Oamaru, July 2025

I rise after a night drinking with Michael O’Brien in his cottage. Last time I did so I bore the brunt of a mortal liver the next day, every footstep was a lash of self-flagellation. Today though I am buoyed by the fact that I showed relative self-control the night before. My gastric, mental and circulatory systems all seem to be in as good a working order as they ever are. The healthy glass of malt whisky that closed off the day before at 2am seemingly dissolved away with my pre bed prayers.

My mission for the morning is mutton pie. Mutton pie is a minor obsession of mine. Descended from Scotch Pie, it came here to the south of New Zealand with Scottish immigrants. It involves well spiced minced hogget or mutton being cooked inside a robust pastry case that sits somewhere between short and hot water pastry. Traditionally the pies would retain a rich fatty gravy which after biting the pie open one could drink, or if one was of a profligate nature pour out before eating the remaining pie. They are both delicious, endangered and tied to this place and its history.

My first stop this morning is what was once an Oamaru institution. I head to what was known as Willetts Tearooms but is now the oddly named Badger and Mackerel. Willetts began in 1920 and lost its name when it moved a few doors down the road earlier this century. Badger and Mackerel is I suspect a far cry from what made Willetts an institution. The café is fine but if it were not for mutton pie and cheese rolls one might be anywhere in the country. Kaitaia, Karori or Kingsland the lattes, pin wheels, scones, upside down artistic hanging pot plant baskets and artful but unarresting paintings on the wall don’t say anything about place. Rather they say something about aspiration.

I order the mutton pie, which is still named Willetts. I am asked if I want black sauce, I accept. In Oamaru black sauce is a kind of Worcestershire sauce with less fermented fish tang than Lea and Perrins. The pie is delicious. Despite the modern trend for a leaner filling and accordingly less glorious fatty gravy the Willetts pie fills my plate when I cut into it releasing the sacred juices of the sacrificial lamb … er… mutton. I sit with friends and the company is equally good. But the surroundings are not right. This slice of contemporary NZ café culture doesn’t fit my ideas about Oamaru, or about mutton pie. I finish my pie and coffee and move on in search of a second.     

The Lagonda Tearooms (sometimes expressed Milkbar) is a slice of childhood. A bastion of pie warmer tradition. Sausage and chips and mutton pie and cheese rolls hold the heat while club sandwiches and lamingtons and cream donuts sit in the south ocean ambient cool. The plush, spotless crimson geometric carpets extend from room to room snaking around the corner from Thames to Eden St. The milkshake machine is perpetually primed, a magazine of luridly coloured syrups ready to fire in anger. Little old ladies sip tea accompanied by caramel slice, they are straight out of 1986, as if untouched by the weathering forces of history. Farmers lay down a future challenge to the ladies behind the counter as they drag mud encrusted red bands across the spotless floor. A Māori family pile in, a baby scooped up in his sister’s arms, a precious sack of giggles. Sausage rolls and big mugs of tea break their fast. The lady in charge spies a $2 coin on the mesmerising carpet. She strides across to a family breakfasting on tinned spaghetti on toast. “Would your little one like to play the grabber machine? I found this on the floor”

I buy a mutton pie made by McGregor’s in Palmerston (south). The woman at the counter folds the top of the bag over and even as she does I can see the brown paper at the bottom start to go translucent, a good sign. I step out the door, back into 2025 , but instead of turning towards the main drag and its juxtaposition of golden arches and memorials to the glorious dead, its church tower that still rings out the hour and the brutalist green wall of a Woolworths that has just been painted back from its dalliance as a Countdown, I head towards the sea and the railway line that safely keeps the township from its ocean.

I walk down to the old railway station. It is now unused as the solemn chorus of ‘nose slicing to spite face’ fiscal austere-ist powers that be, don’t hold with rail travel in this land. I can hear traffic rumbling down the main drag a block away. I walk up onto the platform and shelter from the drizzle. To the east the Pacific Ocean extends away under a cloak of rain. North and south the rails disappear amidst roughly hewn scars of rock and gravel and the odd slab of gently rusting iron. Iron that was no doubt here rusting beside the tracks the first time I visited Oamaru 20 years ago; it was probably here when I was born 45 years ago. Who is aging better I wonder? a ridiculous comparison but a human one.
The McGregor’s pie is peppery, higher in spice than the Willetts, but it is also leaner, the fat is in the brown paper bag while the centre of the pie is a little dry lacking in gravy goodness. It is still delicious, and it is my second pie of the morning. I have no license for complaint. I am full of mutton pie and at least for now I am immune to last night’s excesses, life is good.

I wander back to the main drag, back to 2025.