(DRAMATIC BEAT) Mark Twain ` one of the most famous writers who's ever lived. Even if you've never read his books, I bet you've heard of him. In 1895, he was broke and was forced to do a worldwide lecture tour. He came here. What did he think of us? What did we think of him? And what else was happening in New Zealand at that time? (SLOW COUNTRY MUSIC) Captions by Kristin Williams. Edited by Antony Vlug. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2019 (HARMONICA MUSIC) Oamaru ` where stone rocks. (FUNKY MUSIC) Old-looking buildings and little blue penguins are the town's current cash crop. (UPBEAT MUSIC) A group of these delightful birds is called a raft, by the way, and rafts bob in each night to find the penguin equivalent of Airbnbs. They draw the kind of crowds even Twain would've envied. Back in the day when I first met Oamaru, I remember thinking, 'What a cool wide main road, 'and what dope white stone buildings'. It suggested a past that is still quite present. (SLOW COUNTRY MUSIC) Oamaru Museum's Chloe Searle is sharing the buzz on Oamaru. So, Twain performed one night here in Oamaru. What do you think the place would've been like in 1895? Well, he didn't spare much ink on Oamaru, but I think one of the things that probably would've struck him would've been all the stone buildings. That was quite unusual for a New Zealand town. Most other places are built out of wood and brick,... Yeah. ...but Oamaru didn't really have a lot of timber around, so they made great use of the local limestone and built all these fabulous buildings down here. So, I mean, these were grain stores,... Yeah. ...but yet they're these amazing architectural monuments just to store bags of grain in. INTRIGUED: Oh! So this would've been quite unusual for New Zealand towns back then? Yeah, definitely. Wow. Maybe he didn't spare much ink cos he was... he was speechless. He just thought, 'Wow. That's so nice.' Yeah. (CHUCKLES) That's a nice idea. It seems like Oamaru was quite a thriving town back then. Sort of thriving on the surface in the sense of these gorgeous buildings going up, but in terms of sanitation ` not so good. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, today we take for granted you can turn on the tap, get some nice, clean drinking water, but for Victorian Oamaru, that was actually a real struggle. People were drinking water out of Oamaru Creek, which is also where they were washing their clothes, and people would drown in there, and it just... Not a good place to get your drinking water. A lot of drinking and quite a few brothels. Oamaru was famous for having a lot of sly grogging and a lot of prostitutes, basically. (CHUCKLES) And sly grogging, they would've needed the water for that too, eh? Oh, yeah, definitely. (CHUCKLES) Do you think... Do you think that's why sly grogging was quite a thing? Just to kind of forget the yucky water? I think it probably was. You could probably tell yourself that a beer's nice and hygienic, so just have a few of those instead of drinking the creek water. (LAUGHS) (LAUGHS) With three males for every female, there was a bit of a woman drought, and that led to the Red Plague. Frequenting one of the towns many brothels spread trouble around Oamaru like wildfire. (EASY-GOING COUNTRY MUSIC) So with the people of Oamaru with no clean water and suffering all kinds of horrible diseases, they badly needed a solution. This is part of it here. (COUNTRY MUSIC) The Oamaru Council hatched an ambitious plan to take water from the Waitaki River to the taps of Oamaruvians. In a miracle of civil engineering, a 50-kilometre water race was constructed, and the remnants can still be seen today. This is an example of Victorian civil engineering that has very few other equivalents. In the country? In the country. I'm sure of that. It's a treasure for all of New Zealand, but it just happens to be tucked away in North Otago. Local boffin Bruce is obsessed with this engineering enigma and thinks it should be a structure of national significance. I tend to agree. Well, we're walking on the old water race here, Oscar. It flowed at about walking speed, but it delivered about 5000 litres a minute. What?! How would you like to dig this, man? 50 kilometres. I guess, the advantage back then is you wouldn't have had that traffic control and cones, which would've annoyed all the people and their horses. No resource management, mate. (LAUGHS) No. Somebody in the council said, 'Let's build a water race,' and somebody else said, 'That's a good idea.' Yeah. 'I'll get the money. 'You get the men,... Yeah. '...and we'll do it.' Wouldn't it be good if the world was like that now, eh? Yeah. (DRAMATIC MUSIC) This feels like a special place. What is this? This is Oamaru's water supply reservoir. (DUCKS QUACK) So, the water supply that came from Duntroon in an open race... over aqueducts and through tunnels and gradually filled this pond up with water. So this is where the water completes its 50-kilometre journey? Yes, and it went from here... under the water and through huge cast iron pipes into Oamaru, which is, by the way, a long way away. You're very passionate about this, aren't you, Bruce? Hell, yeah. Why? Why should we care? Oamaru as a town wouldn't have existed unless we had clean water. Ultimately, we would've run out of stream and roof water, and the town would've shrivelled and died. It was a huge financial commitment for the council of the time. They did it because they were convinced that Oamaru was going to be New Zealand's most famous city. (LAUGHS) Well,... things transpire, don't they, you know? I noticed that because it's such a big main street, isn't it? It is. It looks like a big city. They planned for it to be a big city, but without this lake here, there would've been no Oamaru; I can tell you, it would've died. That's amazing. That was` That must've been a happy day in Oamaru. Yep. It would've been like getting the internet. (LAUGHS) Yeah. I... It was bigger. I reckon it was bigger than that. Diphtheria and diarrhoea and even more dangerous diseases virtually disappeared overnight. And it made Oamaru a unique town in the world that we derived the energy to make famous barbed wire, grind flour... Everything. Instead of using a steam engine to do it, you could buy water and do it. When you went to see Mark Twain and the lights came on, it was generated by this water. It came here without too much dirt in it, but I think at some time or other, somebody might've released trout or something. (LAUGHS) And the engineer had to acknowledge one day, in the newspapers, in print, that he apologised for the fish coming out of the taps. So it not only watered the town, but it feed them in some instances? (LAUGHS) Wouldn't it have been good if it had been white bait, eh? You wouldn't have told the engineer, would you? You'd have just kept turning the tap on. And it lasted 100 years?! 103 years. It was still delivering water to Oamaru. Not only that, but the pipes that're under the ground here, and all the way into town, have just been examined, checked out, buried again, and the engineer told me ` personally ` that they're good for another 150 years. Wow. So that those guys back in 1880 built something of which the bulk of it, or the working part of it, has got a 300-year life ` that's not bad for civil engineering work. That's amazing. And it was all hand built. Yeah. It was all before traffic control and cranes and everything. I'm so glad it's still here. It's got all of the features that attracted me to this civil engineering ` elegance, structural strength... I mean, it's been through a few earthquakes. It's carried millions of tonnes of water in its lifetime, and you can still walk safely across it, you know? So` Now, tell me, Bruce, what's wrong with you? I'm not an ordinary Kiwi bloke. I can see that. You know that already. (CHUCKLES) Bruce ` from the outside looking in, you think, 'What a geek about something like the water race over 100 years old.' But, actually, I love geeks, cos they're not too cool for school. They're actually daring to be interested in something. And we need people like Bruce, and actually I reckon this country's full of people like Bruce, who are passionate about our history and want to preserve it. And it is actually their passion that keeps it alive and preserves that knowledge for future generations. So, to actually spend a bit of time in his company was a real privilege. Twain was getting to know the cut of New Zealand's GIB, but there was culture clash. Kiwi audiences expected the great humorist to laugh at his own jokes like how DJs on the radio do. But he didn't. Awkward. Maybe it's because they didn't like the ticket prices, but Oamaru had the smallest audience on Twain's South Island tour. Still, the reviewers showed him mad love. One wrote that, 'He was more grateful and comforting than a special brand of cocoa.' I don't know how reviewers write today, cos I never read them cos I'm too sensitive. READS: 'His visit will linger long and lovingly in our memories.' I bet Oamaru lingered long in Twain's memory too. Apparently, they let in animals, and there was a massive dog fight in the middle of his show. Brilliant! Still, Twain wouldn't have minded. Apparently, he loved animals. Coming up ` what happened to New Zealand's first elephant,... ...and the imposter who gave the CIA the slip in Christchurch. No! The CIA were after him` Yes. ...and he was hiding in Christchurch? That's right. * (EASY-GOING COUNTRY MUSIC) The mighty Waitaki River ` the picturesque border between Otago and Canterbury. And not many people know this, but it's also where the first elephant in New Zealand died. She'd taken part in the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857 and ended up in Otago in 1868, where she was displayed in pubs. The owner was taking her from Oamaru to Timaru. They stopped here, turned her loose. She gorged herself on tutu berries, and three hours later she was dead. Poor thing. Feel like they should... put a elephant statue here to mark the site. Its trunk was cut off and hung in the butcher's window. Oh, awesome (!) I bet that made the sausages feel inadequate. (GUITAR RIFT) It's November 12 now, and our touring Yankee Doodle dandy is calling in on Christchurch. He rubbed shoulders with loaded entrepreneur Joseph Kinsey. I wonder if he tapped him up for some cash. Twain's wife, Olivia, and daughter Clara loved this carbon copy of mini England ` the stone churches, babbling brooks and willow trees. (EXHALES LEISURELY) I wonder if Twain knew that these willows were grown from cuttings of the very trees that shadow Napoleon's grave? These are Napoleon's willow trees. These are Napoleon's willows. That's cool. Local river rat Charlie knows the Avon inside out. Christchurch is a bit like the river itself. You know, when you first see it, it looks very, kind of, English and European and gentile, and there's people punting down it and stuff. But, you know, you get under the surface, and there's this, kind of, other side to Christchurch, the, kind of, darker, more gothic side. I mean, in the 1880s, there was, like, this real problem with lots of people getting drunk and falling into this river and drowning. There were, kinda, about 30-odd people that drowned. Eight were drunk, five were suicides, five were children, two in boating accidents, and one drowned trying to retrieve his hat from the river. So there's quite a catalogue of death around this river, essentially. And there's some other stuff. We're right near the hospital here. Yes. And there was a thing in the 1880s, where, basically, all the waste from the hospital was just being pumped straight into the river. So you'd go under the surface, and you'd find some pretty Gothic stuff. It's quite weedy. If you look down there, there's quite a few weeds and stuff. Yeah. There was this great idea in the 19th century where they proposed to import water buffalo. (LAUGHS) Why?! They were going to put the water buffalo in the Avon, and then the water buffalo would eat all the weeds, and then we'd eat the water buffalo. Wow. (LAUGHS) Damn the Avon for having an anti-buffalo stance. # DJ! No moneyman. # (COUNTRY GUITAR MUSIC) Christchurch knew how to toot its own horn in 1895. That's when the bicycle band joined two awesome pastimes to create the only band of its kind in the world. They played one-handed and made their last ride in 1910. Twain was never shy to give his opinion on things. This is what he had to say about religion. 'Religion was invented when the first conman met the first fool.' (INHALES DRAMATICALLY) Whoa. Bit harsh. And in 1895, Christchurch had an American preacher who was a bit of both. Famous fraudster Arthur Bently Worthington founded the Temple of Truth. Professor Peter Lineham loves telling this riotous Canterbury tale. So, Arthur Bently Worthington arrived in Christchurch in 1891 and claimed to have some wonderful new religion. He built this church... Yeah. ...in Latimer Square called the Temple of Truth, and colonial people were, I think, suckers... (LAUGHS) ...for anything exciting. I've got a copy of his book, actually ` The Worthington Lectures. Wow. And I seem to have a correction copy, because he's busy editing it. There's pencil marks through it. Do you think that's his pencil marks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow! Yeah, of course. You've got Arthur's actual writing in the book? And if you look for some common, sensible argument in the book, you look in vain. It's not there. It's a hotchpotch of ideas. So what was his fate? A rival minister used a detective agency to track down that Worthington was in fact into his sixth marriage ` changed his name every time in order to be somebody else ` and had come to New Zealand to let the heat die down. And the CIA had issued a reward for the discovery of Arthur Bently Worthington. No! The CIA were after him,... Yes. ...and he was hiding in Christchurch? That's right. Well, when the citizens of Christchurch heard, there was a genuine riot in Christchurch. They read the Riot Act, which gave them the power to arrest freely. To go in and start bonking heads? That's right. Would that've been maybe one of the first incidents in New Zealand? Yes, it was. Yes, it was. It was?! Yeah, yeah. The first time the Riot Act was read` That's right, yeah. ...was outside the Temple of Truth? That's right. Whatever you think of Arthur Bently, clearly he had the gift of the gab. And despite the fact that he caused New Zealand's first proper riot, he clearly didn't learn from his mistakes. He spent his final years in prison in America, and apparently he died behind bars while chatting to his 10th or 12th wife. They're not sure exactly which. Hm. Next ` Excuse the hat. It's just I never get to wear a bowler, so... No. Well, you look so good in it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Could Twain stomach a Kiwi feed made up of dishes based on his books? Gelee du vant Tom Sawyer. You see what they did there? And what did moa taste like? They fried up some sausages in this ancient moa grease, and it was delicious, apparently. BREEZY SONG: # Wake up, it's a beautiful morning # Sun is shining bright for your eyes # Wake up, it's so beautiful # Wake up # Wake up, it's a beautiful morning # Wake up # Sun is shining bright for your eyes # Wake up, it's so beautiful # Wake up. # * Twain wrote of loving New Zealand audiences, but there was an inhabitant he missed meeting. It stood 10 feet high and must've been a sight to look at. No. Not a naked Samoan with a terrible accent. That'd be the moa which Twain saw at the Canterbury Museum, so I'm gonna do the same. (HIP-HOP MUSIC) These are moa bones, my friend. Check that out. So that is a tibia or a shin bone off a giant moa. Quinn Berentson's like a dog with a bone ` especially the big ones. He really digs them. (CHUCKLES) Mark Twain was quite taken with them, wasn't he? He was. He mentions them a few times in his book about his journey to New Zealand, actually. The first time he talks about it, he was on the steamship on the way here and apparently met a New Zealand natural scientist who spun him some pretty tall tales about Maori riding moa and then moa being used to deliver the mail and apparently them being wiped out by the railway service so that they could take over the mail delivery. But then when he got to Christchurch, he definitely made a beeline for the museum to check out, you know, the world's greatest collection of moa bones from himself. So, was it a case of each family hunting a moa for themselves? Or was it more organised than that? Well, down here in Canterbury, it was definitely more organised than that. You find these massive, massive moa processing sites. Like moa meatworks, basically, covering hectares. I don't suppose we know how they tasted? There's one record, and it's actually from a European guy called Walter Mantell who found the first, kinda, moa hunting site, and it still had this, kind of, grease` old, ancient moa grease in it. And so, he wrote in his diary they fried up some sausages in this ancient moa grease. And... it was delicious, apparently. So that's the only record we have, but I think you can presume they were pretty tasty. Moa was no longer on the menu, but in the late 1800s, a group of artsy folk gathered to eat, drink and... be, well, arty. Known as The Savage Club, they insisted on staging a feast in Twain's honour. Foodie Richard Till has recreated their 1895 menu. AMAZED: Wow! Oh my gosh. What a spread. We're coming into the second service of three. Yeah. And this is, you know, my best approximation of what these boys would've been` Wow. ...putting up for an honoured guest. This menu is awesome, isn't it? On the left they've got the menu, but what's this funny thing on the right? Is that the agenda for the evening? Yeah, essentially. READS: 'First order of business... 'So smoke and then songs and then yarns.' READS: 'Yarns, music and mirth.' And then the punchbowl. Mm. (UPBEAT COUNTRY MUSIC) It all had to be done, a centrepiece ` which I'm sort of having as this hilarious thing here... (LAUGHS) ...with the moulded rice with peas in the middle ` and then everything had to be arranged symmetrically. So there had to be two of each of the chicken dish, two of the duck, two of the beef, and it was symmetrically on the table. The only point of reference we had for his dinner was this one from a couple of weeks earlier, and so I've kind of created this. And in the newspaper accounts, there were some dishes that I've added. Like, this jelly here, which is a port wine jelly. And it's on the menu in the newspaper. It's referred to as gelee du vant Tom Sawyer. Gelee du vant Tom Sawyer. You see what they did there? Yeah, nice! Of course. Cos he wrote the book. So everything on the table would've had some reference tagged on to it. That would be like me going somewhere and they give me, like, Sione's Wedding cake. (CHUCKLES) Right. Or bro'Town burgers. And how often does that happen? Never. Oh. (LAUGHS) (LAUGHS) (TRAM CHIMES) I was 21 when I first came to Christchurch, the Garden City. I was walking through the Square at night and a carload of skinheads drove past yelling abuse and calling me the N-word. I thought, 'What the hell? What is this place? I'm going back to Auckland.' But I stayed, and soon I discovered close family I never knew about. I met some other cool people, and together we formed a theatre company. And it was here that I discovered my creative heart. I arrived a TV presenter and left a playwright. And I came to love this place.