The Canterbury landscape is a world away from the scenery of the North Island.
Highway One bridges, numerous rivers whose banks are bordered with grey shale left here from ancient glaciers that still snake along primordial routes from the Alps to the sea. The road south leads to Oamaru – the place of my birth. We had left when I was still in a romper suit, moving to the other end of the country – the Bay of Islands and what was known then as the ‘winterless north’.
I have returned a couple of times over the intervening years to North Otago and this time it was out of curiosity for what Oamaru has now become. Reviews of the town’s metamorphosis into one of the South Island’s newest tourist traps – beguiling architecture, South Island charm and of course the famous cheese roll.
The extensive area of Victorian buildings which make up what is now called the 'Victorian Quarter', hails from a time gone by. When other cities and towns in this great nation of ours flourished and so-called ‘progressive' developers pulled down the old and replaced with the new, Oamaru remained in a time warp.
Its prime building era was the 19th Century. Oamaru was wealthy, a Victorian deep water port with a proximity to that yellow ketamine – gold. The Otago gold rush really put the settlement on the map. Immigrants from all around the world flocked to the area. The Chinese as gold miners first then market gardeners, speculators for the mining, and fledging farmers to eek out an existence on the sheep stations in the tussocky highlands of Otago.
There were few trees to build the public edifices of the social-climbing metropolis, but what there was in abundance was stone. The indigenous Oamaru stone, a creamy white, tough limestone became the backbone of the settlement and any building or reputable residence was built of it.
And then, in the blink of an eye, the boom was over.
The gold rush slackened and soon after the exodus began. People melted away, some to the more modern port of Timaru, others to the larger metropolis of Christchurch and some further up the country and across the Strait to the warmer climes of the North Island. With them, they took their money and left Oamaru with its fine buildings, its opera house, its grand Town Hall and its churches bereft of people to fill them.
Soon, anybody with ambition had left Oamaru, and then even we left. Like the Beverly Hillbillies, we packed up our car with our worldly possessions and traipsed north to a new existence in the Bay of Islands and what turned out to be a brighter and warmer future. Oamaru was left with little population, little money and little future, literally a huge, grand white-stone elephant.
Fortunately, without appeal to developers, there were no great architectural carbuncles erected to replace the grand banking institutions and soaring stone structures that had accommodated those grandiose aspirations. The fine architecture had fallen into a dissolute coma, but then something happened… Steampunk.
A small group of townsfolk had already begun restoring the Victorian Quarter and were putting the town back on the map and into the consciousness of a generation fleeing the overpriced real estate markets of the north and who were rediscovering and embracing the area’s history and architecture.
Subsequently, it was also discovered by those interested in the Steampunk Revolution – a term coined overseas in the 1980s, based on imagining inventions that the Victorians may have created for today’s modern world. Think cars and all manner of household conveniences, but all run by steam. Today, the World Headquarters of Steampunk is recognised as Oamaru. Here, in a little corner of Aotearoa, miles away from the rest of the world, but the centre for some.
The town is also a repository of various props from the Mad Max and Weta Workshop movies, new and old inventions and a culture of little round sunglasses, long beards, top knots and Victorian costumes, amongst the established boutique breweries, barbershops and retro-antique establishments.
Regular events and festivals celebrating the movement bring visitors from all over the world and the revitalisation of the North Otago town is well underway. Money is again flowing into the area and in partnership with a progressive Town Council and various trusts that now own a large section of the 'Old Quarter', the once forgotten town is back on the map and enjoying a new ‘gold rush'.
Oamaru has a vibe. It has its mojo back. Oh, and it also has penguins. Welcome to New Zealand’s newest little capital. (ROSS THORBY)
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Published: 31 July 2023