Oamaru

The coast here was used by Kāi Tahu and earlier southern Māori, who fished, gathered shellfish and moved along the shore between the Waitaki and Otago harbours; rock shelters and early drawings survive in the limestone country inland. Europeans arrived in the 1850s to run sheep on the North Otago downs, a port of sorts was opened for the wool trade, and the provincial surveyor John Turnbull Thomson laid out the town in 1858, naming its streets after British rivers. Landing cargo through the surf was difficult and dangerous, and a breakwater designed after a run of wrecks was built between 1871 and 1884 to give ships shelter.

Wool, and then grain from the newly ploughed downs, made Oamaru rich in the 1870s and 1880s. Local limestone, soft enough to cut with a saw and hardening on exposure, was quarried at Weston and used with confidence: banks, stores, churches, a courthouse and an athenaeum went up in classical dress, and for a while the town's public borrowing was as ambitious as its architecture. In 1882 sheep killed and frozen at Totara Estate, just south of the town, were shipped from Port Chalmers to London in the first successful cargo of frozen meat sent from New Zealand, a trade that reshaped the country's farming.

The boom did not last. Railways, larger ports and the shift of trade elsewhere left the harbour quiet and the stone buildings under-used through much of the 20th century, which is why so many of them survived. From the 1980s a restoration movement took hold in the Harbour and Tyne street area, and heritage tourism, penguins and, from 2011, a steampunk museum gave the old warehouses new work.

Oamaru's identity is built on its stone. The Victorian precinct is not a museum village but a working street, and residents speak of the whitestone with proprietorial interest, distinguishing quarries, weathering and repairs. That heritage feeling comes out each November in the Victorian Heritage Celebrations, when the town dresses in bustles and top hats for a fête and street entertainment — an event that mixes genuine local pride with self-aware humour.

Alongside it sits an odder tradition. Steampunk, the Victorian-industrial science fiction aesthetic, found a home here in the old grain stores, and the sculpture museum and its June festival have made a small town in North Otago a recognised point on an international subculture's map. Locals have taken it up with the same willingness to dress up, and in 2016 the town set a Guinness world record for the largest gathering of steampunks.

The town also has a literary claim. Janet Frame, one of New Zealand's most important writers, grew up in Oamaru, and her fiction turns the town into the Waimaru of her first novel, Owls Do Cry, and her account of a Depression-era childhood and later years in psychiatric hospitals is part of how the place understands itself. Rugby, netball, the A&P show and volunteer work at the penguin colonies fill out an ordinary provincial calendar, and the district's Kāi Tahu connections are marked in place names and in the rock art sites of the Waitaki.

About 14,000 people live in Oamaru, making it the largest town in the Waitaki District and the service centre for North Otago. The economy rests on farming — sheep, beef and increasingly dairy on irrigated land — with meat processing, engineering, the limestone quarries, Whitestone's cheese factory and a growing tourism trade. Irrigation from the Waitaki River has changed the surrounding countryside markedly, turning dry downland into green paddocks and bringing debate about water use with it.

Most residents live in single-storey houses on flat streets north and west of the centre, or on South Hill above the harbour, with the older cottages of the harbour district now often restored or let to visitors. Housing is inexpensive by national standards, which has drawn retirees and people priced out of Dunedin, Christchurch and Queenstown, and the population has slowly grown after decades of stagnation.

The day is provincial in rhythm: early starts on farms and at the works, a busy main street in the morning, quiet by evening except in the precinct. The hospital, schools and the council are significant employers, and many families have been in the district for generations. Local concerns include water allocation, seasonal labour for the meat and dairy industries, keeping the heritage buildings earthquake-strengthened and in use, and managing visitor pressure on the penguin colonies.

North Otago's best-known product is cheese. Whitestone Cheese, founded in the town in 1987 by a farming family after drought and a rural downturn, makes more than twenty cheeses from local milk — among them the award-winning Windsor Blue, brie, camembert and feta — and sells them across the country. With them go the cheese rolls found in every southern café — bread spread with a cheese and onion filling, rolled and toasted — which are treated as a light meal rather than a snack.

The sea provides blue cod, groper and crayfish, landed at Moeraki and Kakanui to the south, and the catch from those small harbours reaches kitchens well beyond the district. Market gardens at Kakanui grow tomatoes and summer vegetables, and roadside stalls and honesty boxes sell stone fruit, walnuts and eggs through the warmer months.

Inland, the Waitaki Valley is the country's newest and one of its coolest wine districts, a narrow strip of limestone soils first planted in 2001 and best known for pinot noir. Cafés and small restaurants in the limestone warehouses of the Victorian precinct account for much of the town's eating out. Otherwise the cooking is plain and generous: lamb from the downs, venison, roast dinners, and the pies and slices of a New Zealand country bakery.