Dunedin’s engineering landscape highlighted
Author’s follow-up book after Whanganui
Hot on the heels of her 2020 book, Take Me With You! A Self-Drive Guide to Whanganui's Engineering Heritage, engineer and author Karen Wrigglesworth has done it again, this time swerving south with Take Me With You Too! A Self-Drive Guide to Dunedin's Engineering Heritage.
This book is a bit bigger than the other.
“The stories are slightly bigger too because there are more layers to the stories down there,” says Karen.
The book is filled with photographs, taken mostly by Karen, and descriptive chapters about much more than just engineering. Karen was obviously taken with the history, scenery and wildlife.
The book came out of a residency. “I applied for a residency with the Robert Lord Cottage in Dunedin and pitched the Dunedin book idea to them. At that point I had fairly well written the Whanganui book — which came out of a series of articles I wrote — and I was trying to pull it together into a book.” Her idea was to finish the Whanganui book as part of the residency and get started on the Dunedin book. The residency would enable her to do the research and start writing.
“It was really because the opportunity came up in Dunedin that I focused on Dunedin next, which was fortuitous, because, as it happens, Dunedin has got an incredible engineering heritage of its own. It’s very distinct to the landscape, so comparing Whanganui stories with Dunedin stories, you get similarities like the observatory and so on . . . but, like bridges in Dunedin are very distinct and of the place.”
Our rivers and terrain are different, so our bridges are different.
“The Cumberland Street Bridge is quite a light-looking 1970s structure that goes across the main highway and the railway corridor, so it’s quite different, both in terms of what it does and in terms of the way it looks on the landscape.”
Karen says the steepness of Dunedin streets has also led to the cable car legacy.
“It’s been very interesting to ferret round and find the stories of the place, and, once again, to get into what the stories are, how things work and the engineers behind them.”
She says she tries to keep it diverse. “You’ve got civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical — and there are others now — all engineering.” And she tries to keep an eye out on the landscape.
“As you start to explore and do the research . . . you find things, talk to people, learn stuff. Then I went back and did the photography and that’s when you get a real sense of where they are in the landscape, what they look like, and what else there is potentially as well. It’s a mix of things.”
The title of the book implies that the reader can see these things for themselves so everything has to be accessible.
Almost 40 chapters cover a huge range of places and engineering works, from the steepness of Baldwin St to Donaghy’s Rope Walk (fascinating) and Dunedin Botanic Garden. A map on the inside front and back covers gives directions to every place in the book.
“What I love about a project like this are the hidden things.”
The book comes with a full bibliography and the cover art is the work of Freyja Wrigglesworth, the author’s daughter.
Take Me With You Too! A Self-Drive Guide to Dunedin's Engineering Heritage is being launched at Lockett Gallery, next to Paige’s Book Gallery in Guyton St, at 5.15pm on Monday, October 3.
Next year, Karen says, there will be another book on the rest of Otago.