Now aged 77, Mr Brickell said he felt much the better for his return trip South and to the Dunedin Gasworks Museum, where he has been attending a two-day symposium devoted to ''heritage-led regeneration''.
''It's added 10 years to my life,'' he said with a grin.
During the symposium, which ended yesterday, Mr Brickell, OBE, gave a talk on ''the now-defunct coal gas industry - warts and all'' and recalled that before the advent of ''cheap and convenient state electricity'', almost every New Zealand town depended on coal gas for lighting and heating.
''The gasworks where gas was made were labour-intensive, smelly, polluting, dirty and socially frowned upon but enormously attractive to me as a boy and then later, before the last gasworks was decommissioned in Dunedin in 1987,'' he said.
And in 1975, Ralph Hotere had provided him with a house and studio in Port Chalmers where he had built a pottery kiln ''fired with waste bark from the log export wharves below''. Mr Brickell had also visited the Dunedin gasworks, which was then still operating, and encountered the ''splendid Victorian engine room'', realising that this place ''must be saved''.
Its subsequent preservation was a tribute to ''several like-minded folk''.
Yesterday evening, he attended the opening of ''A Hot Retort'', an exhibition of his gasworks history and art in terracotta, with watercolour sketches by John Madden.
The exhibition, at the Brett McDowell Gallery in Dowling St, runs until October 24.
