Category: Places & Things: A Blackthorn Review

Photos du Nuit: Regent Theatre, Dunedin

30/1/2018

Wonky panorama taken on a phone from the central balcony.

The Regent is a late Victorian baroque extravaganza and apparently the only intact survivor of this idiom, at least in the southern hemisphere. I know all the ones in Chch were knocked down in the 90s and the remaining, partial stragglers were taken out by the earthquakes. Which makes me sad; you'll never be full feral til you've sat through Wild at Heart or Anatomie de l'enfer amongst that particular kind of feverish, moulting grandeur. It's like tonguing a lollypop in the lap of a benevolent if superannuated courtesan with mercury poisoning. There may be odours, but you learn so much.

The Regent was infamous for rejoicing in special arse-punishing seating; I remember writhing my way through a screening of Metropolis and swearing never the fuck again, so it took a lot to tempt me back to watch Romeo and Juliet (free tickets fuck yeah). Despite the original coccyx-compressors having been replaced in a recent restoration the new seats are just as bloody hard on the buttockal region in an entirely new way. Goddamit.

It was fun to watch all the flinty, thirsty ballet mums trying to out-alpha each other, less fun seeing more than one nascent ED in their anxious offspring. The Royal NZ Ballet was mmmokay (Juliet was awesome); special mention for set and costumes. No pictures of the performance because people who do that shit need to die in a fucking fire.

* See more of our photography here * Port Chalmers, Dunedin * Photoessays *

Photoessay: Aramoana beach, Otago, New Zealand

12/12/2017

Despite its sometime-popularity, we still like Aramoana Beach at the mouth of Otago Harbour. On a weekday you can find yourself pretty much alone on its pastry-coloured arc, companioned only by the distant, couchant forms of lounging Sea Lions and lilting squads of terns, their gazes turned forever on the water beneath them. On the other side of the bay stands the Albatross colony and well, fuck-all else, really.

The surfers are usually more intent on the other side of the beach that stretches westward. Dogs are allowed. There's not much broken glass.

Small pleasures.

< One of the more sightly examples of Aramoana's polyglot housing stock, which runs the material gamut from code-compliant modernity to venerable tin-clad fuckery.

I personally burn to crayfish red in about five minutes in this kind of UV, so Felix gets the best of it.
R's not really a beach guy. He won't take his shoes off, which I find both pitiable and disturbing.

Brilliant silver Mullet, like shards of lustre glass, surf the glossy little breakers about 5m from shore.

The dunes manage to both erode and stubbornly persist, but no one knows for how much longer, realistically.
They are clothed in spiky grass and feral flowers.

Millions of snails gave their lives for this pointless tableau. The fine sand buffs the pastel crust from their outer whorls, revealing their flayed, roseate nacre. I could shoot them all day.

This sort of stuff is xmas for us down here. Northern tourists seem to forget the season and slide back into summer sloth, which must be nice. Cooking a full roast on a day that might have fallen out of Satan's arsecrack, complete with fully-operational blowflies and beer bloat isn't my idea of festive. Lots of people just chuck formality and get pissed at the beach with some ham and salad.

* Port Chalmers, New Zealand * Photoessays * Selected Ravings *

Photoessay: Middlemarch Drive

22/3/2017

We took a drive with my mother to Middlemarch, an historic little map smudge squatting on the eastern flank of the central Otago region. It's just over an hour's drive from Dunedin, which is why we often end up circling the area despite its distinct lack of concentrated, explicit attractions. As a somewhat surreal voyage through a schist-heavy, bitten-down landscape,
the passage is of greater interest than the destination.

The ancient basement rocks poke out through the ragged, sack-coloured grazing like dinosaur armour, rising to whipped meringue configurations in one place but laid out in
weary couchant slabs in others- according to the angle of their strata, I suppose.

This looks like drought, but green of any description means there's been meaningful rain.

Don't let this image fool you; Middlemarch is shambolic dive, by and large. Forsaken by historic fortunes and probably a large proportion of its founding families, it lies about the road in a polyglottic sprawl that speaks of a long and general decline punctuated by
single syllables of contemporary uptick.

The Otago Rail Trail- a newish route through a string of rural burgs- is the only real game in town, aside from the eternal farming. Middlemarch has become its handmaiden, devoting its main drag almost entirely to the cargo-cultish service of the cycling tourist trade.

Helmeted hordes disgorge from the train and various vans. They are herded off to cafés and then chased out onto their rented bicycles.

I've always thought of bikes as a way to escape other people, so I don't personally understand the appeal of massed, administrated cycling in matching shirts and headgear that smells of a hundred other sweaty scalps. The route is open to anyone, hazard-free, clearly delineated with no shortage of obvious accommodation and yet most prospective cyclists seemed to cleave to these organised clots.

Just watching them all squinting in the kind of sunlight that will scorch them unwittingly scarlet by the end of the day while their pack leaders droned through safety spiels prior to launch gave me a referred case of the chafed bores.

Their plight was incomprehensible.

Monotony may be a general principle but the fruit is never a bore in Central. Rosaceae go crazy here. The apricots are god-like.

This strange little place had this strange little plaque affixed to its windowsill.

Schist. Goats. Schist. Sag.

Metallic crap aficionados should really make the effort to extend sideways from Dunedin and visually fondle all this oxidised largesse. Everything ever constructed and transported at ruinous expense is rusting on its arse somewhere in Middlemarch. You'll love it.

The Strath-Taieri Rabbit Board.

Badly needs bunny ears.

Do high-functioning sheep dream of flat-affect shearers? Is that a sheep? Why the long faces? That leg needs attention. I smell burning hair.

We got lost looking for a river but came across something called Sutton.

There is nothing as distinct as any definite departure from Middlemarch; you are just sort of not there any more, on your way back toward the coast. The hills lose their most egregious deformities and settle back into felty regularity. Farms begin to look functional; some even have names. Another year will elapse before enough jaundiced detail is rubbed off the memory to facilitate a return.

* More New Zealand Photoessays *

Photoessay: The Moria Gate Arch Walk, Buller, New Zealand

15/3/2017

The bush enclosing the Karamea valley area in the northwest of NZ's South Island includes the kind of heart-of-darkness old growth that tweaks the primate brain a certain way. Gazing at its undulant, pea-green enormity from the road that skirts the limestone bluffs opens the mental portal; it is not until you have stood, dwarfed and dampened, in its midst that your ancestral monkey chatters uneasily and begins scanning the middle distance for glimpses of movement.

It's deeply ironic that the only predators one really faces in this country wear trainers and clutch smartphones, but that's another story.

The drive winds for an unexpected distance through increasingly emphatic mixed podocarp coastal forest that seems to at once condense and amplify as you progress, both invoking and assiduously retaining the kind of downpours that are always imminent in this infamously pluvial district.

Arrival at the dedicated carpark with its strangely prosaic tourist shelter and prosy signage is a bit of a jolt. On exiting their vehicles, the extraneous arseholes of all nations blink at each other in the sunlight admitted by the arbitrary clearing, checking for reception, tightening their laces, picking at their peeling tans. Ambient humanity has soaked sideways even into this once obscure destination in a slightly greasy, sunscreen-scented tide.

I wish we'd started at 4.30am on foot, but I'm um... with a bunch of other people.

If the focus is slightly off in some of these images, I apologise on behalf of the virus that was just starting to balloon my damn eyelids and swell every last one of my cranial membranes.

Luckily the forest isn't here for us and takes the edge off company, swallowing the sight and smell of proximate strangers. The underlying Oparara Basin karst exhales magic through that heavy green pelt, redolent of hard, tepid, tea-brown water and the coarse moss that tongues the boles to knee-depth and drapes the pendant limbs fanning obliquely overhead.

While the track is relatively easy going for anyone with moderate mobility, there's no seating or shelter once you're in the thick of it, so have a thought for any less able companions. At the time the walk was heavily studded with bait stations and mustelid traps designed to mitigate the heavy mortality inflicted on native species by exotic pests; warnings were posted everywhere. Children seem attracted to these and I was forced to dissuade a couple of juvenile randoms from tampering with them along the way, so on behalf of New Zealand's remaining fauna, please do supervise your damn brats.

Annoying, I know, but you had to have the bloody things.

Petroica australis strikes again.

These slightly creepy little smoky bandits relish heavy-footed intrusion and jump out onto the path in expectation of the insects stirred by your passage. And well, to fuck with you, since they are highly territorial.

All South Island Robins sort of look exactly the same and after encountering their simulacra in a dozen different places, one starts to formulate subconscious notions about that material equivalence.

Kahikatea spread their fluted buttresses into the welcoming mould. Their branches soar away into the distant daylight but those of Rimu and other mossy podocarps remain in lime-drenched shade, proliferating into venous silhouette.

They do not pulse in any visual sense but it takes a few extended glances to establish this. These same patterns snake unseen through your own flesh, feeding your brain, irrigating your organs. Blood-warm sweat beads upon your neck and forehead; some of it is yours, some theirs.

Behold the Moria Arch, a cavern tongued out of the fundamental limestone by the deceptively quiescent Oparara river. The track ends in an abrupt descent into its darkness via a pretty undignified scramble over dodgy rocks aided only by a wall-hung chain, so brace yourself for a few short downward slides and a muddied arse if it's been raining (and it probably has).

The really claustrophobic amongst you might want to look away and think about something
else for a moment. The arch opens out to regard the river in two directions. I'm not sure if
these are totally legit stalactites and not just calcified root intrusions, but I was cool with
whatever was happening here.

A skirt of uprooted and forsaken trees downstream spoke for the water in a worse mood.

I'm not going to lie; all that stone overhead in a seriously geologically-active area was not my favourite thing in the whole world. I kept a discreet tally of the likely time it would take to bolt from wherever the hell I was standing toward open daylight at the first hint of P-wave.

The river sand is bone-white and talc-like with a curious scent that might have benefited from visual suggestion but reminded me of clean skin anyway.

All you phobics look away again.

This is how you exit- the same way you came in; slowly and cumbrously, no matter what. It's always easier going uphill than down, but my inner calamity-ruminator pictured getting stuck behind a logjam of sunburnt Germans while the place stoved in around me.

Looking up helps get you through the worst of it; one could always repurpose those moiling strangers and use their static mass to vault to freedom through this handy aperture.

Just sayin.

Back out into some truly titan vegetation. Shamilla is but a passing mote to these two ancient Rimu, or perhaps they were Matai; once the moss and knobliness sets in, it's hard to tell between them.

It may not be especially difficult or obscure, but the remote-ish Oparara Valley still possibly isn't for the faint of heart or those expecting a highly accessible, curated experience. Tree-fanciers, hardcore environment peeps and geology fetishists will get the most bang out of its baroque verdure. If you're one of us, don't miss it.

* More NZ Photoessays * Our Photography * Flora *

The Dentist Dodger's guide to Orthodontic Extrication: I go and get a Tooth Pulled- a Review

16/11/2016

Recently, a toxic moron was elected to the American presidency by a herd of hooting munters who thought tearing up the social contract they rely upon for everything they cherish was the smartest thing they've done in years. Given that he's more emblematic than germinal, meaning the whole fucking world is already scooting on its anus toward some sort of greasy combed-over oblivion, I thought I'd pop a matte brown cherry on that umber sundae and get my dodgy tooth ripped out. Why the hell not?

It was a good call in a heaving main of terminally dumb shit, so I'd just like to take a moment to conceptually pat that ham-faced, doily-headed ball bag of a creature on his leaky old man arse and thank him for positively recontextualising my orthodontic pain.

If that's wrong, I don't want to be right.

Let's have some background. Possibly because they are so jankily idiosyncratic, my teeth possess a strange Jungian significance in both my conscious and unconscious mind; I share them with my blood relatives and they feature in my dreams. They used to distinguish me from three hundred other punters grinning in the blacklight on trance nights. They are weirdly totemic. For these and other reasons I am one of the people who just do not go to the dentist and am strictly of the opinion that allowing people to tinker with shit that isn't broken is how you end up on the unnecessary procedure treadmill with five grand's worth of unpaid bills fermenting under your fridge magnets.

But you know, I'd been in a lot of dental pain for a couple of months. Yes, months, because a prolonged fuck-tonne of pain is ironically the only thing that could have nudged me toward a cubical to get it looked at.

Want to see the actual tooth in question? Ha ha, too bad! I don't do trigger warnings. Here tis- the last molar on the left, disembodied in green disinfectant and a plastic shroud.

If all this feels gratuitously offensive, allow me to rationalise relating these details like some sort of gloating maniac by professing the deeply philanthropic hope that my fellow phobic sufferers will be inspired to stop nursing their gross fangs and go to the fucking dentist. Let my bad experience be your cautionary tale.

Still in the market for something really disgusting? Check out the size of the temporary filling (orange mass) below and all the scandalously out of hand ruination happening behind it.

After lalalaing a deeply-cracked tooth for a year and then ignoring said filling as it demonstrably failed, I had an abscess jammed up over the root (not pictured).

That means pain. Pain when you sit, pain when you stand, a lot of pain when you eat and pain whilst arguing with your partner about going to the fucking dentist. Alongside the standard on-site agony, I was treated to its thrilling adjunct; referred pain, which is like someone stabbing a screwdriver into one's jaw magnified outward, Matrix-style, along obscure neural pathways so that you imagine half your other teeth are looking to quit the building too.

All this tortuous bullshit was the result of leaving a single, simple and eminently resolvable problem too long. Don't do that. It's not just dumb, but actively destructive to sit at home hoping fairies will magic away all that pain and infection tomorrow. It will only get worse, spread sideways, and there are some pretty serious and costly complications that can arise in lieu of timely treatment.

Go to the fucking dentist, fool.

This was my first extraction. I decided to have it out because fuck root canals and reconstruction- they're expensive and fragile and everyone should research those options really thoroughly before committing to them. Don't allow yourself to be talked into that shit in the chair. Both senior teaching dental surgeons I'd spoken to were fairly frank about the minimal benefits of reconstruction in a non-cosmetic position. Their candour was intriguing when contrasted with the recommendations of dental practitioners who have a substantial financial interest in prolonging and complicating your care.

Regarding the procedure itself, I had mentally curated a tremendous Clive Barker array of horrors, splinters, agonies and stitches in spite of my partner's assurances to the contrary; he has a crowded mouth and is an extraction veterano. But I have the MC1R mutation that makes gingers both more sensitive to pain and resistant to anaesthetic (you don't have to be full redhead for that gene to express in case you were wondering about yourself) and the kind of obsessive, morbidly speculative consciousness that boosts any potential hazard into sizzling orbit. It's possibly difficult for a regular person to imagine the state of towering, reflexive panic I had worked myself into whilst dodging the dental bullet, but by the time the pain was topping out all analgesics and tears were rolling down my face in the waiting room, I no longer gave a fuck about any of that and would have happily forced someone to rip out that suicidal molar with their own fucking teeth at gunpoint.

Don't worry, fellow phobics- as it turns out, the procedure is by far the lesser of two oral evils.

We can't really afford regular dentists so we go to the local university dental school. Extending my wretched deferrals until all the students had fucked off on holiday turned out to be really great thing because I got the house surgeon instead of someone still practising with needles and pliers. I demanded and received next-level pain relief (remember, you can do that); we went with 1.5 doses of hardcore local, administered in two places and if you're still reading this piece I probably don't need to tell you that the cessation of abscess pain is a precious reward in itself. This was only enough to numb a very discrete area around 3 or 4 centimetres square (in contrast, R couldn't talk and had numbness for the whole afternoon with far less anaesthetic), but that level of insensitivity was perfectly adequate.

When you're a big fucking baby on the inside it's easy to forget that, to strangers, you present solely as large tense freak in black with fixed expression. You also tend to forget your ability to infect everyone around you with your personal blend of apprehension and hostility, something I remembered in enough time to ask the visibly uptight nurse what to expect rather than, you know, throatpunching the first person to come at me with something in their hand. The people who have to tear bits off other people for a living get wound up about it too sometimes, so engaging them rather than lying rigid and hissing slowly was the right thing to do.

The nurse said I might hear cracks and 'ear sounds' as the tendons securing the tooth gave up, and possibly feel some sort of weird pressure but when the time came, the surgeon just selected the tooth with an implement I didn't even get a look at, rocked it a couple of ways slowly and then boop, there it was. Out. No sounds, no graunching, absolutely zero pain, some pressure (nothing startling or horrible) and the entire process lasted about 20 literal seconds. If I could have allowed myself to blink by this stage, I would have missed it. I should say that this was an uncomplicated extraction of a conventional molar with no breakages etc., but that's a pretty standard presentation.

Pain/trauma/horror rating? A truly pathetic 2/10.

Possibly due to the enviable slickness of the surgeon's technique, I had no pain or bleeding in the days that followed, either. You shouldn't smoke, suck a cock or tongue the shit out of the extraction site for a while and you do get a bloody taste in your mouth for a day or so, but all those skin, gum and bone cells work quickly closing up and after three days there's what feels like total sealing of the wound and blissful painlessness. The gap seems less weird to me that it might to you because I'm congenitally hypodontic, but it's out of sight at the back. Cletus Syndrome: minimised.

On the bright side, this craggy little bitch goes well with the wisdom tooth R had pulled a wee while back (see fig. 4), which means I've finally harvested enough human tissue for earrings. Awaiting vegan powers.

* More Selected Ravings * Read the Book onsite *

Photoessay: Birds at Aramoana mole, Otago Harbour New Zealand

23/8/2016

We took a trip out to the mouth of Otago Harbour during autumn. ^ This is the view of Port Chalmers, in the midst of said harbour, looking back down the windy ribbony road to Aramoana, path to the sea in Maori.

Aramoana and its beaches occupy the western side of the heads and are a fairly decent, non-life threatening surf break, nice walking and the chance to see the local avian and marine wildlife.
Below; still on the way out there. Some of the small bays along the road are good for cockles (Littleneck Clams) and the occasional scallop. There's fuck-all dairying around here and very few sewage outfalls so the water is cleaner than you might think.

Above: Looking across the from the mole at Aramoana toward Karitane and the Silver peaks of the Otago coast. Delightful progressive types tried their hardest to obliterate this landscape with an enormous aluminium smelter in the early 70's, to the horror of everyone with a viable IQ.

Thankfully logistics and local opposition prevailed and all that remains of that shitty prospect is this gimpy old mole, which extends for over a kilometre into the Pacific ocean.

Orcas, dolphins, Right and Humpback whales migrate right past here on their way to and from Antartica. The larger species occasionally enter the harbour but their memories are long (their putative lifespans exceed 200 years) and people are only just beginning to regain their trust.
I hope we deserve it. I fear that we don't.

Terns, gulls and shags appreciate the mole's amenities and their olfactory signature can be pretty intense on a hot day. White Fronted Terns Sterna striata breed in and around the harbour though their populations are apparently declining. They are still a pretty visible presence locally, their slim, swept wings rendering them incredibly agile in the air. Watching them plummet like shards of white glass into the black water after fish makes you wonder how their hollow honeycomb bones can sustain the assault, but they emerge, unfazed, their sabre beaks full of silver.
Black Fronted and Caspian Terns also frequent the area.

Above: The eastern flank of the harbour terminates in Taiaroa Head, home to a lighthouse and the only mainland Royal Albatross breeding colony on the planet.

Albatross need all the help they can get due to the massive assault on their global populations both from overfishing and bycatch mortality. But when we went to the Royal Albatross tourist centre we thought the tour charges (upwards of $100 for a family) were pretty obscene and in fact prohibitive to the majority of local punters. Considering there are no other opportunities to get a decent look at these astonishing birds, the price is unfairly excessive and just one more example of how access to wild places and species is being throttled by exclusive and commercial interests.

The Albatross Centre is a trust but still: those prices. Not cool.

Other interesting species frequent Aramona beach including New Zealand Sea Lions. We were once on the rickety Aramoana wharf with our nephew when a massive black shape cleaved the water just a few metres directly below; though my first thought was Great White, it lumbered out onto the sand as a mighty black pinniped. Their heavy shag, blunt dog faces and sheer massive presence (3.5m/450kg) are hard to convey if you've never had the pleasure. The words sand bear definitely spring to mind.

Advice for photographers visiting Dunedin: Aramoana is a primo, subject-rich site. Access is free and relatively easy for peeps without mobility issues, but there is no public transport to or from. Early morning offers the best light and an often human-free window and penguins, seals, dolphins, birds and whales are frequent visitors. Locals can sometimes get pissy with strangers poking about their private properties in the small adjacent township; there was a gun massacre here in the early nineties which many people are not keen to discuss with nosey tourists. Much of the area is a wetland sanctuary so it's best not to drive all over it or let your dogs and kids harass protected species. The fishing and diving from the beach and mole can be pretty good; there are local catch limits that you can view here.

* Photoessays * Lipstick Review * Kitchen Bitch * Ethnographica *

The Dunedin Gasworks Museum

20/7/2016

I am neither thrilled by pistons nor particularly impressed by mechanical scale and it's safe to say that petrochemicals don't really rock my little world. Clanking industry is an unwelcome stranger; we've never owned an internal combustion engine and hope to see the back of the fucking things in our lifetimes.

That doesn't mean we couldn't appreciate the ferrous relics offered by the Dunedin Gasworks Museum.

It represents one of only three such sites remaining on the entire planet and though it suffers a suboptimal location in scungy, inglorious old South Dunedin, that original location provides essential context for its strangely resplendent infrastructure, surprising number of functional steam-driven machines and compliment of bewildering, archaic appliances.

The past retains its unfiltered texture, odour and mouthfeel, a precious insight in this era of slick, self-conscious edits and boring over-curation.

The site in all its former climate-fucking glory. Not all structures survive, but efforts to
recognise and preserve what remained came, just in the nick of time, from local enthusiasts.

Victorian engineering is a peculiarly concise representation of their society as a whole- feverishly inventive, horrifically blinkered, psychotically exploitative, endlessly aspirational.

The artefacts exemplify its most distinguished paradoxes- baroque and convoluted practicality and that peculiarly brutish strain of innovation, so much a god unto itself.

The site retains their prickling metaphysical tang.

It's an incredibly male place. So many patronymics stamped into iron and picked out in gold. Is this how R feels when I'm fucking around at the MAC counter for half an hour? Despite being a somewhat unconventional masculine specimen he pronounced both the museum's concepts and spectacle attractive, enjoying the engines' ingenuity and the evolutionary processes they represent. Every unit is a chugging synthetic Tyrannosaur, shaped just as much by external requirements as that defunct beast.

I can see how that's cool.

But I sort of felt sorry for them. These old relict engines are like living hearts shorn of their vessels, earnestly pumping and shunting away to no real end. There is a weird pathos to their amputated inutility. That being said, anyone desiring to know something more about mechanisation in general should come and just stare at the things while they operate, because the observer can certainly absorb ambient understanding. The movements are the sort of orchestrated code your synapses can relate to.

^ Eighty-six people can fit inside this thing with all of their luggage and it travels through time with the aid of a bulky central analogue console. Prove me wrong.

SEAL GLAND LUBRICATION grease at nipples provided once in each 24 hours of running time

^ Drag it off and read it. It's quite sobering.

She seems skeptical.

Looking at the clunky old appliances, it's almost possible to envision the moment when design began to overtake homely utility as a primary consideration. Aesthetics were an afterthought, worn awkwardly like a bangle on an unaccustomed wrist, before they became everything.

I remember these hulking things sitting in the baches (pronounced batches)- the NZ version of the overseas holiday cottage- of my childhood. They were usually ramshackle structures ad-libbed from fibro and iron before neoliberal policies redacted leisure from the national psyche. Now they're called beach houses and are usually plasticised McMansions for people who bankroll their wive's boutiques and outpatient cosmetic procedures in exchange for no-contest infidelity. Sorry kids.

Today everything's destined for the landfill after eighteen months. Everybody hearts progress.

I do not know what these mighty tanky things are because I wasn't listening. Boilers? Compressors?

Was more personally concerned with the abundance of smutty old industrial brick. It used to be everywhere, before waterblasters and gentrification, and would leave either orange dust or greenish dampness on the back of your clothes in alleys.

Lol, you can pull your fingers out of your ears now. I'll stop.

Ooooh mmmmm

These shots were taken with the old pocket Canon and represent only the crappiest little
fraction of the photographic possibilities onsite; bring your camera and a couple of spare hours.
Both R and I thought the Gasworks Museum was value for money ($5 admission per adult, currently open Sundays). That's high praise coming from a pair of impecunious luddites.

* More photoessays * Selected Ravings * Photo du Jour * Kitchen Bitch *

Olveston, an historic Dunedin house: we review the experience.

9/6/2016

Olveston is a grand, formerly private family home set on the hill over downtown Dunedin, the sort of faux-baronial monstrosity so beloved by late Victorian nouveau riche types. I won't bang on about the resident Theomin family; interested parties can read about them on the official site.

Despite residing in Dunedin we had never previously visited the place, our taste for vintage shit notwithstanding. Rumours of expensive admission and overratedness warred with accounts of its superlative collection of period effects, perturbing our budget-conscious sensibilities.

So it was with some trepidation that we finally took the plunge and went to see the damn thing.

The edifice itself is pretty much a pebbledash gingerbread bouncy castle whistled ode to middlebrow bad taste, neatly cataloguing most if not all of the flourishes insisted upon by wealthy attention-seekers of the era. It is silly, utterly unsuited to our climate and stuck sort of arse-about-face on inadequate grounds. That's not to say it's without charm, though, unlike so many similarly vainglorious follies.

The grounds were pleasant as a whole and quite well-tended; not sure whether they were attenuated historically or had always been a victim of the overbearing scale of the building. No must-see specimens or noteworthy installations: oh well.

The period glasshouse was nice and effort had been made to keep the collection contemporaneous.

Access to Olveston's hallowed interior is a guided tour-only business; unless you either consult the website or book a private tour, depending on the time of day you can wait two+ hours for the next one. There's really nowhere to do that onsite, nor is there any cafe etc within easy walking distance, which was an annoying quirk, particularly since we had some elderly visitors with us. Luckily the weather permitted sloping round the grounds. Round and round and round.

Olveston was gifted to the city in the late sixties by the sole remaining scion of the Theomin family and it's run today by a foundation. Booking at the attached gift shop was a little bit protracted and there was confusion as to the exact charges applicable; I discovered later whilst consulting the website that we were overcharged. Residents are entitled to some sort of guide pass that allows free subsequent entry or something like that... the conditions weren't very well delineated. As it was a busy day, an extra tour was being organised; we still had to wait over half an hour.

The gift shop itself is a tacky nightmare heaving with random imported tat. That always sets an ominous tone as far as I'm concerned.

We were looking forward to taking some nice pictures of the interior. Until we discovered such activities were not permitted, which was... annoying. And a bit unwarranted, given that the rumoured top-flight status of the collection turned out to be somewhat exaggerated. More on that in a wee bit.

The house is in typically florid mixed late-Vic/Arts & Crafts/Liberty style, heavy on the medieval references and Orientalism. There are some cute features that we won't spoil for you and it was nice to see it all intact, particularly the service areas with their whacky dinosaur appliances and occult layout. If Olveston can lay claim to any particular virtue, it is surely context; the Theomins' acquisitive efforts have provided this invaluable resource in perpetuity.

All that compulsive Victorian materialism, stratified convention and thirst for prestige proves a bit confrontational after a while- far too much and somehow deficient, emblematic of an entire world despoiled in pursuit of curated surfeit. Deep breaths were sometimes needed. Curiously, though the family collected widely, we detected rather few astonishingly significant pieces amongst the standard upscale chinoiserie and colonial art etc, which made the ludicrously ubiquitous do not touch signs and no-photography shenanigans feel precious and unfriendly. There was the odd cool piece, to be sure, but there was very little solid information provided about any of it, which was disappointing.

Our guide was... well, he misidentified a number of objects, seemed unaware of the significance of others, took too much pleasure in ostentatiously scolding visitors for making physical contact with prohibited items (a wall, in one case) and excluded the Chinese contingent of our tour from his introductory banter. Awkward.

All bitching aside, such an holistic glob of anachronistic context is a sight worth seeing and Olveston really does present a cohesive glimpse into cultural aspirations at the start of the 20th C.

Our recommendations: keep this one up your sleeve for a rainy day. Tours involve about 45 minutes of standing around and a few flights of stairs, so if you're not 100% mobile I'd think twice. A more than passing interest in design, antiquities and olde-worlde business are probably prerequisites. Look up the tour times because there's fuck-all to do if you're heinously early. If you can swing it, opt for the more exclusive two-person tour because a large party (there were about 20 people on ours) makes for a suboptimal experience. The guides aren't miked (which is understandable given that tours sometimes happen simultaneously) and the interior rooms are both busily furnished and heavily roped off, resulting in crowded sightlines and sometimes unintelligible commentary.

The cover charge of $19.50 NZ per head for visitors and $15.50 for Dunedin residents (except us- as I said, we were stiffed) is too much to pay for amateur hosting and puts the experience beyond the reach of many locals, which bothers us. Olveston is interesting, well-presented and overpriced.

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