The 60-year-old Yorkshireman man — at the time a policy adviser for the Institute for Education Business Excellence — was on his first trip to New Zealand in 2011 to see his daughter Alice, who was studying at the University of Auckland.
Over Easter, Alice and two of her siblings, Kat and Nick, flew to Christchurch with their father for a tiki tour of the South Island.
But there was a hitch. Nick needed to study for his final exams at high school and so they decided they would stop for three days at the start of the trip to give him some time and space.
"We arrived in Oamaru after dark, thought ‘this is like any place you’ve ever been’ — because you come in on the state highway — so we booked into a motel, thought ‘this is just like a motel’, morning came . . . my daughters and I walked into town," Mr Harbourne said.
They started to see signs pointing them to the historic precinct and penguins "and we didn’t know about any of them".
"We thought, ‘Things are looking up.’"
He was tantalised by Whitestone Cheese, confounded by Steampunk HQ, and enamoured by the history; so much so, that five years later when he quit his job and left bureaucracy behind him — deciding he wanted "to become a writer" — Oamaru was his next stop.
For four months, from September to December in 2016, he returned to Oamaru from his Yorkshire home and met between 60 and 80 of the locals as "one story led to another".
Mr Harbourne returned home to delve into Oamaru’s history online.
Launched in Oamaru this week, Penguins Under The Porch: A Yorkshireman’s Ode To Oamaru, Mr Harbourne’s first book, cites the North Otago Times and the Oamaru Mail from the 1870s.
"I was fascinated by the idea of a town that was created with a lot of money, because the stone carvings don’t come cheap, and yet for 100 years nothing happened," he said.
"When the money ran out in 1892, there was never any reason to knock this place down. A hundred years on, it was easy to see that the town was starting to wake up in terms of its history and its appreciation of heritage."
John Megget Forrester, the son of renowned Oamaru architect Thomas Forrester added the tower to the post office, now the Waitaki District Council’s Thames St headquarters, and built the Oamaru Opera House. When he died at the age of 99, Harbourne was 7.
"He was alive when I was alive, there’s just something about history being within touching distance."
And Mr Harbourne’s history of Oamaru — no doubt obscure for his intended British audience — is all "human interest" stories.
It focuses on two types of people, those who built the town in Victorian times, and those who have since breathed new life into it.
