To give you some idea, a flight from St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, to Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia on the east coast of mainland Canada, takes two hours. Before that, and for most of the period after Western contact, Newfoundland remained a barely noticed British colony, almost completely reliant on its marvellous proximity to the seemingly endless resources of the Grand Banks fishery.Īmong the many facts the rest of the world – even the rest of Canada – fail to fully grasp about Newfoundland is just how large and far away it is. The newest province of them all, Newfoundland, didn’t join what Newfoundlanders refer to as “the mainlanders” of Canada until a very contentious referendum was barely won in 1949. In 1992 I was fortunate enough to be appointed the first “come from away” writer-in-residence at Memorial University in Newfoundland, a place that both is, and is not, a part of Canada.
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