Dunedin and the Taieri Gorge Railway

IN October 2017, my editor Chris Harris showed my father, Brian Walker, around Dunedin, one of New Zealand’s most long-established cities.

According to scholars I cite at the end of this post, Dunedin was already, by 1881,

. . . a ‘handsome city’ of over 40,000 people. . . . its twenty-two miles of streets were paved and well lighted. Fine buildings of Oamaru limestone or local basalt lined its main thoroughfares. . . . and it was the site of the four and five storied headquarters of the colony’s leading manufacturing concerns and business houses.

Here’s part of a panorama of 1870s Dunedin, on display at the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. The Maori word Toitū, meaning undisturbed or uncut, also connotes museum and so this is a bilingual name. Otago is the name of the wider region in which Dunedin is located.

Detail from 1870s panorama in the Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. The uncompleted building in the middle is the Garrison Hall in Dowling Street, which still stands today.

Dunedin is a planned city, founded in 1848 as an ideal metropolis for future settlers, who were mainly expected to come from Scotland. Christchurch, further north, was more ‘English’, and also a planned city. Perhaps the most notable town planning feature of Dunedin is a belt of greenery around the inner part of the city called the Town Belt.