Oamaru: Port in a storm

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.

For nearly 20 years the port deteriorated and in the absence of dredging, even the smallest fishing boats could enter port only at high tide. Then, in the late 1990s, the Waitaki District Council finally resumed modest dredging and breakwater repairs were authorised.

People now accept that the breakwater protects much of the town from the sort of erosion damage done over the winter of 2007. For a while in the 1980s there was hope that the planned cement works at Weston might revive the port.

Weston is in the news again, but Holcim's decision that the cement, if produced, will be shipped out through Timaru probably spells the end of any hope of a commercial revival for the Port of Oamaru.

So the waterfront serves pleasure craft, a handful of fishing boats, sports clubs and the penguin colony. Oamaru Harbour is now a registered historic area and after some false starts, plans are under way to improve access from the Harbour/Tyne St precinct.

I have taken several groups of heritage visitors around it, using it to illustrate colonial hopes and dreams. In time, interpretation signs may tell those stories to a wider audience.

Hopefully, soon, the shags will be moved along from a restored Sumpter Wharf so that a new generation of Oamaruvians will sing B. K. N. E.'s song:

Oamaru, fair Oamaru;
The port of Oamaru; We tell you here there's nought to
fear
For the port of Oamaru.

For more on the area see www.historicoamaru.co.nz [2]