Incredible bulk: Bull kelp reaches giant size

Kelp grows on the most exposed rocky shores and reaches its greatest size in the south of New Zealand.

Kelp has one of the fastest growth rates of any of the marine plants.

This bull kelp specimen, pictured right, on Oreti Beach in June 2016 could be close to a world record. The fronds were 10m long, stalks 10cm thick and the total weight was around 240kg.

Kelp grows on the most exposed rocky shores and reaches its greatest size in the south of New Zealand.

Southland has hundreds of species of seaweeds and the Bluff and Rakiura coasts are possibly the richest in the world. Towards the equator corals replace seaweeds, and in Antarctica the abrasion by ice, low temperature and long periods without sunlight prevent seaweed growth in the intertidal zone.

First Church

Invercargill’s best-known church is First Church in Tay St, designed by John Mair and completed in 1915.

The unusual design is in the Italo-Byzantine style and perhaps influenced by St Mark’s Basilica in Venice which Mair would have seen in his travels through Italy and France.

More than a million bricks were used with the colours forming intricate patterns. One is said to have been intentionally placed out of pattern to show that the works of man fall short of the works of God.

A fire damaged the church in 2015 and it reopened after two years’ restoration

A fictional first

The first appearance of Southland in a work of fiction is in Julius Vogel’s peculiar novel Anno Domini 2000, published in 1889. Stewart Island, in 2000, has ‘‘huge factories for tinning fresh fish caught on the banks to the south-east, large establishments for dressing the seal-skins brought from the far south and for sorting and preparing for the market the stores of ivory brought from near the Antarctic Pole, the remnants of prehistoric animals which in the regions of eternal cold have been preserved intact for countless ages.’’

At the date of publication the existence of the Antarctic continent was known but it was another six years before anyone landed on it.

Vogel had been the eighth Premier of New Zealand from April 1873 to July 1875 and briefly in 1876 but never had the financial resources to sustain the lifestyle he aspired to, so abandoned New Zealand in September 1876 for the lucrative office of Agent-General in London for the New Zealand government.

He was a Jew when many of his contemporaries held a deepseated anti-Semitism, and not of a long-established family with capital, and he was an ill fit into the political establishment of the time but he founded The Otago Daily Times and his borrowing plans financed the early development of railway in New Zealand.