Click photo to enlarge
Cormorants colonise Sumpter Wharf. This pier, New Zealand's
only surviving Victorian export wharf, awaits restoration.
Photo by David Bruce.
As part of Oamaru's annual Heritage Week celebrations,
Gavin McLean revisits his home town to launch his book,
Kiwitown's Port: The Story of Oamaru Harbour. In this
feature he tells of the developers' dreams of grandeur, and the
resulting bankruptcy as well as the storms and shipwrecks of
colonial Oamaru.
In 1884 the people of Oamaru were on a high. From their
windows on the South Hill, they could see the clipper Dunedin
alongside their new Sumpter Wharf, busy loading frozen meat
for London.
Due shortly was New Zealand's first regular frozen meat
steamer, the Elderslie, commissioned to run solely between
London and Oamaru. B. K. N. E., proud as Punch, penned the
song The Port of Oamaru for the North Otago
Times.
One verse went:
Songs loud and long for our
harbour board will sweep
Across the sky.
What bold men dare, no jealousy
can stop
What they will do,
They ventured and they quickly
made a
Port of Oamaru.
That dreadful ditty captures Victorians' passion for material
progress - the bigger and smokier the better.
New Zealand still depends on the sea, but in colonial times
that reliance was plain for all to see. No town could grow
without a port.
As an impressed Southland visitor said after inspecting
Oamaru's breakwater in 1889: "It is a concrete declaration of
the fact that for a mercantile people harbour means city and
no harbour no city."
You can see this, feel it almost, whenever you walk around
Oamaru's battered old waterfront.
Few of the handsome Oamaru stone buildings that now charm
visitors to the historic precinct would have been built had
Oamaru's leaders not virtually bankrupted themselves building
these crumbling concrete and wooden structures.
Cape Wanbrow offers only limited shelter, so the first
decades of European settlement were difficult ones as ships
took their chances unloading in the open sea.
In 1867 the provincial government built a small jetty in the
open sea, but in February 1868 a ferocious storm smashed it
to pieces along with three ships.
In fact, Oamaru was one of the most dangerous anchorages in
New Zealand in the 1860s and the early 1870s.
More than 20 ships were wrecked there and many more were
stranded, but recovered. On one occasion four ships littered
the beach at once. Oamaru's reputation stank.
That all started to change in 1872 when work began on a huge
concrete breakwater. Look closely enough, and at its landward
end you will see a battered, now badly silted-up wharf.
This is Macandrew Wharf and when it opened in 1875 shipping
casualties virtually came to an end. Insurance premiums
tumbled, cargo handling speeded up and passengers from the
Dunedin ferry no longer had to risk a dunking in the sea.
The other concrete wharves, Normanby Wharf, with the Sanford
fish plant, and the little Cross Wharf, now home to the sea
scouts and a restaurant, opened in 1878 and 1879
respectively.
They must have seemed a blessing to merchants, though Dunedin
politician James Macandrew went a bit far when, inspecting
these first wharves, he prophesied that Oamaru's docks would
one day rival those of London.
Not quite.
These concrete wharves could handle any coastal or
transtasman ship, but the largest overseas ships still had to
lie off the port and use surf boats to load and unload cargo.
Although it may not look like much now, with its resident
shags and damaged decking, the large wooden wharf, Sumpter
Wharf (1884), marked a turning point in Oamaru's thinking.
The breakwater was finished that year, but a recent survey of
the harbour bed had shown that it was less rocky than had
been assumed.
That softer seabed meant that with a dredge, the harbour
board could dig out a deep shipping channel to open up the
harbour to the biggest ships trading to New Zealand.
Not everyone was convinced and there was considerable debate
about whether Oamaru's ambitions had over-reached its
capacity to pay for harbour improvements.
But the harbour board pushed on, building a long rubble mole
on the northern side of the harbour, a new wooden export
wharf and building a dredge, typically named the Progress.
By the time Sumpter Wharf was finished in 1884, Oamaru could
handle ships as big as Port Chalmers could, and bigger than
those handled by arch-rival Timaru.
A recession was already biting by then. The economic
downturn, the mounting interest bill and the loss of some
short-distance coastal trade to the new South Island Main
Trunk all combined to put the harbour board in receivership
in the early 1890s.
Things got so bad that some years its members worried where
the next cask of cement would come from to repair storm
damage to the breakwater.
Ships always get bigger. By the early 1900s, many Home boats
- the steamers that traded between New Zealand and Britain -
had outgrown Sumpter Wharf.
So, because the receiver agreed that the port had to trade
its way out of debt, in 1907 the new Holmes Wharf was built
on the north mole.
Holmes Wharf, the main wharf today, eventually handled
10,000-ton freighters. But the Home boats stopped calling in
1970, transtasman ships in 1973, and coasters in 1974. By the
early 1970s the rail ferries had destroyed conventional
coastal shipping.
Since then, North Otago has struggled to maintain its port
assets on the proceeds of levies on fish crates and cheap
mooring fees.
