A Strictly Local Matter

Not one to spurn a chance to advance himself socially, David Loughrey made the most of an opportunity to see and be seen.

World War 2 was a time when Dunedin citizens pulled together to battle Jerry and generally came together for King and country. Well ... most people. Criminals kept doing their thing, but, as David Loughrey has uncovered, it was a different class of con in the good old days.

It was transported by recalcitrant truck drivers and put together by hard men in the Great Depression to sate the thirst of a worried city. It is the Deep Creek pipeline, an engineering marvel that springs from a frozen fold in the earth. David Loughrey investigates.

It is three decades since one of the darker episodes in electrical engineering history took place in Dunedin. David Loughrey looks back to the 1980s with an excerpt from his soon-to-be-released book Hot Solder: The Andrew Hollison Story*, on the life of an enigmatic and controversial Dunedin electrical engineer.

It comes from an age when utilitarian purpose did not preclude elegant design of the very latest fashion. The Ward St substation is one Dunedin's finest infrastructure buildings, an art deco masterpiece that once provided careers for tidy, introspective loners.

SW3 is a modest building.

A Dunedin crowd used to lines of large men thundering into each other with ball in hand turned out to a football match this week, as Serbia took on Hungary in the Fifa Under-20 World Cup. David Loughrey hid among the spectators in row Z, taking notes on the ebb and flow of the game, and the madness of crowds.

Its name is of uncertain origin, it has been split into three by Statistics New Zealand, but St Kilda is a solid seaside suburb with neither airs nor affectations. David Loughrey travelled to the wide avenues and tight grids of the city's south to get a taste, and cast a sharp eye over the numbers.

Exactly 4614 people* live in Northeast Valley, one of a number of indisputable facts about this sometimes enigmatic suburb. But the facts only tell half the story. Armed with a sharp eye and a feel for humanity's strengths and weaknesses, David Loughrey ventured into the valley to find the whole truth.

In the pre-dawn darkness of a slumbering Dunedin, the spiritual arise to cleanse themselves from the sins of the night. David Loughrey followed them on their daily ritual, received a baptism of hot salt water, and came face to face with creation.

Viewing penguins, touring heritage buildings, and taking photographs of the Dunedin Railway Station are all good things to do when you come to Dunedin. For long-term residents, though, a favourite activity is being angry. To help newcomers, David Loughrey has put together a guide to being angry in Dunedin.

The shadowy and little-known existential infrastructure services unit at the Dunedin City Council was set up to deal with issues of existence, philosophy and the absurd. The unit was housed in crawl space behind the stone facades of the Municipal Chambers and its reception area was an intolerably low and stuffy room in the ceiling of the Skeggs Gallery.

For most of us, a trip to Pixie Town is a happy Christmas-time highlight. Not so for David Loughrey, who says the ''remorseless, jerking hysteria of the dreadful sharp-eared Christmas gang'' is settled deep within his subconscious. He braved near certain psychological damage to relive the traumas of his youth.

David Loughrey recently did something he'd never done, despite a severe reluctance to exit his comfort zone. He represented the city's socially awkward and fearful citizens on a trip to the Dunedin Casino, and he learnt a sort of lesson.

A certain flouncy flower was in bloom in Dunedin this week, and enthusiasts gathered to celebrate its sensuous delights. David Loughrey had been dimly aware of a blur of colour of late. He meditated on the whys and wherefores of the rhododendron, and found himself transported to the land of the Buddha.

A Dunedin city troubled by repressed childhood pain and a collective lack of self-esteem was invaded by 210 plain-clothes psychiatrists this week. Hiding the dark recesses of our psyche from their relentless gaze was essential. Fortunately, David Loughrey was keeping an eye on the visitors, and uncovered a weakness.

They sat neatly on varnished wooden pews, 250 smartly dressed women wearing fashionable leather boots and holding elegantly curved wine glasses.

Thousands upon thousands of spam emails land in the in-boxes of Dunedin workers every day of the week. But who thinks of the poor souls whose lonely job it is to send them? David Loughrey does. Today, with a little help from Google Maps, he imagines the empty lives of the emailers who spammed him recently.

Housie is thought to have begun in Italy in the 1500s, before migrating through Europe, played by the French aristocracy along the way. Not to be outdone, South Dunedin is a stronghold of the local housie hustle. David Loughrey travels to the flat to bear witness, and discovers a fast game is a good game.