#Dunedin/Ōtepoti

[clarityofblue]

I miss you, Dunedin, the home of my heart. (a.k.a. Ōtepoti). This is such a nice way to view the world!

In the words of the great AoNZ band, Split Enz:

Aotearoa, rugged individual, glisten like a pearl, at the bottom of the world...

The Pacific Ocean is huge.

[spencerhall]

New music video I made for Ōtepoti band Bunchy's Big Score

[dec0mposing]

So my neighbourhood flooded last night. We got three months of rain (and its still going!) in about 30 hours, I evacuated my home about 10:30 last night when water started pouring into my street from the road above, my home was fine when I left and is still fine, thankfully, but my community has been really devistated by this event, and my heart is hurting for our hapori.

[extincto]

Posters seen in Dunedin/Ōtepoti today

[deliriumdunedin]

Previews of some of the items coming with me to the Beloved Market here in Ōtepoti this weekend!

A range of items dated from the 60s to modern will be available!

Come on up to the Māori Hill Community centre this Saturday the 27th of July 2024 from 10am - 2pm and support your local vintage sellers!

For more previews and updates follow me on instagram

[devonannasmith]

Painted a big mural with some cool women for the FIFA fan festival here in Ōtepoti. The Dreamgirls Collective, Aroha Novak and Kell Sunshine 🌞

[drhoz]

The Great ACT-NSW-NZ Trip, 2023-2024 - Ōtepoti / Dunedin

Last stop on the trip, and Aotearoa's secondmost-southern city. In fact there aren't many cities or even towns that far south in the world, largely because the weather tends to be atrocious what with the Roaring Forties howling their way around the world at that latitude. It gets even worse as you head further south. One old sailor's expression went, "below 40 degrees south, there is no law; below 50 degrees, there is no God."

That said, we had a perfectly pleasant time, althought the streets were certainly steeper than we were used to, coming from a part of the world that hasn't had mountains in just over one billion years. In fact the steepest residental street in the world is in Dunedin.

The steepness was unintentional - most of New Zealand's early urban settlements were plotted out in London, without any consideration for the actual terrain.

People first started settling the area between 1450 and 1500, with successive waves of more Māori, and eventually Europeans, including large numbers of Chinese and Scots. In 1895, Mark Twain said of the Dunedin Scots, "They stopped here on their way from home to heaven – thinking they had arrived".

Not that the intereactions between locals and new arrivals was always peaceful - see Murdering Beach and the Sealer's War.

The terrain itself is largely the result of the entire area being one huge extinct volcano, with Otago Harbour the eroded out heart of the mountain, and features like the columnar basalts at Blackhead Promontory and Mt Cargill evidence of deep slowly cooling lava. Blackhead is being quarried for road aggregate, and the quarry owners wanted to excavate it all the way down to 50m below sea level and turn it into a boat harbour. Geology fans put a stop to that plan, thankfully.

(The Banks Peninsula Volcano on the coast east of Christchurch is another extinct volcano with its heart chewed out into an amazing harbour.)

I hadn't even known that Dunedin WAS a volcano until the morning I spent at the Otago Museum, so walking through a carpark on the way to raiding the many secondhand bookshops (Dunedin = university town) and spotting what was clearly pillow lava was a bit of a surprise. Back in 2020 one local intended to set up geology tours for tourists, and the carpark pillow lavas were one of the stops. We also stumbled across the University of Otago geology department museum, which is open to any passersby that might take an interest. Fabulous collection of minerals and fossils.

As usual, plenty of species to see (and the museum, and the albatross and penguin sanctuaries will be their own sets of posts) and a bunch I'd already recorded.

[hamishpetersen]

Goldfish Bowl

Text commissioned for the inaugural exhibition at Wave Project Space, Ōtepoti Dunedin:

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A post shared by Wave Project Space (@waveprojectspace.otepoti)

Listen to “So Tough” by The Slits. Make a cup of weak tea just to keep your hands warm and look out the only window in the living room. Doesn’t get much sun in April. Less in May, this side of the valley. You try not to check your notifications. You try to sit still. It’s not easy.

James Varga’s pictures form a haphazard diary to the last eighteen months. Starting with a return to their childhood pencil copies of cartoons, Varga began drawing again. It was a way to record the important parts of their world, or process the emotional soup through which we each wade. Rather than making pictures to “say something,” painting became a practice of picturing the world Varga needed to see. Similarly, they use their mother’s surname to claim that part of themselves.   

The difference between a diary and an autobiography is the audience. “What should my reader know?” “Does anyone ever need to see this?”

Listen to “Identity” by X-ray Spex. There is a picture of Varga’s legs stretching out to a sunburnt Alexandra backyard. Dead washing machine and semi-rural ¼ acre dream detritus. There is a picture of chopped fish and fish heads. If you know, you know. Being Tauiwi or Tangata Tiriti in Te Wai Pounamu can be full of placelessness; being anywhere at all down here can feel like the wrong place to be. Sometimes, we blame ourselves. Varga’s POV pictures evoke this feeling of waiting around for something to make sense. But pictures like that of the dish of fish heads have a different effect; like the sour umami of a fish head soup on a table of boiled hams and carrots; finding what you were looking for. 

Listen to “Pay to Cum” by Bad Brains. Varga adds a generous cock to a pencil drawing of one of their friends. For a laugh? Or because it needed to be said? In my brief conversation with Varga, it’s clear they are trying to cut through the absurd violence of masculine performance. There is a CD case for John Rowles’ “HITS collection” on the floor in the photo Kari sends me. It’s beside a painting of a milk bottle and some pencil sketches of muscled butts. 

Pay to write, pay to play

Pay to cum, pay to fight

Listen to “Product of My Environment” by Circle Jerks. There is a picture of a scrotum driving a tank. Like anyone, Varga’s mind wanders. Even when resisting the internet as subject matter or medium, the testicular posturing and violence of the recent invasion of Ukraine brought these globally televised politics into Varga’s pictures. Whether the picture is literal and figurative, or abstracted, comical, and political, Varga’s work seems to always be an act of processing, never solved. 

On Zoom, Varga and I talk about displaying the pictures like a “salon hang,” recalling the Salon exhibitions of the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris where all the paintings accepted to the institution’s annual exhibition were crammed onto the walls. There’s an irony here for Varga as a self-taught artist. This antiquated mode of display can function in the opposite way to exclusive salons; more like an over-stimulating information soup, or endless Tiktok Trending page.

The high and the low are artificially separated in much of daily life. Instead, just as the punk poets Viv Albertine or Poly Styrene did, we are all cataloguing the boring, normal, enraging, hopeless, loving, small, vital, and forgettable moments of life in our own ways. Varga will keep going whether you’re looking or not. It’s one way of pushing through the clouds.  

[otepotirenaissance]

First Church Ōtepoti Dunedin - taken by me 🎀

[have-you-been-here]

Dunedin / Ōtepoti, New Zealand / Aotearoa

[writtenonbone]

To people in Ōtepoti Dunedin 💕

[airandangels]

Large parts of the southern New Zealand city, Ōtepoti Dunedin, are currently flooded from an extreme rainstorm, yet another deluge due to climate change. Ben Nevell had something to say about it.

[spencerhall]

Li'l animation for Ōtepoti Zinefest!

More event details here

Stall registrations here

[dec0mposing]

Fanny Wimperis, Marion Scott playing the Piano (1904) Glass negative photograph.

Marion Scott playing the piano at Carlinwark beneath a pastel portrait of her deceased mother.

[extincto]

This morning's sunrise. Absolutely incredible 🔥

[aonoexpat]

15-09-2023

The rest of the road to Ōtepoti was pretty, it was lovely to see the sun and drive along the coast with some background music. When I got to the city I tried to get some help with my gas cooker, but everybody I asked said they had no clue what was wrong with it, and sent me along to the next person. Finally somebody determined that the pressure in my gas bottle was too high, and let some of it out, which we both hoped would help. Spoiler alert: it did not ☹️ Luckily I wasn't going to need it for a while, because I had some leftovers to eat, and I was going to spend ten days house and puppy sitting for somebody a little ways North of Ōtepoti, where I'd have access to a proper stove. I was really excited about this!

I spent a day exploring Ōtepoti, and felt oddly at home there. People, again, are super kind there. The city was founded by the Scottish apparently (hence the English name Dunedin), which might explain why it felt familiar.

It has a slightly more European layout, which, legend has it, was designed with English (flat) landscapes in mind. This has resulted in Ōtepoti holding the record for the world's steepest street, because the landscape here is, in fact, not flat. It's called Baldwin street, and is a real challenge to walk up. I wasn't going to subject Elrond to that kind of an incline, there's even a sign at the bottom stating 'not suitable for campervans'. I met some other tourists there and we all marveled at Baldwin street together, and took photos for each other, which was a very wholesome experience :)

My mom and I did a quick deep dive into this street's wiki, and here's some fun facts:

At its maximum, the slope is about 1:2.86 (19° or 35%);

An 11-year-old boy pogo-stick-ed up the street in 10 minutes to raise money for the Ronald McDonald House, and got a plaque for it at the top;

When Lime rental scooters were introduced to the city, the mayor said he thought he could trust people not to ride them down Baldwin street, and within a week somebody had done it;

Less fun fact: a student tried to ride down the street inside a wheelie bin and didn't survive the ordeal 😬

Part of the street is paved with concrete, because at this slope asphalt, when heated by the sun for too long, would just droop down the street;

They installed a water fountain at the top, and had to include a little stepping stone for a young boy that couldn't reach it:

In the evening I went to the local observatory, where some really kind people had set up telescopes for the public to freely use to see the blue supermoon! It was inspiring to see how many parents with children came out to have a look, and enjoy the fun facts the staff were sharing. I'm pretty proud of the pictures I managed to take through the eyepiece:

After exploring the city, I went to meet the person whose house and dog I would be looking after for the next little while. He has a small plot of land up in the hills with 17 chickens and a tiny house, that he is still very much working on. It was a bit less finished than I had expected it to be, though. The "power" that he had said would be there was a little black box, its power cord coming in through a (thereby perpetually impossible to close) window, only putting out 12V. The "shower" he had said he would install was a loose shower head that I had to fish out of the mud, and couldn't reach the controls for from the actual shower cabin itself, that used LPG to heat up water from a 20L tank (not enough for nice comfy showers for TEN DAYS), and in the process of hooking that up he had created a gas leak that I didn't discover for another day and a half (super safe situation 👍 /s). The dog required a lot more attention than the owner had let on, didn't behave like he had said he would (as in actively squeezed himself through that one open window and knocked over everything in his path when I tried to go to the shops), and there was nothing to clean the (non-level, btw) floor with when the dog knocked over his entire water bowl. The drinking water felt unsafe to me due to algae growing inside the tanks, there was mould on the curtains, the unfinished chicken wire was painful to maneuver around, and there was little to no light at night which resulted in me burning my hand when trying to make a hot water bottle. This all coincided with me getting uterus-punished for days on end and I can tell you, only having access to ✨bushes✨ or a compost toilet in a broken shed outside and no running water is not ideal when going through that. I thought I was going to have a great time, a comfortable little vacation from my vacation, but it ended up being one of the most stressful times on this whole trip so far, and the owner was completely unreachable throughout all of it. The only upside was that the place was isolated enough for nobody to hear my frustrated screams 🥲 That, and the Wi-Fi, which was pretty fast and finally allowed me to have some video calls with home again. And when the place wasn't covered in clouds, the views could be pretty nice!

When it was time to leave, I was overjoyed to be back on my own. I had to give up on my broken little gas cooker, and found a second hand one online that I went to pick up in town. It works like a charm, and cooking has become a fun activity once again! I've spent the last few days trying to make up for lost relaxation time, chilling in the botanic garden and on the beach:

I've also found out that reddit is quite a good place to get in touch with locals, and I've been meeting up with some of them to get a drink and finally have a real-life conversation with another human being again. I had really missed that! Chatting about my adventures helped me see them for what they were again: adventures, memories and stories that I am still actively living.

I'll likely be hanging around the city for another week or so, because I have some appointments with tattoo artists to see if I can get something done 🙂

After that my path is still a bit unclear. I found that after I'd passed the 6-month mark, my mind has been pretty fixated on how I'm going to get back home, and it made me lose track of how much time I actually still have left here. It's made me realise that going back to work for a little bit might not be such a waste, so there's a solid chance I'll be spending two months working in a vineyard soon. It's also made me wonder if I really want to milk my visa to its maximum and stay until the end of January 2024, or if I would like to just go home a bit sooner. On the one hand I'm really quite eager to return to the familiarity of Europe, and all my loved ones there. I'm tired of being on the move, of being alone, of living in a car. But then, on the other hand, I can have one good day here and realise how extremely lucky I am to have this chance, and I'm not ready to leave it all behind just yet. Yesterday I went for a lovely walk on the beach and climbed a rock, and really felt like I was in a good flow again. I dearly miss all the wonderful people back home, but I think I'll end up sticking around as long as I can, while I still can ❤️

My last few days have felt much more upbeat again, I think partly because the sun is coming out more and more and I can really feel spring itching to break through. Though at the moment I'm writing this, I'm trapped in the car by strong winds and cold rain! Luckily there aren't a lot of people around, so I'm playing these three songs on repeat and singing along at the top of my lungs to keep my spirits up 🎧