The pipes: They strike terror in the hearts of enemies. To Scots, they sound nice
The pipes: They strike terror in the hearts of enemies. To Scots, they sound nice
Bagpipe bands are rather like Chinese orchestras. You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em. Some people, hearing a bunch of Japanese musicians at full blast, fear that something in the corner needs a good dose of Three-In-One oil. Arabic music is baffling to the Western ear, and we cannot understand why Mozart has never caught on in Syria. Dunedin’s Mayor Peter Chin, himself of Chinese origin, should remember this when he considers the plight of young, top-class bagpiper Simon Maclean. He has been threatened with confiscation of his pipes after complaints about his busking in the streets. Simon has been funding his university education by entertaining the burghers of Dunedin (and people in the United States over the Christmas break) with his ever-so-special skirls. But he hit a jarring note with cowardly, anonymous moaners, who have asked the council to demand he pipe down, permanently.

Can you believe it? Dunedin, the Edinburgh of the South, banning the public playing of the pipes? If anyone suggested such a thing in Edinburgh, they would probably end up lying in a ditch outside the city, dead from the thrusts of a thousand claymores and dirks.

This incident might, at first sight, seem baffling. But Dunedin has changed for the worse, from its origins as a rich but canny Scottish city. Today, it has almost entirely lost its sense of direction.

For example, the motto of the place is “I am Dunedin”.

Nobody has yet been able to explain what this means.

If Simon Maclean “is Dunedin”, he should have complete freedom to play his pipes. If some Californian refugees “is Dunedin” or it has been taken over by the English who now “is Dunedin”, may God have mercy on the city.

Further social turmoil has been caused by the council and university’s plans to build a dramatically expensive replacement for crumbling Carisbrook, historic home of Otago rugby. In what promises to be a spectacular PR disaster, Dunedin-founded investment adviser Forsyth Barr has just pledged financial support for this dinosaur. If the stadium fails to materialise, the people at Forsyth Barr will look like parochial idiots. If it goes ahead, FB investors nationwide will be paying in some way for a facility that few of them will ever visit.

Some time ago, Dunedin mounted a TV ad campaign to attract new inhabitants, featuring not a cloud in the sky. But we all know that the weather in Dunedin is dreadful, and the only redeeming features of this chilly city are its people and its unusual cultural diversity.

Now, though, we see a surprisingly unfriendly side to a place that only last week was “revealed” by some research or other as New Zealand’s nicest city in which to live. It has turned on one of its own (an artistic descendant of a proud Scottish clan, to boot) and rejected an important part of its heritage: the pipes.

The place has evidently been taken over by tone-deaf foreigners, who – like one caller to RNZ National – believe that the definition of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes, but doesn’t. The best advice we can offer to these intolerant idiots is: either move to slightly warmer but infinitely stiffer Christchurch – and be entertained all night by the music of boy racers.

Or turn up your iPod, next time you get near Simon Maclean.