Port Chalmers is the main port of the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. Although
it has been a suburb since local body reorganisation in the 1980s, it is
still regarded by most people throughout Dunedin as a separate town. It has
a population of 3,000. Port Chalmers lies ten kilometres inside Otago
Harbour, some 15 kilometres northeast from Dunedin's city centre.
Much of Port Chalmers is located on a small hilly peninsula, at the northern
end of which is a large reclaimed area which is now the site of Dunedin's
container port. Close to the southeastern shore of this peninsula are a pair
of islands, which lie across the harbour between Port Chalmers and the Otago
Peninsula. These two islands are Quarantine Island/Kamau Taurua and Goat
Island. Prior to the local body reorganisation in the 1980s Port Chalmers
was made up of several suburbs, as well as the central area, Roseneath,
Blanket Bay, Upper Junction, Brick Hill, Sawyers Bay, Mussel Bay, Upper Port
Chalmers, Dalkeith, Careys Bay, Reynoldstown, Deborah Bay, Hamilton Bay,
Waipuna Bay, Te Ngaru, and Aramoana, as well as the outlying townships of
Long Beach, Purakanui and several other smaller nearby villages and
farmsteads.
Although the harbour beyond Port Chalmers is regularly dredged, most of the
port activity is centred on Port Chalmers rather than on central Dunedin.
Part of the reason for this is the narrowness of the Victoria Channel, the
one part of the Otago Harbour navigable by large ships, which makes it far
easier for berthing to take place at Port Chalmers, closer to the open sea.
Any big ships venturing into the upper harbour and Dunedin's own wharfs need
to be piloted in with the help of tugs.
The port was the last visited by Robert Falcon Scott before heading south on
his final expedition to Antarctica. A large stone monument now stands above
the town dedicated to Scott's final expedition.
Most of Port Chalmers' economic activity centres on the container terminal.
Fishing, of historic importance, is now only a small part of the economy.
The creative arts are also important to the town's economy; Port Chalmers
and the surrounding suburbs of Careys Bay, Roseneath and Sawyers Bay have a
thriving arts community, and the town is regarded as a haven for alternative
lifestylers. Noted residents of the town include Māori artist Ralph Hotere.
Port Chalmers was also the appellation of a ship which sailed between
England, Australia and New Zealand at the beginning of the 20th century. It
was torpedoed in mid-October 1940 and sunk, with some crew surviving 14 days
at sea on the lifeboat.
History
According to Herries Beattie an old Māori name for Port Chalmers was
Potakere' or 'Pou-takere' which may have indicated the hill where the tuahu,
or altar, was sited. 'Koputai' is a later name and refers to an incident in
which the tide rose and beached canoes were set adrift. When a peace was
made between Kati Mamoe ('Ngati Mamoe' in modern standard Māori) and Kai
Tahu ('Ngai Tahu' in modern standard Māori), about 1780, Koputai was one of
two southern terminuses of Kai Tahu territory.
By February 1839 the Weller brothers of Otago (modern Otakou) on the
opposite side of the harbour had set up a saw pit which appears to have been
at Sawyers Bay. By September the following year a 'big boat', supposedly the
schooner Anne, was under construction, apparently there. In 1840 Port
Chalmers and the whole western shore of Otago Harbour from about Burkes to
Otafelo Point was included in Te Matenga Taiaroa's sale of land to the
French whalers Pierre Darmandarits and Edouard DuBern, brothers in law and
business partners. The first Christian service at Koputai was held by the
Reverend James Watkin, the Wesleyan missionary at Waikouaiti, in 1842.
Taiaroa's cousin Kohi was living at Koputai Bay in 1843 but, according to
Shortland, allowed himself to be strangled by Taiaroa, over a boat Kohi had
burnt at Koputai. By 1844 the place was deserted.
In that year Captain Wing anchored the Deborah in the bay now bearing its
name where he was joined by Frederick Tuckett who selected an adjoining
block of land (the Otago Block) as the site for the Scottish New Edinburgh
settlement. He nominated Koputai as its deep water port to be called 'Port
Chalmers' after the Presbyterian Free Church leader Thomas Chalmers. The
sale of the Otago Block from Māori to the Otago Association was concluded at
Port Chalmers 31 July 1844. Already, by June 9th, there were two whares,
Māori-style houses, and a pile of bricks waiting to be turned into Tuckett's
house. Mr. and Mrs. Lethbridge were in residence, David Scott and several
others. In December 1844 Alexander McKay and his wife arrived to open the
first public house, the 'Surveyors' Arms'. The town was surveyed by Charles
Kettle in 1846 and a Town Board was formed in that year. The first ships of
Otago Association settlers, the John Wickliffe and the Philip Laing,
anchored at Port Chalmers in March and April 1848.
Thereafter the town developed as a port for the city and the province,
superseding the earlier Otago (modern Otakou) as the harbour's international
port. It was first connected by lighter with Dunedin at the head of the
harbour, then also by a steep road from North East Valley to Sawyers Bay, a
spur of the main road north. By the 1860s a harbourside road from the city
had been formed. In 1866 the Town Board was superseded by a Borough. On 1
January 1873, the first 1,067 mm narrow gauge railway in New Zealand opened:
the Port Chalmers Branch, linking Dunedin and Port Chalmers. It was
subsequently incorporated into the national rail network through a
connection to the Main South Line, which was opened through to Christchurch
on 7 September 1878 and Invercargill on 22 January 1879. 1881 saw the
opening of the Victoria Ship Channel allowing ocean-going vessels passage up
the harbour to Dunedin. 1882 saw the inauguration of New Zealand's
refrigerated meat trade when the ship Dunedin left Port Chalmers with the
first such cargo.
Ship servicing and building industries developed in the 19th century while
the adjacent Carey's Bay became a fishing port. The development of the town
reflected the growth of Dunedin and Otago with rivalry between the city and
Port Chalmers over which would handle the bulk of shipping. After an early
fast start the city and the province declined in relative national
importance in the course of the 20th century.
Port Chalmers was a port of call for several notable expeditions during the
heroic era of Antarctic exploration. Following the 1923 transfer of the Ross
Dependency (Antarctica) to New Zealand, and the New Zealand Government's
lease of rights, the giant Norwegian whaler, C.A. Larsen, became the largest
vessel serviced in the Otago Dock, Port Chalmers, in April 1928.
A road tunnel linking Sawyers Bay with Waitati as part of a new north
motorway was proposed in the 1930s but never built. A new faster,
harbourside road from the city was completed in 1965. Passenger services
from the port ended in 1967. However the selection of Port Chalmers as the
South Island's first container terminal in 1971 demonstrated its advantages
over Lyttelton and relegated Dunedin as an overseas port. In 1979, passenger
trains between Port Chalmers and Dunedin ceased after 106 years of operation
The container traffic has continued to expand and a new expanding trade in
timber developed in parallel but the greatly reduced labour needs of these
trades saw the town's population contract. Controversial attempts to site an
aluminium smelter at Aramoana at the mouth of the harbour in 1975 and 1980
didn't succeed. The Otago Harbour Board, established in 1874, was replaced
by a quasi-autonomous local government entity, Port Otago Ltd, in 1988. The
1913 Port Chalmers Old Identities Society's collection was transferred to
the old Post Office building and reopened as the Port Chalmers Museum in
1987, and has since been renamed the Regional Maritime Museum. In 1989 the
borough of Port Chalmers and the whole surrounding district were absorbed
into an enlarged City of Dunedin.
From the 1970s an artists' colony grew up in Port Chalmers and Carey's Bay contributing to tensions over the port's continuing industrial development and giving a different flavour to the town. In the 1990s a new trade in visiting cruise ships added another element and continues to expand.
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