As an airship hovers nearby, Queen Victoria rolls into town for Steampunk Festival NZ.
© Liz Cadogan/@LizCadogan

Victorian Cultural Heritage
Meets Kiwi Creativity

Queen Victoria was there, celebrating her 200th birthday. Festivities included a parade, teapot races, parasol duels, and a wedding. The bride wore purple, the groom a metal samurai hat.

What is this?

Oh, I see: This is Oamaru (pop. 13,000), where Victorian cultural heritage and Steampunk creative thinking are a marriage made in heaven—a.k.a. New Zealand.

Like “Rock Paper Scissors,” parasol duels involve three  moves: Plant, Twirl, Snub.
© Janet Doyle

What is Steampunk?

By definition, it’s a sub-genre of science fantasy set in an alternative Victorian era. By practice, it’s an art inspired by 19th-century steam-powered machinery. By Jove, it’s jolly good fun!

No Steampunk Victorian deep-sea diver ever forgets his top hat.
© Liz Cadogan/@LizCadogan

In Oamaru, the Victorian setting is real. Built on gold rushes and grain booms, Oamaru was once New Zealand’s 9th biggest city, burgeoning at the same pace as San Francisco.

Then the boom went bust.

With its Victorian limestone architecture, Oamaru is a popular location for filmmakers.
©Brenda Mueli @OamaruCaptured

But a national treasure was hiding in plain sight—New Zealand’s most intact Victorian architectural landscape. With 70 heritage buildings on the historical register, Oamaru proved the ideal Steampunk Capital of the Southern Hemisphere.

In the steampunk retro-future, whimsical fashion is all the rage.
© Malcolm & Annette Whyte / M&A Whyte Photography

Imagining Yesterday’s Tomorrow Today

“Steampunk is as rich as your imagination can possibly make it,” says Helen Jansen, a.k.a. sky pirate La Falconesse. She and Iain “Agent Darling” Clark organize Steampunk Festival NZ for visitors from around the world.

Clark and Jansen have been widely praised for making NZ steampunk welcoming to all.
© Joyce McGreevy

They attribute steampunk’s appeal to its inclusiveness and creativity.  “It lends itself to the creation of a personality as an extension of yourself in that alternative time,” says Clark. “You’re not being somebody else, as in LARPing [live action role play], where you’re playing the part of, say, Captain America.”

“In steampunk you get the opportunity to become the person you imagine yourself to be, and that may be an airship captain, an inventor, or a secret agent who travels through time.”

Steampunk’s popping of personality lets us be more than we appear to be in our everyday lives.
© Malcolm & Annette Whyte / M&A Whyte Photography

Delight in Discovery

Says Jansen, “We’ve seen people develop their confidence and create the most incredible devices and outfits. Some people who were very shy are now going on stage. They’ve found the wonder.”

“Every year as people come to Oamaru you see that delight in an inner discovery,” says Jansen.
© Malcolm & Annette Whyte / M&A Whyte Photography

She and Clark delight that fellow Kiwis are discovering Oamaru, located in the Waitaki District of New Zealand’s South Island.

“I was in tourism and came here because of the penguin colony,” says Jansen. “Oamaru was known in the international tourism market as a place to see penguins, but people I met in other parts of New Zealand would look at me quizzically and say, ‘Where?’”

Steampunk Festival NZ  changed that. Today, wherever Clark and Jansen travel, people ask, “Oh, are you from Oamaru?” It’s become a point of pride.

“We always travel in ‘full steam,’ ” says Jansen of their garb. “It’s too heavy to pack.”
© Joyce McGreevy

All for Love and Fun

When Clark and Jansen launched the steampunk movement in Oamaru, he was a captain in another movement, ALF’s Army.

“All for Love and Fun,” explains Clark. ALF’s Army was founded by a university lecturer in the 1960s when tensions over the Vietnam War were a regular feature of campus life.

“The idea was to get rid of aggression in a peaceful way.”

Groups formed regiments of pacifist armies and did battle, using paper swords, flower bombs, and cold porridge.

“The nurses would revive everybody with whiskey and jellybeans,” says Jansen.

The rules of tea dueling are elaborate. One should “dunk as if one’s life depended upon it.”
© Tourism Waitaki

Today ALF’s Army is New Zealand’s “largest pacifist warfare organization” with regiments in several towns and cities. Another delightful fact: In 1990, ALF’s founder was appointed The Wizard of New Zealand by Prime Minister Mike Moore. Yes, officially.

Wizardry Was Just the Beginning

One evening as Clark, a renowned jeweler, celebrated with his Oamaru regiment, he brought along a beer mug embellished with fanciful gadgets. This inspired the formation of the League of Victorian Imagineers, which led to an exhibition—which drew thousands of visitors to Oamaru’s Victorian Heritage Celebration.

A steampunk gadget must look as if it works, says Clark. “Oh, it’s got a wee boiler
and high-voltage electricity. What could possibly go wrong?”
© Joyce McGreevy

Soon all these different parts—steampunk, Victorian heritage, history, fantasy, love and fun, creative thinking, local neighborliness, and worldwide interest—clicked together, like one exquisitely embellished gadget of possibility.

Craft is key. As a music video explains, you can’t just glue on gears and call it steampunk.
© Tourism Waitaki

The Steampunk Festival NZ steamed gloriously forth, a gathering of be-gowned, be-goggled, and be-jeweled ladies and gents amid a gleaming array of gizmos, gauges, and gears.

“Everybody who comes is also contributing to creating the festival,” says Jansen.
© Janet Doyle

Ten years on, Steampunk Festival NZ is the crown jewel of a town that’s increasingly rich in tourism treasure.

Better still, the Festival’s richness is not about making money, but all for love and fun. One more reason to visit Oamaru, NZ, where Victorian cultural heritage and Steampunk creative thinking fit together, hand in gadget-embellished glove.

Does this glove let La Falconesse teleport between places and times? One imagines so!
© Joyce McGreevy

Follow Steampunk NZ here. Plan Oamaru/Waitaki travels here.

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