Steampunk capital, little blue penguins, and New Zealand's finest Victorian precinct
Oamaru is New Zealand's most architecturally distinguished small town — its Victorian Precinct is a National Heritage Area of honey-coloured Ōamaru stone buildings that in the late 19th century housed the finest merchants' exchange outside of Christchurch. The town has reinvented itself as the self-declared steampunk capital of the Southern Hemisphere, with Victorian-inspired art installations, an annual steampunk festival, and galleries in old grain stores. Every evening at dusk, between 50 and 200 little blue penguins (the world's smallest penguin species) waddle ashore from the sea to thei…
Oamaru's Victorian grandeur came from the 1860s–1880s wool and grain boom: the town grew wealthy enough to build in imported Ōamaru stone — a soft, easily worked local limestone — creating a harbour precinct of warehouses, banks, and exchange buildings that survives almost intact because the economic collapse that followed wool price crashes in the 1880s simultaneously halted development and preserved what was already built. Author Janet Frame grew up in Oamaru and set several of her books here; her childhood home is now a museum. The little blue penguin colony was established on the Oamaru w…