Born at his mother’s family farm in northern Scotland in 1816, William Sinclair Trotter came from a pastoral background. William left Scotland as a young man in 1838 and emigrated to New South Wales where he aspired to make his fortune. He travelled on board the Boyne and arrived in Sydney in 1839. Unimpressed by Australia’s poor economic prospects and convict population, William quickly left Sydney for New Zealand.
Travelling on board the whaling ship, the Magnet, he was put in charge of managing cattle for the new settlement that John Jones hoped to establish in Waikouaiti. The Magnet arrived in Waikouaiti in March 1840. Faced with wild bush and no established housing, William may have been disappointed with the prospective settlement as he returned to Australia. Shortly afterwards, however, he made a second attempt at settling in Otago.
William acquired a sheep run through a government initiative to encourage settlement in Otago and came to reside at Moeraki in 1851. Four years later he married Isabella Dalrymple in Waikouaiti. The couple had eight children together, although their first born died as a baby in Moeraki in 1856. After living in the Moeraki area and later managing a farm they named ‘Greenvale’ in West Otago, William and his family eventually settled in Woodlands near Invercargill. In 1872 he purchased 4,000 acres of land, which the family ran as a sheep farm, in the Toetoes district in Southland.
William died at his home in Woodlands in 1893. His obituary described him as ‘a man of peace…who took a deep and intelligent, but quiet interest in all questions affecting the welfare of the colony and of his district’. Reminders of William’s presence remain in the Otago region with Trotters Gorge and Trotters Creek named after the Scottish settler.
Mr William Sinclair Trotter