Oamaru had a well preserved old Victorian era downtown. Our house was a gingerbread style cottage that reflected the Victorian design style. We headed into town on foot to see a few things on our list, Steampunk HQ and the Forrester Gallery. We got a few extra visits in at the Custom's House Art Gallery and the Waitaki Museum and Archives. We were blown away by the art by Mathga Daunheimer! She makes painted quilts. The interplay of the quilting with the paint was sublime. In all our travels we have never seen anything like it. The Steampunk HQ gallery was a blast. So many quirky art pieces and funky displays made it great fun. Then we went to the Forrester Gallery, housed in an old Bank Building. Four very different artists were on display. Across the street was the Waitaki Museum that had natural history and Māori artifacts. Then we walked back to the house and jumped into the car. We bought a few items at the store and investigated the penguin colony. It was a bit too expensive and commercialized so we gave it a pass. We drove past a jetty packed tight with shags and a cool playground. Then we drove up to the lookout point and nearly got blown away by the gales.
The harbor
We stopped in at the Custom's House Art Gallery and headed upstairs
This is a quilt!
A close up of the underseas quilt
It is easier to see how the quilting gives a 3-D effect
A sandy beach with a shell
A Steampunk Dragon
My favorite one, a bee on a sunflower
Abstract
The artist herself
You can see the design on the back
And a list of the fish represented on the front
Back Downstairs
My second favorite piece
We still have books to read
The Victorian buildings have been preserved
Good on Oamaru!
Steampunk HQ with a full sized steam locomotive out in front
Open for business
A big airship next tot eh building
I had the $2 but it was broken
Emu
Scary skull
A noise maker
Ain't no bull
I played the cosmic organ
Goo go Gorilla
Froggy
The three headed dog at the front of the Ferry of Styx
Deep sea lantern fish
Unique train
A ray
Watch out for this beast
A cricket 5 foot long
Whose rooster?
The portal!
You can see me off tot eh right
The fly on the wall
The fisherman
What an Steam Tractor might have been
Not a camera, a nest
Lunch Time
A huge land train
This tire will not go flat
A tractor sized motorcycle
See Leslie over the back tire?
The laboratory
Caw caw says the steam crow
Nice buildings all around
Fly little buddy
It is a wonder why other towns lost their old buildings
Trains will sneak up on you
The Forrester Gallery is housed in an old Bank Manager's House
It was a grand building filled with great art
What are the things you need to take with you?
The white wolf
In response to the poem about the sick rose by William Blake
Let then eat bacteria
Poor Venus can't make a shell because the ocean is too acidified
The building was grand
The staircase was excetional
A nice collection of pieces
A spiral of consumption
Dragons!
Eerie!
Looking from the Gallery to the museum across the street
The ceiling of the Bank Manager's House
Was elaborate indeed
Oamaru is graced with many fine buildings
Victorian part of town
Spheres found in ancient mudstone
Diatoms in a pattern that the kids could recreate
We saw these boulders the next day but supersized
This bird is extinct and fed upon the also extinct Moa birds
This is the scale of the extinct Haast's Eagle
A farmer found stone tools in his first furrow
He collected everything that he found from flakes to big adzes
He donated the entire 9000 items to the museum
Big glazed jars from an apothecary
Outside the library
Not an appetizing pie
The church
A huge slide
Metal kiwi
A cool painting on the wall
No need to buy paint
Serious playground
Carved into the stumps
We saw a dozen or more classic cars on the roads
The Little Blue Penguins can't help being slow, they have tiny legs
The Little Blue Penguin Colony
Breakwater looking back towards Oamaru
Wink wink, know what I mean?
It is the yellow-eyed penguin on the sigh
Red on the beak of this shag
There were hundreds of birds on this jetty
Preening is never done
10 birds per square meter
Looking back into town
Out to the breakwater
Green eyed monster
Look both ways!
The blue green water of the harbor
Up in the wind
A sheltered harbor
The bird jetty
Some rain off in the distance
At the lookout they had the quintessential milepost
We liked to see how many places we had been
