'Tomorrow as it used to be' at Steampunk show

Revisionist history of a slightly odd variety looks set to take over Oamaru's main street tomorrow.

Ordinary everyday people with ray guns will converge on a closed Thames St to admire water-cooled computers and time machines from a future that never existed.

The street party event is in association with the League of Victorian Imagineers' third exhibition, entitled "Steampunk: Tomorrow as it used to be", which opens at the Forrester Gallery at 5.30pm today.

Exhibition organiser Helen Jansen said the Steampunk movement, based on a futuristic re-imagining of a Victorian world where the main fuel source was not petrol but steam, had grown rapidly in recent times.

Three years ago, "there wasn't much of it - just a few oddballs making stuff", she said.

Since then, a unique combination of location and inspiration had ensured nowhere in the world had made Steampunk a central part of its community as Oamaru had.

"Mixing the No 8 wire mentality of New Zealanders and Oamaru's Victorian culture that we've promoted for years means Steampunk comes readily to people who otherwise might not relate to Victorian culture," she said.

Steampunk appealed for a number of reasons.

"Steampunk gives people the romantic feeling that you can change the course of history," she said.

"Modern-day man can't grasp today's technology - you can't tinker with an engine like you used to.

"My theory is the technology is easier to understand than the current technology."

The first exhibition in Oamaru, drawing on the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne among others, attracted 6000 people in 2009, and a further 11,000 people last year over a six-week period.

Trish Shirley, who began work on her largely papier mache pieces during last year's exhibition, viewed Steampunk as a means of having fun while employing her practical skills.

"This is playing for adults.

"You do it to put a smile on people's faces and because you like making stuff."

The key, she believed, was to take the mind back to a time when advances in science and technology led many to believe that anything was possible.

"What you have to do is put yourself back into the Victorian era," she said.

"It's your imagining of what the future might have been like."

She had taken the Steampunk ethos of recycling materials and not using plastics to another level by making stock with a cow's shinbones before fashioning them into teeth for Fluffy, her armoured sabre-toothed tiger.

Peter Fleury, of Dunedin, whose ray gun of largely kauri and copper, entitled Dr Gattling's Lunar Avenger, used a working steam engine which runs the barrels from a CO2 cylinder, was looking forward to the street party.

The exhibition will include exhibits from local and international artists.