It dawned on me this semester that these months would be my last in Dunedin. There was so much I still hadn't done. What more of the weird, wacky, and wonderful was yet to be seen? As the stress of the end of semester hit, the ominous cloud of exams loomed, and decisions about the future needed to be made, I took the opportunity to broaden my horizons.
My goal was to re-envision Dunedin beyond the crunching of bottles underneath your feet on the way to campus and to rediscover its nature beyond St Clair and the Botans. To see that there are always more people to meet, more laughs to share, and more history, culture, and experiences lying just below the surface, waiting to be rediscovered.
If this has been your last semester in Dunedin – or even if it's not – please, touch some grass. Expand your bubble and rediscover a place you thought you already knew. Even if your metaphorical touching of grass involves multiple human skulls, a viral sea-shanty, and a full cream Speight’s.
The Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery
The liminal space of Central Library had held me hostage long enough. I’d become a slave to its time warp, dissociating before my laptop and “writing” with the literary dexterity of a fresher writing a thesis statement. My mind-body disconnect had grown so large that it felt as if my brain dragged behind me like a wedding train. Taking a gulp of fresh air, I strayed from the beaten path I’d worn in the carpet between my desk and the bathroom, and wound up at The Dunedin Museum of Natural Mystery on Royal Terrace.
The museum, for lack of a better description, is someone’s house that displays the largest amount of creepy shit they could find. Said creepy shit includes a vast collection of bones in the ‘mammal wing’, a desecrated sheep fetus, a calf with two heads, a pair of lead nipple shields (yep), and a skull of a chihuahua that appears to be from the owner’s old pet. RIP Chilli.
For the humble price of a Bowling Club meal ($5), the Museum offers a mutant hybrid of the Otago Museum’s Animal Attic on shrooms, an art gallery about life’s fragility, and a collection of whatever else couldn’t find a home. We’re talking ghosts, a corporal punishment cane, and a real human skull. The latter is covered with a cloth because of a ‘Museum’s Aotearoa’ policy prohibiting the exhibition of human remains, so you have to squint a little.
My working theory is that the owner, Bruce (who naturally used to work for Critic) wanted to see if it was possible to become haunted and, if so, to speedrun it. However, as Bruce manages to sleep beside the mammal wing and a reinforced door from Seacliff – an abandoned mental asylum just outside of Dunedin notorious for its abuse, neglect, and mistreatment – it irks me to believe that there is no such thing as ghosts or haunting. If there were, this place would be fucked.
When not expanding the fossil record, Bruce is a climate activist with Extinction Rebellion, recently trespassed from the train station for blocking coal trains. Bruce’s stamp is also plastered around the city through his art – his murals of Freddy Mercury (Queen St) and badgers (Royal Terrace) make him a subconscious part of Dunedin life. The Museum shows the weird and the wacky, but also the irrational, unique, and unhinged that lies just below the surface.
Uncovering the Peninsula
You can forget the Peninsula exists when you’ve been trapped in the North D-campus-supermarket Bermuda Triangle for too long. The original siren call of my trip down the harbour was from Wellers Rock to the tune of ‘The Wellerman’ sea-shanty, the one that randomly went viral during COVID and my subconscious has been singing since. Worth the trip? Eh. It’s essentially just a rock and a natural boat ramp that (brief history lesson incoming) was used to launch boats and waka. Its name comes from the Weller brothers who set up a whaling company in the region in the 1830s, running three whaling stations and resupplying ships.
Left without the promises of the shanty and with some time to spare, I buffed out the trip (took me long enough to get there). Next stop was the Harington Point gun emplacements, the largest and most extensive of Dunedin’s old fortifications including a series of bunkers and subterranean bunkers. The emplacements were built alongside the more well known Taiaroa head fortifications and the Disappearing Gun in the 1880s and ‘90s due to fear of the Russians. With the Russians no longer likely to invade, the armaments now reek of fresh spray paint and serve as a place for edgy teenagers to rip their first bongs. Unless all of those small garden hoses were used for washing the place up.
Darkest Dunedin
On a history buzz, the Tales of Murder and Woe Van Tour seemed slightly more entertaining than wandering the Settler’s Museum with the “gallery walk”: hands behind your back, considerate frown, slow pace, and the occasional nod. Nothing quite sets the expectations as high as a $110 van tour of Dunedin cemeteries. If nothing else, you can confirm if your flat is haunted through the tour guide, Gregor, telling you about a double homicide that happened in your old flat in the 1800s. Knowing Dunedin landlords, there is probably still evidence of that scene now covered in around 80 layers of dried paint.
Opting not to peer-pressure any of my friends to pay for the van, I took the trip solo and ended up with a private tour. Starting in the Octagon, the trip headed through North Dunedin in the direction of the Northern Cemetery – both Aotearoa’s most haunted cemetery, the location of many freshers’ first funnel on St Paddy’s, and direct competition with the mammal wing of the Museum of Natural Mystery. The tour takes you to the mausoleum of the Larnach family (the castle one), where you are told a family history of wealth, in-fighting, and suicide: a tragic tale that left the mausoleum filled with two skulls with bullet holes through them.
It turns out the current “tradition” of students pissing up on graves has a history. In the 1960s rumours of parties and late night drinking in the tomb emerged as an edgy past-time of students. By the time the ‘70s rolled around, a hole had opened in the mausoleum’s floor, and one of the skulls was removed – later found in a post-graduate student's flat, displayed on his mantlepiece. He was clearly not a member of Museum’s Aotearoa. Coincidentally, the culprit had produced an award-winning essay about the Weller brothers’ 1830s whaling station (fun connection for me).
Despite the skull being confiscated by police, the student didn’t get in too much trouble. The charge of improperly interfering with human remains was dismissed as they maintained that the skull had been gifted by a friend; that human remains could not be owned and therefore could not be stolen; and that they had taken proper care of the skull and jaw bone as they “kept the skull polished and in good condition.” Urban legend has it that the Larnach’s skull had been used as an ashtray.
Speight’s Tour
Speight’s is neither obscure or unique and surprisingly this tour was the most underwhelming on the quest to rediscover Dunedin. Speight’s manages to pack as many people as humanly possible into these tours and it feels like you're consistently on the verge of tripping over people whilst vying for space to look at a 5 foot 3 tall clay reconstruction of James Speight. I was expecting more of a Willy Wonka chocolate factory type tour (bring back Cadbury’s) but all of Speight’s bottles and cans are manufactured at Lion’s brewery in Auckland, so no golden bottle caps are made here.
The tasting was the saving grace of the tour. Meeting travellers from all over the world, sharing a gold medal ale with them, I watched them discover Dunedin for the first time – and got to see this familiar place through their eyes.