Oamaru, NZ 2021

South Island heritage town

I must have driven through Oamaru on past visits to the South Island of New Zealand in the 1970’s and 80’s, but I didn’t recall the town. So, on our 2021 holiday south we stayed two nights and got our cameras out for an early morning walk around. I had become aware of Oamaru’s reputation as a “steampunk” town and for its heritage buildings, most often built from the local Oamaru stone.

It is interesting looking back on my past photography and noting the distinctions that each place lends itself to. While I usually like to capture people in my street images sometimes it is the architecture that I’m most drawn to. This was definitely the case in Oamaru. Revisiting my Raw files from that morning I found that there are none that include people in any meaningful way and mostly not at all.

Oamaru is a modest sized provincial east coast town, settled by Europeans in the 1850s and formally surveyed as a town in 1859. It still services the local rural hinterlands of North Otago and has a population of around 15,000. But it feels more substantial than that - I suspect that’s mostly due to the prominence of the solid Oamaru Stone heritage buildings that are well preserved in the older part of town. The stone derives from the local limestone and is also known as Whitestone. It gives the buildings a distinct aged look that reminds me somewhat of the limestone houses in the Cotswolds in the UK. Oamaru may be a young town compared to the Cotswolds, but it embraces its heritage well.

We were out early on a weekend morning, so the lack of people in the images is partly due to that - but we had already decided to focus on the architecture of the civic and church buildings, as we wandered happily through the town centre, down to the port area and back.

You can see more of the images from our morning in Oamaru here: Oamaru