Cape Town Lens: Oamaru. Catholic Basilica and pipe organ. Opened in 1894 fully completed in 1918. Architect Francis Petre.

A Cape Town University of Cape Town tagged image from photographer – denisbin as published on Flickr.

Oamaru. Catholic Basilica and pipe organ. Opened in 1894 fully completed in 1918. Architect Francis Petre.

Image by denisbin

Oamaru.Oamaru at the estuary of the Waitaki River was a major Maori settlement area where over 1,000 middens have been searched. This was a major home of the Moa hunting Maoris of the 1300s and 1400s. Whalers visited the Otago coast here in the 1830s and the first white settlers came around 1850. The town of Oamaru was declared in 1859. Local quarries provided an extremely hard form of very white limestone for many of the buildings. The town grew as a service centre for the agricultural hinterland. Its boom period was in the 1870s and 1880s when its heritage buildings were erected. Since the port closed in 1970 the town has slumped industrially but has reinvented itself as a heritage city. It contains over 70 buildings on the NZ heritage list. Some of the historic buildings, many built of white Oamaru stone along Thames Street include the Waitaki Council Chambers, the former Municipal Chambers now the Opera House 1907, the Court House 1883, the Boer War Memorial, the Queens Hotel 1884, the Mechanics Institute 1882, the Post Office 1884, the National Bank 1870 etc. There are many more buildings in nearby Tyne Street.

Otago and the settlement of Dunedin.This was an area of major Maori stronghold but whalers started landing on the coast from 1820. In 1829 a Maori sold 60 acres of his land to Peter Williams for 60 muskets, gun powder, cannons and other supplies. The muskets were used to conduct a war with the Maori of the Canterbury Plains region. The first settlers were the Wellers brothers at a whaling station in 1831. The Maori Wars ended around 1838 and in that year four Otago chiefs travelled to Sydney and sold much of their land. In 1840 Governor Gipps of NSW banned all future land sales and vowed to investigate all sales. The Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 invalidated these land sales and all sales of Maori land in Otago had to occurr through the Crown. The NZ Company using the ideas of Edward Gibbon Wakefield purchased the Otago lands in 1844 and in 1848 the Free Church of Scotland sponsored a Scottish settlement there by the Otago Association. Two ships arrived from Greenock led by Captains William Cargill. He later became the first leader of the Province of Otago in 1853. He lent his name to the city of Invercargill. The Scottish settlements of the south were boosted greatly by the discovery of gold in Central Otago in 1861. 18,000 diggers flocked to the gold fields which are nearer to Queenstown than Dunedin. This led to the rapid expansion of Dunedin which became NZ largest city in terms of population and it remained so until 1900 when Auckland eclipsed it. It is still NZ’s largest city by area! Otago remains a largely rural area with pastoralism as the main industry and tourism in the Alps. Its major cities at Oamaru (14,000) and Dunedin (126,000) near the coast and Queenstown (13,000) in the Southern Alps. 200 kms inland from Dunedin is the small town of Alexandra (5,100 people) which is noted for its stone fruit and wine grape industries and hydroelectricity. It has the dubious reputation for being the coldest, hottest, driest and sunniest town in NZ. It lies in the rain shadow area east of the Alps. 80% of the people of Otago province have Scottish ancestry. Otago province has 212,000 people with more than half of them living in Dunedin. Dunedin is Edinburgh in Scottish Gaelic.

Several technological breakthroughs were especially important in the settlement of Otago and the southern regions. The first was the development of barbed wire in 1863 and its general usage by the 1870s. The other was the development of freezers to enable frozen meat to be shipped by steamer across the world. This happened in 1881 enabling the expansion of the southern sheep industry for frozen meat for England. In fact the first shipload of frozen meat in the world was shipped in a boat named the Dunedin when it was refitted with a refrigeration unit in 1881. The Dunedin ship was built in 1874 for the route from England to NZ. The first long distance load of frozen meat was sent from Sydney in 1879 but it was only a small part of the overall cargo. The Dunedin had a steam powered refrigeration system to freeze the entire hold of the ship which was then filled with NZ lamb. The ship Dunedin left the city of Dunedin in February 1882 with the cargo arriving in London in excellent condition. Soon ship loads of frozen lamb and beef were being exported from NZ and Australian to London. The NZ Shipping Company converted other steamers in its fleet and dominated the trade from the start. The steamers travelled from NZ to Cape Horn in Sth America before going on to England. In 1890 a carbon dioxide compression refrigeration system was developed for steamers and this led to the export of refrigerated, but not frozen, butter from NZ and Australia to England. The new system was less costly and cheaper to run and made it feasible to export butter as well as frozen meat. Suddenly by 1892 dairy farms expanded everywhere as many steamers were converted to have refrigerated cargo holds. By 1902 Lloyd’s Shipping Register had 460 refrigerated vessels on its books.

The economy of Otago is based on agricultural production- some wool, lots of lamb and beef meat processing, some dairying, fruit and wine. The province relies heavily on tourism (Queenstown and Dunedin and the Otago Peninsula) and although Dunedin is the seventh city of NZ in terms of population it is still regarded as one of the four main cities of NZ because of its historic importance. The University of Otago was the first university established in NZ by legislation in 1869. It opened in 1871. The buildings we now associate with the University were completed in 1878/79. It now has 21,000 students although not all are based in Dunedin. Nevertheless education is another major industry of Otago. There are 12 high schools and colleges in Dunedin including the early established Otago Girls High School which was the first high school for girls in the Southern Hemisphere when established in 1870. (The Scottish Presbyterian Church always placed great emphasis on education.) The School’s current buildings were built in 1910. Otago Boys High School was established in Dunedin in 1863. Its impressive Scottish Tudor Baronial style buildings were erected in 1885.