have lots of dangerous creepy-crawlies...scorpions and things like that. But there are no scorpions in Scotland. We should be grateful."

Indeed we should.

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