Historic Precinct - Oamaru

Otago

Oamaru’s collection of Victorian and Edwardian buildings fashioned from creamy limestone has turned Oamaru into a national treasure. Much of the North Otago town of Oamaru was built during a brief, rurally based, bonanza that promised more than it delivered. In expectation of further affluence, the townsfolk of the mid-19th century turned adventurous architects loose on the distinctive creamy limestone of the district. The result was - and is today - a townscape that towers over a modest community with a present-day population of fewer than 14,000. One chronicler observed that the citizens of Oamaru would ‘move Heaven and Earth to make Thames Street the modern Athens of the South’. Early Oamaru may have lacked philosophers and playwrights, but its huge banks gleamed like Greek temples. In its heyday, Oamaru elegantly married pioneer optimism and capitalist enterprise in neo-Classical and Victorian Italianate styles. The old mercantile heart of the town may well make the visitor ‘shiver with a sense of yesterdays’. The arrival of lean years left Oamaru, ‘the best built and most mortgaged town in Australasia’. Even today, few of Oamaru’s fine buildings have been demolished and they remain a precious precinct of colonial New Zealand, intact for later centuries. Oamaru began humbly, in 1853, with a runholder’s hut of raupo stalks and clay. The white Oamaru stone was cheap, easily worked and plentiful. As more and more quarries were opened merchants vied for attention with Italianate facades festooned with urns, scrolls and wreaths - and arched windows that hinted of Venice.