A Stranger’s Impressions of Dunedin

Cromwell Argus, Volume III, Issue 129, 30 April 1872, Page 7

A Stranger’s Impressions of Dunedin

An amusing narrative, entitled “Round about New Zealand, by Olympus,” is commenced in the Australasian of the 13th inst. We take up the narrative at the point where the writer has returned from a Hying visit to Invercargill;— We returned to the care of Underwood at 4 p.m, that day, and next morning found that ancient mariner steering his ship through the Heads of Otago—Heads which delighted mo by reason of their magnificent boldness, rising hundreds of feet from the raging breakers underneath, and being wilder and more majestic than any rocky scenery to be met with in Australia. Proceeding up the harbour to Port Chalmers, the ever-changing views of mountain and bay strike one accustomed for years to Victorian sceneries with singular attractiveness ; mountains with their crests enveloped in dense clouds, delicious-looking little coves and bays everywhere around, and the track, narrowed to nothingness almost by buoys, winding purposely to delight the eye of the tourist. With but little delay, I soon found myself enveloped in trunks and aboard a tiny steamer, puffing and • fretting itself along for Dunedin, with a firm determination to revel in a square meal and a quantity of that New Zealand ale upon which the Hon. Julius Vogel became eloquent the other day in the Town Hall. The first view of Dunedin is exceedingly charming, the town being spread out, as it were, upon huge hill-sides, with the like novel and peculiar rings of clouds and mists about their summits; but in wharves Dunedin is excessively shy, the best one being narrow and plank-rotten, with a hand-train laid along its centre, terminating as it does in the midst of rude and healthy cabmen, vicing with each other in sharing your luggage amongst them. In the city of Dunedin, pedestrians—imported ones, I mean,—could never reach condition tit for running. I feel certain no living man could bo found who had done Dunedin and found 35 yards of straight surface, for every street revels in its own hill; and no matter where you start from, or whatever your motives or morals may be, you have got to climb before you walk far. The only time 1 remember getting the best of Dunedin was from the centre of a good fat cloud browsing upon a bald lull, where we made each other’s acquaintance, and I never remember feeling so happy as I did descending upon that ancient city of Scotchmen !

The drives around Dunedin arc truly magnificent, particularly to Port Chalmers, the road winding around and over mountains, the woodland sceneries being wild and beautiful, the grand black, red, and white pines o’erladen with lingo festoons of supple-jack, the splendid ever-changing hues of the native ferns, the delicate inter-turnings of maiden’shair ferns, and the wonderful beauty of wild flower decorations, forming pictures which live in memory In Dunedin, each hill provides its own rain, and showers are going on continually on their own responsibility. When the hills arc unanimous, one rainbow is used up without being noticed, twelve could bo kept going without interfering with each other; and the consequences arc that every white man wears a perpetual mackintosh coat. The policemen arc eternally clad in mackintoshes and red loggings ; they wander forth like melancholy Shanghai fowls, and you may roly upon each sergeant being a Presbyterian.