ŌAMARU — In a scene that seemed lifted straight from the pages of a fantastical novel, a woman clad in a striking pink frock coat introduced herself amid swirling steam from an unusual brass apparatus strapped to her back.
“I am Lady Sarsaparilla Ovabyte, of the Coventry Ovabytes,” she declared. “We specialize in crafting exquisite cordials.”
Beside her stood a man sporting glasses fashioned from conjoined forks.
“Captain Bob McSpoon, inventrepreneur,” he introduced himself with a nod.
On this Victorian-themed street in the quaint town of Ōamaru, New Zealand, Ovabyte and McSpoon, whose everyday names are Juliet and Greg Thorn, were not alone in their eccentric attire. They joined countless others donning goggles, forks, and steam-emitting devices for the town’s annual steampunk festival. This four-day event is a spirited celebration of the unusual, attracting thousands of enthusiasts from across New Zealand and beyond.
Steampunk, an imaginative fusion of Victorian-era style and speculative science fiction, envisions a world where steam power continued to evolve into modern times. This genre thrives on creativity and thrives on the mantra that the more peculiar, the better.
Steampunks pride themselves on a knack for recycling and DIY, honing skills in sewing, metalworking, hat-trimming and steam mechanics as they dream up fantastical personas with outfits to match. During the year, attendees are bricklayers, engineers, artists and farmers, with many describing themselves as normally shy or reserved. But they had come to the festival to be seen.
“The first time you dress up and go out in public is really scary and then people get such a buzz out of it,” Juliet Thorn said. “It’s so cool that you take on a different personality.”
Teapot racing and parasol dueling are steampunk sports
In its 17th year, whole traditions and sporting codes have sprung up around the steampunk festival, which is among the world’s best-known.
Hundreds crowded into upstairs rooms and old community halls for steampunk-themed contests. They raced to dunk cookies in cups of tea and cram the soggy results into their mouths before their competitors. A parasol-dueling contest looked like competitive vogueing judged on speed and style.
Michele Cotten won a fashion show displaying wild and upcycled outfits that participants spent months finessing. Cotten fused steampunk with the Star Trek universe to create a hooped dress made in the style of a navy Starfleet uniform. It was rigged with Christmas lights to evoke a galaxy and Cotten, a crowd favorite, strutted and posed to whoops from onlookers.
Then there was the teapot racing, in which competitors sent remote-controlled vehicles mounted with teapots around a fiendish obstacle course to the gasps and groans of a watching crowd.
“If you go out of bounds, that’s a disqualification,” said Ross McKay, one of the sport’s creators, who dreamed it up with his late wife and a friend. He has since introduced teapot racing to other steampunk events worldwide.
“It’s lots of fun and the judges will take bribes,” he added.
When McKay’s wife showed him pictures of steampunks, he recalled thinking, “What a bunch of weirdos,” but the self-confessed “history geek and science fiction nerd” found plenty to love about the genre. The retired banker was soon enrolled in night classes for sewing.
Now he is Captain Roscoe Dangerfield, Inspector of Nuisances to Her Majesty Queen Victoria III, which combines the historical element of a real Victorian job with the fiction of a monarch who never lived.
The steampunk community had become his tribe, he said.
Small town is an unlikely steampunk capital
Ōamaru is the placid home to 14,000 people and 3,000 endangered native penguins, the latter of which live at the far end of town in a colony so pungent it can be smelled from the hill above. The town on New Zealand’s South Island doesn’t feature the sweeping vistas popularized by the Lord of the Rings films, which bring tourists to nearby regions, and for years was mostly seen as a stopping point between the cities of Christchurch and Dunedin.
An architectural quirk has put Ōamaru on the map as what locals call the steampunk capital of the world. The town features a completely preserved Victorian street by the harbor, a legacy from the 19th century days when Ōamaru was a commercial and mercantile powerhouse as a departure point for meat, wool and grain exports from New Zealand to Britain.
The cream-colored stone buildings now form the backdrop for the festival’s steampunk adventures. Later in the year the town also hosts a Victorian festival celebrating a historically accurate version of the era, with the events coexisting peacefully after the steampunks and Victorians decided the town was big enough for everyone.
Anything goes in a no-rules genre
Steampunk, a term coined in the 1980s, gives participants an opportunity to rewrite Victorian-era social conventions on the basis that if you are flying on a magic carpet or traveling through time, it doesn’t matter if you make the rest up.
“We’re an equal opportunity society,” said Iain Clark, who co-founded the festival and is widely known in the community as Agent Darling. “Women, unlike in Victorian times, can be anything. We have female engineers, captains of industry, captains of airships, adventurers, explorers, scientists.”
Sometimes all in the same week. Bringing a different outfit for each day of the event is common and fitting rooms at the festival’s headquarters allow for quick changes, with nothing strange enough to raise eyebrows.
In the street, a Star Wars trooper trudged past, followed by a pack of wolves. A French tourist nervously adjusting his crocheted and leather gloves was introduced to steampunk only three days earlier and immediately fell in love with the genre.
“You can be creative and you can be somebody else and no one cares,” said John Syben, who was attending his fourth festival.
His partner, Chris Sinclair, said the pair previously had been “far too tame, so we’ve gotten more and more outrageous every year.”
“There’s always someone who’s more nuts than you,” she said.
