Port Chalmers - History

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 9, 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 central 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 central 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 gave Dunedin the major South Island container port. In 1979, passenger trains between Port Chalmers and the west harbour suburbs to the city centre 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.