Dunedin

Kāi Tahu and earlier peoples knew the harbour as Ōtākou, a name later applied to the whole province, and had settlements around its shores and at Ōtākou village on the peninsula. Sealers and whalers arrived from the 1810s, and a whaling station operated at Ōtākou in the 1830s. In March 1848 the ship John Wickliffe reached the harbour carrying the first settlers of the Otago scheme, organised by the Lay Association of the Free Church of Scotland; the town was named Dunedin from Dùn Èideann, the Gaelic name for Edinburgh, and laid out on a plan that ignored the hills it had to cross.

The settlement was small and poor until gold was found at Gabriel's Gully in 1861. Thousands of miners passed through the port, and the money they brought made Dunedin briefly the largest and richest town in New Zealand, with the country's oldest daily newspaper, its first university, founded in 1869, and its first brokers' association. Banks, warehouses and churches went up in Oamaru limestone and dark Port Chalmers basalt, and the wealth paid for the botanic garden and Larnach Castle. In 1882 the refrigerated ship Dunedin sailed from Port Chalmers with the first successful cargo of frozen meat to Britain.

As the gold faded and the North Island grew, the city slipped down the national rankings, and through much of the 20th century it lost industry and young people. What it kept was its Victorian and Edwardian building stock, largely because there was no boom to replace it, and its university. Since the 1990s the warehouse district has been restored, the roofed Forsyth Barr Stadium opened in 2011, and the harbour edge has been reworked for walking and cycling.

Dunedin wears its Scottish descent openly: a statue of Robert Burns has stood in the Octagon since 1887, pipe bands play at civic events, and Presbyterian churches stand on prominent corners. The city also carries a strong Kāi Tahu presence, with the marae at Ōtākou on the peninsula and southern dialect names across the map.

It is above all a university town. Students at the University of Otago and the polytechnic make up a large share of the population, and student life — flats with names painted over the door, the annual capping show, graduation processions through the streets — sets the rhythm of the year. That population helped produce the Dunedin sound of the early 1980s, the guitar-based indie music of bands recorded by the Flying Nun label, which gave the city a reputation in music far beyond its size. In 2014 UNESCO named Dunedin a City of Literature, recognising a long line of writers, the Robert Burns Fellowship and a strong publishing and library tradition.

Rugby matters: the Highlanders and Otago play under the roof at Forsyth Barr Stadium, where a student stand keeps the noise up, and the rivalry with Canterbury is old and sharp. Beyond that the culture is outdoor and unpretentious — surfing at St Clair in cold water, tramping on the hills behind the city, and a widely shared pride in the wildlife living on the doorstep.

About 133,000 people live in the Dunedin city area, making it New Zealand's seventh-largest urban area and the largest city in the south of the South Island. The University of Otago, the polytechnic and Dunedin Hospital are the biggest employers, and health, education, research and public administration dominate the economy alongside engineering, food processing and a growing technology and games development sector. Tourism, cruise ships and the port at Port Chalmers add to it.

Most people live in suburbs spread over the hills and valleys around the harbour — the flat, older streets of South Dunedin and the beach suburbs, the villas of Roslyn and Maori Hill above the centre, and newer housing in North East Valley and Mosgiel on the Taieri Plain. Students concentrate in the old villas of North Dunedin, whose cold, damp flats are a recurring local controversy. Housing is cheap by national standards, though prices have risen sharply.

The rhythm of the year follows the university: quiet in January, crowded from late February, with graduation weeks and match days filling the centre. Current issues include the long-delayed rebuild of Dunedin Hospital, the population decline in nearby rural districts, and what to do about South Dunedin, a low suburb built on drained swamp where a rising water table and sea level make flooding steadily more likely.

Dunedin's most characteristic food is the cheese roll, shared with the rest of the south: white bread spread with a mixture of grated cheese, onion soup mix and evaporated milk or cream, rolled up and toasted until it browns, served hot with butter. Cafés compete quietly over them. The other southern delicacy is the Bluff oyster, dredged from Foveaux Strait and sold in fish shops and restaurants through autumn and winter, usually raw or lightly crumbed and fried.

The coast supplies blue cod, the standard fish in a Dunedin fish and chip shop, along with muttonbird, or tītī, sold in season to those who know how to cook its strong, salty meat, and whitebait fritters in spring. Otago lamb and venison, Central Otago stone fruit and pinot noir, and cheeses from the surrounding districts appear on restaurant menus and at the Saturday farmers' market at the railway station, which has become the city's weekend social event as much as a shop.

Beer is part of the identity. Speight's has brewed on Rattray Street since 1876, and its draught is ordered by name across the south; Emerson's, founded in the city in 1992, is one of the country's craft-brewing pioneers and has a brewery and bar of its own. Coffee roasting is taken seriously in the warehouse district. Chocolate is a sentimental subject: the Cadbury factory that scented the city centre for decades closed in 2018, but the Jaffa-rolling charity race down Baldwin Street has continued each July, and local confectioners continue to trade on the association.