Australasia > New Zealand > South Island > Otago > Country town > Articles > Otago Peninsula: Poets, Ghosts and Penguins

"There is said to be a ghost in Larnach Castle...an apparition dressed in black," the tourist brochure declares. It sounds like a tried though not necessarily true line.

The stone lions and dark pines of Larnach Castle sit high on a ridge on Otago Peninsula near the South Island New Zealand city of Dunedin. The peninsula has jagged, symmetrical headlands that seem from the air like the wings and tail of a bat designed by a mad cartographer. A suitable place for shades to dwell.

Larnach Castle sits amid 35 acres of gardens and gales, about half an hour's drive from Dunedin. Its "ghost" is said to be that of its founder, William Larnach, the 19th Century businessman and parliamentarian whose Gothic Revival dream home too soon became his nightmare. It always was a nightmare for his maids - they had to lug hot water up three flights of stairs to fill Larnach's marble bath. I spent the night in the very comfortable accommodation wing established by the castle's current owners, the Barker family, and unlike William Larnach, had a profoundly untroubled sleep.

After the castle's completion in 1875, Larnach's first wife died, followed by his second one and then his daughter. Marrying a third time, to a much younger woman, William Larnach soon discovered that his bride was embracing rather too fondly her new family - in particular, his own eldest son. In 1898 the desolate Larnach locked himself in his room in Parliament House, Wellington and with his revolver dispatched his woes to the great Hansard beyond.

In 1967 the Barker family rescued the building from impending demolition. Having slowly restored this elegant stone, iron and glass creation, and installed comfortable guest rooms in its adjacent Lodge, plus a great table, they now preside over one of New Zealand's most unusual accommodations.

There's more to the 33 kilometre long Otago Peninsula than shades of Gothic gloom. Its fertile green slopes have long been a haven for people and creatures. The first settlers, some 900 years ago, were Maori explorers, followed much later (in the1820s) by European whalers and sealers. Then, in 1848, came two shiploads of dour Scots, intent on establishing a Free Church settlement at Dunedin.

Their leader, Rev. Tom Burns, was a nephew of the bard Robbie Burns, whose statue still dominates the town square. He sits there like a homeopathic dose of bawdiness for Dunedin's 115,000 citizens, surrounded as they are by cathedrals and churches.

Dunedin was meant to be the Edinburgh of Oceania; even its name means Edinburgh in Old Gaelic. Its handsome spires, as well as its more secular edifices, like the Law Courts, a Flemish Renaissance Railway Station and the 1869 University buildings, earn it a billing in my brochure as "... probably the best preserved site of Victorian-Edwardian architecture in the Southern Hemisphere". The brochure also notes that Dunedin's police station features "Queen Anne touches" - presumably those of the architect, not the occupants.

With the Scots came whisky and haggis, making Dunedin today the southernmost site in the world of these two traditional Scottish consumptions. But rather than smelling like Johnnie Walker's sink, Dunedin has a delicious bouquet. Thanks to its Cadbury's factory, this is the only Victorian-Edwardian city in the world that smells like a giant cup of hot chocolate.

"Screams from tortured engines, human cries of anguish and sounds of crumpling metal and splitting wood..." It's my brochure again, this time noting a scene that occurs regularly on hilly Baldwin Street, which is listed in the Guiness Book of Records as "The World's Steepest Street".

The short, sharp incline (of 38 degrees) attracts a parade of motorists courting disaster. Typically, the car stalls half way up the hill; its brakes don't hold; the car rolls back... The residents of once sleepy Baldwin Street have lost count of their wrecked fences. Don't ask them - or their insurers - what they think of Guinness and his little book of brags.

Intent on setting no fence-wrecking records, I drive back out on the Otago Peninsula, past its cypress hedges and its sheep as woolly as pipe-cleaners. Here, at dusk, a toddle of Yellow Eyed Penguins pops from the surf and shuffles up the beach at the private conservation reserve, "Penguin Place". Heading inland, they make for ferret-proof nesting boxes. From special hides we watch these "Hoiho" (the Maori word means "noise shouter") penguins, the rarest in the world. At 65 centimetres height they are also one of the tallest penguin species. Ambling over the slopes, they strike me as much like little vagrants in tuxedos.

The Royal Albatross is the largest of all seabirds, with a wing-span exceeding three metres. For some reason, in 1938 several of them chose to nest on grassy Taiaroa Head at the very tip of Otago Peninsula. Instead of imitating the Ancient Mariner and shooting the birds, local volunteers diligently protected them.

As a result, Taiaroa Head is the only place in the world where albatrosses nest on a mainland. From an observation platform within the impressive Taiaroa Head Royal Albatross Centre we view the birds and their chicks through binoculars.

I soon understand why these magnificent sailors of the air spend only a tenth of their long lives on land. On terra firma the young albatross is hopelessly clumsy, but once gliding, it's poetry on the wind. To see a fledgling testing its wings on an autumn day is like witnessing the birth of flight.

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