there’s something sweetly melancholy about the last days of summer when it’s still warm enough for swims and eating outdoors, but the chill in the early mornings and late evenings signals the frigid days that lie ahead. With the timeline for travel bubbles still uncertain, it’s probably best not to [...]

Professor Hallie Buckley and Dr Peter Petchey presented their insights from their archaeological research at Drybread Cemetery at our AGM on 9 February. Drybread was established in the early 1860s as a gold-mining settlement at the northern end of the Manuherekia Valley. Thirty years later Drybread was abandoned as gold [...]

Lance Corporal John Hanrahan The Central Otago Heritage Trust received funding in 2019 for the Oral History Project. Our goal is to develop a collection of oral histories capturing the unique stores of Central Otago. At the heart of this project is a group of volunteers trained to [...]

Central Otago has its fair share of grim place names such as ‘Deadman’s Point’, ‘The Lonely Graves’, ‘Drybread Cemetery’ and the ‘Linger and Die’ reserve in Alexandra. We explore the origins of ‘Linger and Die’ and whether this bleak name is justified. The Linger and Die is a public reserve [...]

The dispatch of the dearly departed became an add-on service for a few enterprising colonial Central Otago builders, joiners and picture framers. Although funeral services seem an unlikely diversification for such businesses nowadays, it was a logical solution back in the 1870s when the influx of settlers and goldminers to [...]