Giveaways
EVERY now and then I drive from Queenstown to Invercargill — known as ‘Invers’ to the locals — to get bits and pieces for my car, to go shopping, or to get a pedicure, as Queenstown is notoriously expensive for personal services.
Invercargill is not just the southernmost city in New Zealand, but the southernmost of all the cities where English is the main language, in the whole world.
On one of my trips down there, I set off on the 18th of January, which is high summer here. The day was gloriously warm. But the next two days became wrap-up days, as they often are at the south end of New Zealand even in summer.
Up to now, Invercargill has been overshadowed by flashier and more adventuresome tourist destinations like Queenstown, famous for things like bungy jumping and skiing as well as the undoubted charms of Lake Wakatipu.
But Queenstown seems to be full up, and overpriced. Many backpackers and freedom campers are also being driven out of Queenstown and its restrictive environs.
The fortunes of old-fashioned and off-the-beaten-track places like Invercargill often improve when people get tired of the Queenstowns of this world, and go looking for a more relaxing sort of holiday.
Invercargill might not do bungy jumping and skiing, but it’s still the gateway to the wilderness of southern Fiordland where the Hump Ridge Track is located; the coastal wilderness of the Catlins east of the city; the lengthy beaches of 26-km long Oreti Beach where Burt Munro used to race ‘The World’s Fastest Indian’ and the similarly lengthy beaches of Te Waewae Bay and Toetoes Bay; the town of Bluff (most southerly on the New Zealand mainland); Slope Point, the southernmost point on the South Island; and Stewart Island/Rakiura further to the south, a large island that is now one of a handful of international Dark Sky Sanctuaries.
Invercargill also has a lot of beautiful old buildings and parklands, which I’ve written about in an earlier post.
The large, classy Queens Park joins on to a so-called Town Belt of parkland that encompasses the inner city. The Town Belt is shaped like a trident with Otepuni Gardens, through which flows the Otepuni Stream, as the middle prong. The downtown area is thus divided up into two precincts in an arrangement very similar to the Adelaide Park Lands, except that in the case of Invercargill, the railway yards and the industrial district of West Invercargill (probably still a swamp in the 1800s) form the western side of the downtown precinct.
Such encompassing parklands were a common thing in colonial New Zealand and in some towns and cities in Australia too, such as Adelaide.
Here’s a more detailed aerial photo of a part of the central area, followed by a historical photo and some photos of my own taken inside areas highlighted with yellow ellipses. You can see the Otepuni Gardens and stream in this aerial photo, as well.
All in all, old colonial cities like Invercargill (and Adelaide) often have a lot of character and public amenity, and need to be kept that way.
On the other hand, anything to do with petrol and motor racing is a big thing in Invercargill, thanks to the influence of people like Burt Munro no doubt. Or to put it another way, Burt Munro didn’t race up and down Oreti Beach all by himself. I went to Teretonga Park, the home of (non-beach) motor racing in invercargill and its surrounding region, which is known as Southland.
There’s also Bill Richardson Transport World, which bills itself as “the largest private automotive museum of its type in the world;” an absolutely world-class double transport museum founded by the late H W [Bill] Richardson, a prominent Invercargill trucking company proprietor and passionate enthusiast for anything that ran on rubber.
Just lately, my friend Chris visited Bill Richardson Transport World, on Tay Street, with my father Brian, and got some great photos of his own.
Here’s a lineup of Ford automobiles from successive years in the late 1920s, 1930s and on through the World War II era and beyond showing how they got progressively more streamlined.
The lineup continues below. It’s actually quite educational.
The museum also had what it claimed to be the most complete set of pre-Model T Fords in the Southern Hemisphere. Yes, the Model T wasn’t Henry Ford’s first Ford by any stretch. But it was the first to be a big seller.
Here’s the last one before the famous Model T.
Most of the vehicles in Bill Richardson Transport World are historic trucks and vans of various sorts, however.
They included a very early Black Maria, or in this case, strictly speaking, a blue one. I wonder if the prisoner ever had to get out and help push?
n the Volkswagen hall, there was a Volkswagen microbus ambulance of the ‘Southland Hospital Board Invercargill,’ on which I am quite glad I never had to depend!
They also had a yellow Mini that appeared in the original 1981 version of the movie Goodbye Pork Pie, about a tearaway boy racer who keeps getting arrested.
Here’s a scene of Kiwi camping in the 1960s:
The housetruck on the right was made by John Britten of motorcycle racing fame, probably a bit later as he was born in 1950.
And here’s a sign from the days when Texaco, which changed its name, locally, to Caltex in 1941, advertised its products in New Zealand with Māori motifs. The chief shown here is King Tāwhiao.
There’s heaps more to see at Bill Richardson Transport World, plus a restaurant called the Grille (geddit!).
Basically, the place is a petrolhead’s heaven, though it is a bit pricey to get in: NZ $40 a head is the standard adult admission fee.
Bill Richardson Transport World is part of a wider Transport World triplet of museums that also includes Classic Motorcycle Mecca, which claims to be “Australasia’s premiere motorcycle museum.” That’s definitely for next time with Brian.
And Dig This Invercargill, a theme park in which people get to operate heavy machinery, which is closed for refurbishment till later in 2025.
The Southland Museum and Art Gallery in Queens Park has been closed since 2018 due to earthquake risk. It is scheduled to reopen in late 2026 as Te Unua Southland.
And earthquake risk, and the cost of refurbishment, was also used as a pretext to demolish almost the whole of Invercargill’s oldest and most historic city block, between Tay, Dee, Esk, and Kelvin Streets, across the way from the Crescent and the South African War Memorial.
Here’s a video of me walking around the area before it was redeveloped, and looking at the frontages. The buildings across the road, which I wondered about at the end, were safe.
I had quite a bit to say about all that in a couple of other posts called ‘From Heritage, to Glass and Girders?’ and 'Invercargill’s New Mall.'
It was on Saturday the 19th, when I was shopping for sandals, getting a pedicure and looking for car parts, that the locals I ran into told me about their ‘crazy’ council-sponsored redevelopment scheme.
Like just about everyone who isn’t from Invercargill, I’d heard or noticed nothing about it till I went there and met local people. It’s amazing how much can go on in a town without anybody who doesn’t actually live there ever finding out about it, even in the modern information age.
On the Saturday, I also managed to make enough time to get to Queens Park, where I caught up with about 100 runners from a club called Invercargill Parkrun. This seems to be an arrangement whereby busy people work towards a competitive race around the park once a month. I met a woman who was a marshal, guiding the direction of the run.
We spoke for 20 minutes. Her name was Marie and I found that I had met her socially eight years before, a friend of a friend. Her husband Ant was also a Facebook friend of mine, as it turned out. We ended up going to the park’s gilt-edged-service café, the Cheeky Llama, and talking more about the redevelopment scheme and other things.
The next day, a search for a second-hand bumper for my car led to a place called Demolition World, run by another woman named Leigh, which turned out to have nothing to do with car parts at all.
One of the old signs outside the front entrance promised panel-beating services, so I thought it must be an auto junkyard. It turned out that it was just a sign and that Leigh was a sign collector.
Instead, it was a re-created town made up of bric-a-brac from the colonial era to the 1960s, stuff that Leigh saved while on-selling more valuable recycling materials, timber mostly.
I was so astounded. Demolition World has a historic shopping street that recreates the past, including a church where people are getting married in the old style; a bar with old-style bottled beer; a ‘dairy’ (NZ expression) or corner shop from the fifties with 1950s containers for the products; a circus; a re-created toy shop with old toys; a blacksmith’s shop; a railway station; a horse-cart; and an old medical centre. It’s a work of art.
Leigh doesn’t charge for entrance, but appreciates a ‘gold coin’ donation (meaning $1 or $2, not real gold).
My next post will be an update about Invercargill’s port, ‘Blustery Bluff.’ In the meantime, there’s more about this part of the country in one of my books, The Sensational South Island, for sale on my website a-maverick.com.
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