OAMARU

We arrived here as a stop en route to Christchurch on South Island, mainly to see blue penguins shuffling tiredly up the beach to their nesting boxes in late evening, after a hard day fishing out at sea. Not the brightest of birds on the planet but tough spirited, with distinctive personalities.

But I digress. This town was settled relatively early by the British in the 1860s and became very prosperous very quickly because there was a fertile and flat hinterland, and an adequate harbour. Unusually for NZ at the time there was little woodland to build houses with but there was plentiful limestone which is relatively soft to cut and shape. This enabled them to build large, prestigious buildings in the centre of town. It had a reputation in the 1880s as the "best built and most mortgaged town in Australasia".This boom was based on grain exports and this was added to when gold was found. It was very soon bounding with young men with money to burn. Inevitably excessive drinking, fighting and prostitution followed.

During the good times the town spread widely across the flat surrounds and an impressive botanical garden from those times still flourishes.

By the 1880s the gold had run out and world grain prices had plummeted. Bust followed boom, leaving many of the stone buildings as empty hulks.

One relic of the time is that the centre of town still has a defined no-drinking boundary.

In modern times the stone buildings are occupied by an eclectic mix of second hand shops, junk shops and an art movement called Steampunk. The latter is about creating objects that the Victorians might have built had they the technology of today. It is very tongue-in-cheek but very stimulating in its imagination. We visited a gallery and rarely have I seen so many appreciative and chuckling visitors. Art and humour, a rare combination.

The Wikipedia entry shows that many distinguished NZers were brought up in Oamaru, most of them in the arts or literary fields.

We walked round the top of a viewing point, and a commemoration plate there had this modest but touching poem harking back to the earlier settler years:

To the memory of all ....seafarers who have sailed from the port and lost their lives:

There are no roses on a sailor's grave

nor wreaths upon the storm-tossed waves.

No last post from the Royals Band,

Just shipmates there floating alone.

The only tributes are the seagulls' sweeps

and the tear drops as a loved one weeps.