At one point, this street was the busiest in New Zealand, which is kind of crazy to think about when you see it empty in the early morning hours. I came across this part of town one morning as rain showers drifted through, coating everything in a light sheen.
Time of day can have a dramatic impact on mood, giving places a completely different feel in the morning than they have at night. Predawn light has a crispness of its own, quite different from the softer, moodier light of evening.
Of course, there is another side to photographing places at that hour. Standing there in the half-light, camera on a tripod, you can’t help wondering, what the heck am I doing up at this ungodly hour?
Here’s a photo I took one of of my wanderings. In 1876, when James Speight, Charles Greenslade and William Dawson handed in their notices at Dunedin’s Wellpark Brewery, it all worked out rather well. Between them, they had a useful combination of skills. Dawson was a brewer, Greenslade a maltster, and Speight a businessman. They leased a building on Rattray Street and went into business for themselves.
They mixed some malt and hops together and, impressed with the results, named the beverage Speight’s. More than 150 years later, the brewery remains on Rattray Street, where it has been ever since.
Daily Photo – Bridge On The Otago Harbour Cycleway
There’s something satisfying about a bridge that makes you stop and look before you cross it, or take a second look once across the other side.
This one is part of the Otago Harbour Cycleway and stretches across the Water of Leith with its cables pulling away in every direction. It turns what is essentially a fairly simple footbridge into something that looks rather more dramatic than it probably needs to be. From this angle, the lines all seem to converge on the centre, drawing you towards the other side.
I like places such as this. A bridge is usually somewhere you cross without thinking much about it. You are going from here to there, and the bit in between is simply something to get over. They’re not necessarily spectacular destinations, but they give you a reason to slow down.
Dunedin isn’t a bad place to live if you like walking. You’re never far from the beach, the bush or the harbour. You can head up into the hills for sweeping views or stay down on the flat, depending on what sort of walk you’re in the mood for.
This is one of my favourite harbour tracks, a place where several paths branch off in different directions, making it easy to turn a short stroll into a much longer wander. It can be a wild place when the wind funnels down the harbour, strong enough to make you lean into every step. But on a calm day, with the water shimmering and the hills reflected in the harbour, it’s a pretty good spot.
Five Things to Think About When Photographing Snow
A few emails have arrived asking for some tips on photographing snow, particularly from people who aren’t necessarily out there with a camera every day, but who suddenly find themselves surrounded by a winter wonderland with the family in tow and want to come home with a few good photographs.
So, while this isn’t quite my usual sort of post, I thought I’d put together a few things that might help.
Why is my beautiful white snow grey?
This is probably the most common problem. You look out at a landscape covered in beautiful, clean, white snow, take a photograph and discover that your camera has decided the snow should be a rather miserable shade of grey.
The reason is that your camera is trying to be clever. It sees all that bright snow and thinks there’s far too much light, so it darkens the whole photograph. If you’re using a phone, try tapping on the snow and then sliding the exposure control slightly brighter. If you’re using a camera with manual controls, try increasing your exposure compensation a little.
The important thing is to check the photograph afterwards. If the snow looks grey, brighten it up. If it starts looking like a glowing white sheet with no detail at all, you’ve probably gone too far.
Why does everyone look so dark?
This is another common one, especially when you’re photographing the family standing in front of a large snowy landscape. The camera sees all that bright white snow, exposes for it and leaves the people looking rather like silhouettes.
If you can, position your family so they’re facing towards the light (but be carefully to not have them facing directly into it as everyone will be squinting) rather than having the brightest part of the sky behind them. Your phone’s setting can also help balance the bright snow with the darker faces.
And don’t be afraid of using the flash. Yes, I know, you’re standing outside in broad daylight and it seems completely unnecessary, but a little flash can add some light to people’s faces and make a surprisingly big difference. Photographers will often use flasgh outside in daylight, even if it’s just a little for the eyes!
Why does my snow photograph look so boring?
This is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. Snow can look absolutely magical when you’re standing in it, but photographs have an annoying habit of reducing all that magic to a large white expanse.
The answer is to look for something that breaks up all that whiteness. A person standing in the landscape, a row of trees, a fence disappearing into the distance, a brightly coloured jacket or even a set of footprints can give the photograph some shape and, importantly, a sense of scale.
If you’re photographing the family, don’t necessarily line everyone up and tell them to smile. Photograph them making a snowman, throwing snowballs or trudging through the snow. The snow is the setting. What your family is doing in it is the story.
Where did all the snowflakes go?
If it’s actually snowing, you might expect your photograph to be filled with beautiful, delicate snowflakes. Instead, you look at the result and wonder where they’ve all gone.
Snowflakes can be surprisingly difficult to photograph, especially with a phone. They can be almost invisible against a bright background.
Try finding a darker background, such as trees or a building, which will make the falling snow much easier to see. If you’re photographing children running around, jumping or throwing snowballs, use your phone’s burst or action mode if it has one. With a camera, a faster shutter speed will help freeze all that activity.
Of course, you could also embrace the blur. Sometimes a slightly blurred photograph of a child charging through the snow tells you far more about the day than a technically perfect photograph ever could.
Don’t forget that your camera is getting cold and wet
This is the one that can turn a lovely day in the snow into a very expensive trip to the camera shop.
Snow and cameras aren’t necessarily natural friends. Keep an eye on moisture getting onto your lens and, if you’re using a camera, remember that batteries don’t particularly enjoy the cold. Keeping a spare battery in an inside pocket can be a very good idea.
The other thing to remember is condensation. If you’ve been outside in the cold and then bring your camera straight into a warm house, moisture can form inside and around it. If possible, put the camera into a sealed bag before going inside and allow it to warm up gradually.
Bonus Tip: Take Lots of Photographs
Allow yourself to play! Try different settings, different angles, different focal lengths and different ways of using the light. Don’t just take one or two photographs and then move on. Take twenty. Take fifty. Take a hundred if you want to. Once you’re finished, you can always go back through them and delete the ones you don’t want.
If you take two photographs, you’ve got a fairly slim chance of getting exactly the photograph you’re hoping for. Take twenty, however, and your odds of finding a good one are suddenly much better. And if you’re running out of space on your digital memory, have a quick look through the images and delete a few of the obvious rejects.
As an example, I took nearly forty photographs of this particular tree in the Strath Taieri, moving around to all sorts of different positions, trying different focal lengths and making adjustments to the exposure and the way I was working with the light. I wanted to make sure I had the photograph I was looking for. By the time I’d finished, I was fairly cold, but fortunately the car’s heating was more than sufficient to warm me up again.
And that’s really the beauty of digital photography. You can experiment, make mistakes and try again. The only thing it costs you is a little time, and perhaps a few gigabytes of storage.
And finally, probably my best piece of advice is this: don’t spend the entire day worrying about getting the perfect photograph.
Long before Europeans arrived on the shores of New Zealand and set about naming everything after themselves, their friends, or somewhere they’d left behind in England, Māori already had perfectly good names for pretty much everything.
Here in Dunedin, the prominent mountain we now know as Mount Cargill was known to Kāi Tahu as Kapukataumahaka. While the name doesn’t lend itself to a neat, literal translation, it carries the meaning of a place where food was gathered, particularly where birds such as weka and kererū were hunted and snared while feeding on the berries of the kapuka, or broadleaf tree.
So, long before Mount Cargill was Mount Cargill, it was a place where people went looking for dinner. Which, when you think about it, is probably a far more useful name for a mountain.
Daily Photo – Cactus Garden in the Winter Glasshouse
Today I bring to you the cactus, which allows me to share a story that I can assure you is absolutely true and fits neatly into the “idiot has a gun” category.
In February 1982, an Arizona man and his friend headed out into the desert to engage in a little “cactus plugging”. For the uninitiated, cactus plugging is a rather simple activity. All you need is a gun and a giant cactus and, like many activities involving firearms and questionable decision-making, it generally goes well until it doesn’t.
On this occasion, the pair came across a cactus reported to be between seven and eight metres tall, which would have made it well over a century old. Now, the thing about this particular cactus that features in our story is that this type doesn’t grow arms until they’re around 70 years old, and the monstrous specimen the pair had chosen had side arms later estimated to weigh around 230 kilograms, making the cactus somewhere between 150 and 200 years old. Well, the pair happily fired away at the cactus, repeatedly shooting into the base, naturally weakening the trunk. When their target didn’t immediately fall, they continued firing in the hope of toppling the mighty beast.
What happened next, I can only imagine, was one of those moments in life when time seems to stand still while everything happens in slow motion. As they continued firing, one of the massive side arms suddenly broke free, falling directly on top of one of the men and pinning him to the ground. The now unstable cactus, no longer able to support its own enormous weight, then collapsed on top of him.
Faced with his friend being crushed beneath a giant cactus, the other man ran several miles for help, but by the time emergency crews reached the remote location, he was already dead.
There are, I imagine, countless ways to leave this world. Being flattened by a cactus in the Arizona desert, has to rank among the more unusual.
Daily Photo – The Dinning Room at Larnach’s Castle
When William Larnach moved into his peninsula mansion, if he’d had a fridge, his “to-do” list probably wouldn’t have fitted on it. In fact, it was more a case of asking what had been finished.
Things he would have proudly been able to tell his wife Eliza he’d finally gotten around to completing included erecting the three-storey stone shell, constructing the central tower, securing the main roof, framing the exterior verandahs, completing the temporary estate cottages and roughing in the primary interior layout.
His to-do list, however, was just a tiny bit longer. Among other things, it included completing the lower apartments, enclosing the verandahs, carving the master ceilings, laying the interior woodwork, constructing the grand staircase, building the ballroom, finishing the ground-floor structural stonework, shipping 20 tons of glass panels from Venice, and sourcing premium native New Zealand timber to cover the raw brickwork. Then there were the grounds. Massive piles of construction debris had to be cleared, dense bush cut back, muddy clay fields graded, windbreaks established and the footprint of a formal garden laid out.
So unfinished was the building that the Larnachs continued to live on a building site for another 12 years as various parts of the house were completed. The highly elaborate carved ceilings in the main foyer and dining room were so specialised that they alone took six and a half years to finish. Building his grand home had taken so long, and demanded such extraordinary craftsmanship, that Larnach lived in a fully completed house for just 11 years before his death in 1898. A lot of that time he spent in Parliament in Wellington, so how much time in actually spent in his home is hard to say!
I’d spent the early part of the evening having dinner with a group of long-time friends, an occasion that quickly confirmed to everyone present that, despite the passing years, I hadn’t changed one bit. I’d arrived carrying a camera and tripod, immediately reassuring the gathering that there was every chance I’d disappear at some point in search of a photograph. With that expectation firmly established, I did what any sensible person would do and went in search of the first round of beers to get the evening underway.
Dinner itself was a complete success, if your definition of success involves dripping food down the front of your top while simultaneously scattering the rest in an impressively constructed semi-circle around the edge of your plate. Not content with that achievement, I rounded things off by leaving a trail of beer drips that started at the bar and led all the way back to our table, courtesy of the pint I was apparently meant to be in control of.
Having made what I felt was an entirely suitable impression, and reassured everyone that I remained exactly the same slightly chaotic person they’d known for years, I said my goodbyes and went in search of a bus home. Naturally, the camera and tripod came with me. After all, there was no point carrying them around all evening if I wasn’t going to stop somewhere on the way home and take a photograph
There are mornings when the weather seems unable to make up its mind. This was one of them. I was driving back from Port Chalmers to Dunedin when a curtain of rain swept across Otago Harbour, turning the familiar view into something altogether more theatrical. Dark clouds hung low over the hills while shafts of sunlight found improbable gaps, pouring through as though someone had quietly opened a door in the sky.
I pulled over because some scenes deserve more than a glance through a windscreen. They ask for a little patience.
Here’s an image I grabbed on a stroll through Dunedin’s inner city. On this occasion, I’d been looking at some of the older buildings in the area, trying to find different angles and interesting points of view. That’s when I noticed the sun reflecting off one of the windows of a nearby office block. When the light caught it, I liked the contrast between the modern glass and the older architecture that surrounded it.
I seemingly had the road to myself, the harbour’s captivating reflections keeping me company as they appeared out of the passenger window while I swung in and out of bays. Boats, boatsheds, swimming pontoons, harbour markers, and the hills of the western harbour bounced off the water like glass. I passed the famous Wellers Rock just as Harrington Point Beach, Taiaroa Head, and the harbour mouth came into view.
A ray of golden light flooded a rustic wooden wharf, its weathered, spindly piles casting sharp reflections into the glassy tide. A fishing boat sat moored at the jetty, gently swaying on the calm sea. The deep blue water shifted to a clear, sunlit turquoise near the shore, mirroring the bright afternoon sky. I pulled the car over, grabbed the book I’d been reading, found a patch of grass in the sun, and read for a while. It was all rather delightful.
The wonderful thing about small, locally run museums is that they’re like rummaging through the back shed and discovering an antique clock. I mean that in the most affectionate way, I really do, because that’s exactly how I came upon the story of Portobello’s original lockup. It’s one of those small but fascinating chapters of Otago Peninsula history that could easily be overlooked.
In late 1883, after years of lobbying and persistence, the local community finally achieved what was then considered something of a luxury: their very own policeman. To accommodate him, the authorities erected a modest wooden police station and lockup on the corner of Beaconsfield Road and Landreth Street, just a short stroll from the waterfront. It was hardly an imposing structure. There were no grand stone walls or iron gates, just a practical little building designed to keep order in a growing settlement.
Yet for the people of the Peninsula, it represented security, stability and a tangible sign that Portobello had arrived as a community worthy of official attention. Remarkably, it continued to serve as the district’s law-enforcement headquarters for more than half a century, until new quarters were built in 1938.
The Unspoken Rule of the Information Kiosk: Is it just me, or when reading a faded, sun-bleached outdoor information plaque about a town or a walking track, do you feel a subtle social obligation to stand there squinting at it for at least thirty seconds longer than it actually takes to read? Just so passing locals think you actually know what you’re doing, rather than simply being confused and lost.
Daily Photo – Reflections of Otago Harbour
On a lovely bright winter afternoon, I was driving along the Otago Peninsula Road between Broad Bay and Portobello when I rounded a point and the road dipped into a bay. I pulled the car over, got out, and crossed to the cycleway that runs along the edge of the harbour.
The Otago Harbour and Peninsula are wonderful places and, if you stopped at every interesting or captivating sight, you wouldn’t get anywhere at all. Most of the time, you simply drive on and enjoy the scenery as it slips by. On this occasion, however, what made me stop was the fact that the harbour was so perfectly still it looked almost like glass. Rarely have I seen reflections on the harbour look so remarkable.
Seemingly having the road all to myself, I’d been resisting the temptation to stop and take a few photographs for some time. Yet when I reached the edge of Latham Bay, I could no longer resist it.
The “No Exit” Allure: Why is it that a faded, slightly bent rural road sign that explicitly reads “No Exit – No Turning” acts as an immediate, irresistible invitation to carry on and see if it’s fictitious?
Daily Photo -The Meridian Mall
Before the Meridian Mall was a fashionable retail outlet and Arthur Barnett was one of Dunedin’s most recognisable department stores, and long before shoppers wandered between chain stores carrying takeaway coffees, this entire block was something quite different.
In fact, if you had stood here in the 1860s, you may well have found yourself ankle-deep in mud.
The land occupied by today’s Meridian Mall sits on what was once part of the lower floodplain of the Water of Leith. Early Dunedin was a city of hills, swamps, and ambitious dreams. As settlers expanded north from the original settlement, marshy ground was gradually drained and reclaimed, transforming wetlands into valuable commercial land.
Then came the gold rush.
The discovery of gold in Central Otago in 1861 brought an explosion of people, money, and opportunity to Dunedin. The future Meridian Mall site became part of a bustling commercial district lined with small businesses. Drapers, bootmakers, tobacconists, jewellers, photographers, tailors, boarding houses, and hotels occupied the narrow sections that once covered the block. Horses clattered along George Street while miners, sailors, merchants, and travellers crowded the footpaths.
Unlike today’s enclosed shopping centre, the area was a patchwork of separate buildings, each housing its own trade and its own stories. A visitor could buy a new pair of boots, sit for a portrait, order a suit, and find a bed for the night, all within a few metres of where shoppers now browse modern retail stores. Beneath the polished floors of the Meridian Mall lies ground that has witnessed more than 160 years of Dunedin history, from swamp and gold rush to department stores and shopping malls.
What all of this shows us is that cities are never really finished. They simply keep reinventing themselves, one generation building over the footprints of another, until a modern shopping mall stands where horses once splashed through mud and gold-rush merchants haggled over the price of a pair of boots.
There is a particular kind of optimism that belongs to the early settlers. They arrived at the bottom of the world, stared up at a mountain range that appeared designed specifically to prevent travel, and decided there must be a way through. They ventured into unmapped country searching for gold, launch small wooden boats into rivers no one has successfully navigated before, disappeared underground into cave systems simply to discover where they lead, or stood on a wild and exposed coastline facing the Pacific Ocean and think, yes, this seems like a perfectly reasonable place to build a settlement.
At some point in the nineteenth century, somebody looked at the stretch of coast that would become St Clair and came to exactly that conclusion. The difficulty was that nature had plans of its own. Standing on the Esplanade today, watching surfers drift beyond the breakers and families wander along the promenade with coffees in hand, it’s difficult to imagine the coastline as anything other than permanent. Yet for much of its history, St Clair was engaged in a long and often unequal struggle with the sea. The ocean would advance, people would respond, and then the ocean would advance again.
The first attempts to hold the coastline were charmingly optimistic. Timber walls were built, only to be destroyed. Stone walls followed and met much the same fate – in one case, a substantial wall survived for little more than two years before being swallowed by the sea. Another replacement was constructed at considerable expense and promptly suffered a similar fate and by 1890, after years of effort and expenditure, much of what remained was little more than wreckage scattered along the western end of the beach.
This was not simply bad luck. Geography was partly to blame. The shape of St Clair Point creates a complicated and often destructive wave environment. Storms arriving from the south-east are concentrated and redirected in ways that can be remarkably unforgiving. When the protective walls failed, the sea did not merely reclaim a strip of sand. Water pushed inland and contributed to a series of major floods that spread across South Dunedin. To residents living there at the time, the beach was not a recreational asset, it was a very real threat.
Eventually, around the beginning of the twentieth century, a different approach emerged. Instead of attempting to stop the ocean outright, engineers began looking for ways to work with the natural movement of sand along the coast. Their solution was the construction of groynes, heavy timber structures extending out into the surf. The idea was simple enough: trap sand moving along the shoreline and allow the beach to build itself naturally. For a time, the plan worked remarkably well. The beach widened. Sand accumulated. The coastline appeared more stable yet anyone familiar with the sea knows that victories are often temporary. Severe storms returned in the years before the First World War and reminded everyone that the ocean had not surrendered. The response was the construction of the concrete seawall that still forms the backbone of the Esplanade today, together with a new generation of timber groynes built from hardy woods including kauri, tōtara and Australian blue gum.
One of those structures would eventually become something rather unexpected. When it was first built, nobody would have imagined it becoming a local icon. It was simply infrastructure. A practical solution to a practical problem. Yet over the decades the groynes became woven into the visual identity of St Clair. They appeared in family photographs, postcards and later in countless social media posts. Generations grew up with them standing out in the surf, as familiar a part of the beach as the seawall itself.
Following reconstruction work in the 1950s, the groynes helped create what many remember as the golden years of St Clair Beach. Through the 1960s, 1970s and much of the 1980s, wide stretches of sand extended across the shoreline. For many Dunedin residents, this became the St Clair they knew best. Summer days seemed endless, and the beach appeared fixed and unchanging. Of course, coastlines rarely remain fixed for long. The sea is patient. Decades passed. Timber weathered. Marine borers tunnelled through hardwood piles. Winter storms loosened planks and broke supports. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the structures began to disappear. What had once been substantial coastal defences were reduced to weathered remnants protruding from the water. By the early 2020s, only a handful of poles remained until eventually there was one.
For a surprisingly long period, a solitary timber post stood isolated in the surf. It was no longer performing any meaningful engineering function. It simply existed, stubbornly resisting the waves that had spent more than a century dismantling everything around it. There was something strangely moving about that final survivor. It had become less a piece of infrastructure and more a monument to persistence, both human and natural.
When it finally vanished beneath the waves in July 2022, it felt like the closing line of a much longer story.
A few blocks up and along from the Law Courts Hotel is Dowling Street, a interesting wee street that has transformed into a make-shift artistic hub. Walk up Dowling Street from it’s terminus at Queens Garden, and at about halfway you’ll come across 31-33 Dowling Street. Look closely at the top of the grand, former Excelsior Hotel and you’ll spot a quirky piece of Dunedin history hidden in plain sight. High up, etched into the Victorian plasterwork, are the words: “ESTD 1862 J. DONALDSONS.” It looks like the proud mark of a high-society banker or shipping magnate, but it’s actually a monument to the humble mutton pie.
John Donaldson was a Glaswegian immigrant who arrived during the 1862 gold rush. Like thousands of others, he tried his luck panning for gold in the freezing rivers of Central Otago and like many others, he found absolutely nothing. Realising the real money was in feeding the desperate masses rather than digging in the mud, he returned to Dunedin and opened the Glasgow Pie House.
It was a stroke of genius. His hot, savoury pies and legendary multi-tiered wedding cakes (one reportedly so enormous it took three grown men to carry it through the streets) made him a fortune. By 1887, the successful baker had amassed enough wealth to buy out the ramshackled wooden hotel that previously occupied the site. He knocked it down and replaced it with the brick-and-plaster landmark we see today.
When the Excelsior Hotel finally opened its doors in 1888, Donaldson made sure his culinary empire was permanently commemorated. Instead of putting the hotel’s actual name on the main parapet, he stamped his own name instead.
Occasionally, on my shuffles through town, I pass by the Law Courts Hotel located on Dunedin’s Lower Stuart Street. The hotel has an excellent bar with the intriguing ability to stop a person from walking in a straight line after spending the evening sitting at the bar – but that is beside the point.
In August 1953, when the young Queen Elizabeth II announced she was dropping by, the nation collectively lost its mind. Never before had a reigning monarch visited our wee country, and amid the wild hysteria, everyone quickly began cleaning and tidying in preparation. Once the royal itinerary was confirmed, and Dunedin was locked in for a three-night stay, Norman Stewart the hotel’s proprietor, was only too pleased to offer Her Majesty a bed for a few nights. The hotel’s key selling point? A sturdy balcony perfectly positioned for waving at thousands of adoring fans.
To get everything spic and span, the first-floor accommodation was completely gutted. In place of standard hotel lodging, decorators built a dedicated royal suite consisting of a private bedroom, a sitting lounge, and direct access to that all-important balcony. Local Dunedin furniture makers and craftspeople were commissioned to build bespoke wooden pieces, ensuring Her Majesty was surrounded by the finest Otago craftsmanship. To dull the noise of the bustling city outside, heavy drapes and plush New Zealand wool carpets were laid, alongside a literal red carpet that ran from the hotel’s main entrance, across the pavement, and onto Stuart Street. Downstairs, the local pub was completely locked down, turning the entire building into a secure, heavily guarded compound for the duration of the three-day visit.
When the royal train finally rolled in on January 25, 1954, the hotel had been transformed from a respectable local establishment into a fortified fortress. As the royal car pulled up on Lower Stuart Street, the Queen and Prince Philip stepped directly onto the red carpet. They made their way through the crowd and up to their Royal Suite, stepping out onto the balcony to be greeted by the roar of thousands of fans packed tightly across the Stuart and Cumberland Street intersection.
Daily Photo – The Entrance Hall at Larnach’s Castle
Upon arrival at Larnach’s home, guests were greeted with an almost panoramic view of the splendour and beauty of the Otago Peninsula, looking out over bays, inlets, and harbours that stretched from the city to Port Chalmers and beyond.
Before entering the house, they would first ascend stairs made from local Port Chalmers basalt, guarded by lions, eagles, and griffins carved from Oamaru stone. They then came face-to-face with a heavy door crafted from solid English oak, featuring a Gothic Revival design with heavy brass handles and glass panels that filtered light into the main entrance foyer.
Once inside, guests found themselves standing in one of the finest entrance halls in the country. The tiles beneath their feet were sourced directly from Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England, while the glass windows came from Italy, and the ornate wooden paneling was crafted from Spanish mahogany, kauri, and Burmese teak. Above them sat a ceiling so intricate and detailed that it took six years to carve, from which hung the finest chandeliers money could buy. To a visiting guest, there could be no doubt that this was a residence built not merely for comfort, but as a staggering declaration of wealth, power, and ambition.
The Esplanade first became a destination in the 1880s, when Dunedin’s growing population began looking beyond the city for somewhere to escape the noise and smoke of urban life. What they found at St Clair was wind, surf, and an endless stretch of sand facing directly into the Pacific Ocean. At the time, getting there was no simple matter. The road across South Dunedin could be rough and muddy, and much of St Clair itself was little more than dunes and paddocks from William Henry Valpy’s old Forbury estate.
Everything changed with the arrival of the cable tramway in 1881. Suddenly, the beach was accessible to ordinary Dunedin residents, and St Clair quickly transformed into the city’s seaside playground. Families arrived carrying picnic baskets, couples strolled beside the sea, and bathers cautiously entered the cold southern water wearing heavy woollen costumes that must have weighed twice as much once wet.
The Esplanade developed in stages as cafés, hotels, bathing facilities, and promenades appeared beside the ocean. By the early twentieth century it had become one of Dunedin’s social centres, particularly during summer evenings when crowds gathered to walk the waterfront and “take the air” in a tradition borrowed from British seaside resorts. The St Clair Baths, built into the rocks at the southern end of the beach in 1884, further cemented the suburb’s reputation as a place of recreation and leisure.
Yet for all the elegance of the Esplanade, storms repeatedly damaged sea walls, roadways, and buildings, forcing generations of repairs and rebuilds. On calm evenings, when the lights from cafés spill onto the pavement and the ocean fades into darkness beyond the railing, it is still possible to understand why generations of Dunedin people were drawn here in the first place.
In the late summer of 1870, on the Otago Peninsula in Dunedin, a grand residential building project was started: dense bush was cleared by hand and the site was leveled by blasting away the top of a hill, it would be four years before the home was liveable and another 12 until it was totally completed. It was known formally by its owner as ‘The Camp’, named after the temporary cottage that was built nearby where his family could escape to on the weekends and enjoy country life while the building work took place. Locals, along with newspapers’, dubbed it Larnach’s Castle, and the name stuck.
It was built to a scale of luxury and grandeur that made it practically peerless, across the country. At a time when a typical Dunedin villa had four to six rooms, William Larnach’s boasted 43 with a turret and battlements that sat 320 metres above sea level. At the time of construction, it was so inaccessible that specially designed and built access roads were made so ox teams could drag the materials up the steep slopes to the building site where William Larnach would oversee every decision made in the construction of his home. Larnach not only had significant input into the whole design process, everything was made to the highest quality of craftsmanship and when finished, it would culminate in a grand residence that was as technically advanced as it was sublime.
For those of you who like precise detail, this photo was taken at 7:09am on a Thursday morning with my iPhone. If you’re after something a bit more historical, I can tell you it was taken from the very spot where a helipad sits, which used to be the location of a hovercraft that ran tours of Otago Harbour. Go back a further and you’ll find a ferry passing not too far from this exact point. Finally, if you were hoping for something a bit more poetic, I’ll leave you with Dylan Thomas: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Daily Photo – Sky Reflection along the Silver Stream
It was one of those quiet, midweek afternoons with nothing much out of the ordinary happening, and I found myself near the Silver Stream River, which flows close to the suburb, or town, of Mosgiel. I parked the car and set off along a path that followed the river with an easy sort of confidence. In the still of the afternoon, the sky reflected in the river as it gently ambled past lush paddocks, farm machinery, and the Maungatua Range in the distance.
Now and then I’d cross paths with another person out for a wander, and we’d swap a “hello” before continuing on our separate ways. Aside from that, it was just me and the quiet, taking it all in. I kept moving, occasionally stopping for a closer look at something that caught my eye, or for the odd short conversation along the way. It was an unhurried sort of stroll, the kind that doesn’t demand much from you at all. In time, though, the daylight started to slip away, and I figured it was probably wise to turn around and work my way back to the car.
I ended up at Nicols Creek Waterfall without much of a plan, which is usually how these things happen. The track felt longer and steeper than expected, damp underfoot and just uneven enough to keep you paying attention. When the waterfall finally showed itself, it was a narrow ribbon dropping through thick green bush. Everything around it felt dense and slightly overgrown, like it had been left alone for a while. I stood there for a bit, listening to the water more than looking at it, thinking it was quietly better than the walk in had suggested.
If you’re familiar with the geographical make-up of Dunedin city, you can probably afford to skip the next few sentences and skim further down the page. For the uninitiated, Mosgiel is a suburb roughly 15 kilometres from the city centre, a place that sits somewhere between suburban living, retirement homes and a country town. It was here that I found myself on an idle Tuesday evening.
I can’t say I’ve spent much time in Mosgiel, apart from the occasional visit to the rugby ground or a quick stop at the supermarket or takeaway, so I decided to take a stroll along the Silver Stream. It was autumn, and over the previous few days the afternoons had taken on a noticeable chill as the light lingered into the evening – perfect walking weather.
If you’re feeling adventurous, there’s Silver Stream walk that’s classified as “hard”, described as covering rough, uneven ground with partly cleared vegetation, the odd marker to guide the way, and short stretches where the track becomes steep. As I wasn’t evening adventurous, on this occasion, I opted for something far more sedate, a gentle walk along the floodbank on the edge of town. Having identified a likely starting point, I parked the car and set off along a path that followed the river with an easy sort of confidence.
Every so often I passed a fellow walker and we’d exchange a casual “hello”, but otherwise I was left to quietly take in the surroundings. Lush paddocks stretched out on either side, farm machinery sat idle in the distance, and beyond it all rose the outline of the Maungatua Range. I walked on and on, sometimes stopping to look more closely at something, sometimes pausing for a brief chat. It really was a most pleasant sort of walk, the kind that asks very little of you. Eventually, though, the light began to fade and it became time to retrace my steps and remember the way back to the car.
I was having what I was calling an ‘Aramoana day’. It wasn’t nearly as special or spectacular as it sounded. Quite simply, it involved driving out to the small coastal settlement on the northern side of Otago Harbour and stopping wherever I liked.
Since Aramoana is a good 30-minute drive along a narrow, winding harbour-side road, it gave me plenty of opportunities to pull over and waste away a good portion of the morning, and much of the afternoon, looking at whatever took my fancy. And that’s exactly what I did.
Which is how I came to be standing on the Aramoana Boardwalk, watching the world go by, and the occasional ship.
If there’s one thing to be said for modern buildings, it’s that they are incredibly interesting to photograph. You can always find an odd angle or a strange arrangement of glass or tiles that sticks out in an altogether unexpected way and gives your photo a bit of intrigue.
I mention this because one of the newer buildings in Dunedin is done in a style I like to call pointy and angular, and it’s a perfect example of what happens when architects are given a ruler, a lot of money, and a lot of confidence.
I stood across the street for a moment, trying to make sense of it. From one angle it looked sharp and deliberate. From another, it felt like it couldn’t quite agree with itself. The light didn’t help much either. It caught one edge, missed another, and reflected everything except what I was actually trying to photograph. Still, I took a few photos. Modern buildings, if nothing else, always give you something to work with, even if you’re not entirely sure what that something is.
