Thursday - Oamaru Architecture

We were up quite late on Thursday after a long sleep, having had a great time the previous evening. We breakfasted with Sally, sat around solving the worlds problems and then set off to see more of Oamaru.

Firstly we visited the workshop of John, who is a modeller who sometimes works for the renowned Weta workshop in Wellington. He is one of the creative geniuses behind some of the amazing Steampunk exhibits of Oamaru. We're looking forward to the unveiling of his next creation in a couple of weeks or so, but you'll need to keep an eye on the Oamaru Steampunk pages to find out what it is!

Then we went for a bit of a walk around the Victorian precinct, while Fi's camera got some exercise:

Tyne and Harbour St streetscapes, Criterion Hotel front door dead centre

There is an amazing collection of businesses in the precinct including bookstores, a Victorian milliner, a working woolstore, a metalworking workshop with original Victorian casting patterns, a bookbinder, a stonemason, a bookshop, a Victorian clothing shop and several cafes and art galleries. The Heritage Society has encouraged volunteers to dress in the period style and we saw many people in Victorian dress wandering the area during our ramble as well as a young chap riding a penny farthing. Three tour buses were parked in the general area during the morning and this augurs well for the wider broadcast of knowledge of Oamaru's treasures. The Japanese tourists were particularly enamoured of Steampunk HQ.

Here is a limited collection of photos from the Harbour and Tyne Street areas. The Oamaru Whitestone Civic Trust is responsible for the preservation of a lot of these buildings and it works with the Victorian Heritage Celebrations Committee to present an annual Victorian Heritage Celebrations festival, which will be held this year in Oamaru from 16 - 20 November 2011. The sixteen programme is available now from the contacts page of this site.

East side of Tyne Street, looking north

Michael O'Brien - bookbinder

Connell & Clowes building

Penny farthing

Union Bank

Slightly Foxed bookshop

View south along Harbour St towards The Loan & Merc

The Etherneum on Tees Street

After wandering back to Steampunk HQ and arousing the railway engine from the apocalypse with our two dollar coins, we met up with Phil and Sally for lunch at Annie's Victorian Tea Rooms, a delightful establishment that serves tea, coffee, sandwiches (without crusts of course), scones and (the piece de resistance) cake from the elaborate cake trolley. All of these are served by exquisitely mannered waiters and waitresses in period costume.

Annie Baxter and the scrumptious cake trolley

Mike, Phil, Sally and Fi partake of tea

We said farewell to Phil who was going back to work and we followed Sally to the Oamaru Public Gardens. We wandered through beautiful plantings of poppies, pansies, tulips, etc all in bloom. We also got to see some lovely old elm trees and a blue cedar - increasingly rare sights. The gardens include a Peter Pan garden where we finally said our goodbyes to Sally.

Entrance to the public gardens

Peter Pan and Wendy

Poppies

We headed to Steam (the cafe) after leaving the Public Gardens and had one last coffee there before climbing into Enzo and heading back down the road to Dunedin. We took the scenic route via Kakanui and followed a few of the Vanished World markers (set up for geologically interesting sites and another aspect of Oamaru that we could not investigate because of insufficient time). We rejoined the main highway at Hampden and arrived back in Dunedin about five o'clock. We raced through three days of catch up blog and went to bed.

So a huge thanks to Sally and Phil for their generosity, hospitality, boundless energy and bonhomie. Given that before this trip, we had met in a cafe for about an hour, they welcomed us into their home and tirelessly showed us some of the best of their community and culture. We look forward to returning the favour one day and hope to see them soon in Fremantle.

We are blogging about Thursday but today is Friday and it is our last day in Dunedin for tomorrow we drive up to Christchurch and then fly to Auckland in the afternoon. We will spend Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Auckland and then fly back to Christchurch on Tuesday before flying out to Sydney and Perth later that day. So there will be a gap in the blog for a few days and we will write up our Auckland experiences on our return home in the middle of next week. If you've been a regular follower of our blog, we thank you for sharing our journey with us and we hope you have found something of interest and some moments of humour here. We love New Zealand very much and Dunedin in particular and we hope a little of that shows through in our writing.

It is bronze play-off time tonight with Australia v Wales at 8:30 and we will be at Pirates with our yellow scarves and our national anthem, ready to sing and sink some final pints of the Buccaneers and say farewell to our friends at the club. Thanks a million Dunedin and Pirates Rugby Club alike, we were here for nearly seven weeks and we loved every single minute of it. More next week about the Rugby World Cup final!

Wednesday - STEAMPUNK!!!!

Wednesday dawned and we jumped in the car and headed off to Oamaru to visit the Steampunk Exhibition and stay with Sally and Phil, who had kindly offered us a place to stay on the basis of an hours conversation at the Nova Cafe before the Ireland v Italy match in Dunedin three weeks ago.  We had no real idea what to expect there in Oamaru and they were not sure we would accept their offer, but I can safely say that the world would be a better place if more people accepted invitations to visit from complete strangers in bars!








Before heading up there, our knowledge of Oamaru was limited to this:

• it is one and a half hours drive north of Dunedin
• it is famous in Dunedin for its limestone - Oamaru Stone - which is used as a contrast trim in many magnificent Dunedin bluestone buildings (including the railway station)
• the town seems a bit boring from State Highway 1 and you don't really feel like turning off to explore the town centre
• they have a Steampunk festival which is running right now and finishes on 27 November
• Sally and Phil live there

Oh and this vital piece of information:

A mere 36 hours later we could write reams ..... oh all right ..... we will wax lyrical AND write reams about one of the great, undiscovered places to visit in South Island.  And we hope that this blog can help fix the second adjective.

The town expansion during the late 1800s was fuelled partly by the Otago gold rush, but mostly by the boom in agriculture that followed.  However, its harbour is not as safe and usable as Dunedin and it missed out in seaborne trade to its southern neighbour.  It was, at the end of the 19th century, a bigger city than Los Angeles!  Money drifted away from Oamaru in the 1900s but what was left behind was a wonderful legacy of magnificent (and now magnificently preserved) Victorian buildings.  These include complete rows of adjoining buildings such as banks, municipal buildings, churches (so far, so good, but many towns have these architectural legacies) but in addition there is a very charming opera house and an entire section of commercial and mercantile buildings, many of which house operating businesses or clubs. Oamaru town currently has a population of roughly 12,000 people and regional Oamaru a population of roughly 22,000.

The heritage precinct of Oamaru, mostly Victorian buildings built of white Oamaru limestone

The local heritage society and the Whitestone Trust have laboured long and hard over many years to preserve, restore and keep these lovely buildings alive.  From some of that labour of love sprang forth the Steampunk Festival, now in its third year, which has stimulated the creative juices of many of the local residents and which has attracted regional and international entries this year.

Steampunk, for those not in the know, is a genre of art that imagines a technologically advanced, Victorian society.  Rather than the ubiquitous electricity of today, devices would be powered by steam, gas, or aetheric vibrations (you'll have to look that one up yourselves), but the clothing, optimism, and formality of Victorian culture remains.  Several authors, film makers, designers and many, many fans around the world have contributed to the rise of the genre over the last ten to fifteen years.

The exhibition is held in the beautiful Forrester Gallery in the Bank of New South Wales building in the main street of Oamaru.  Photographs cannot do this exhibition justice. We have a couple of photos but won't publish them here out of respect for the creators and their copyright. So you will just have to get on a plane to NZ and go there and see it for yourself so you don't miss out. Or you will have to lobby your local arts philanthropist to have this exhibition tour, because seriously, this is art that deserves a worldwide audience.
Every item is so engaging. There is a great marriage between each fantastical object and its accompanying cleverly-crafted written commentary card. There are fluffy creatures, ray guns, fantasmegorical timepieces, dirigibles, motorbikes, steam-operated time machines, time traveller apothecary kits, intergalactic mail services, lunar safari equipment etc etc.  The displays are spread through three rooms on different floors. It takes one or two hours to peruse all the items in reasonable detail and if you need a break, the Steam cafe next door makes excellent coffee. And incredibly, this exhibition is free, thanks to the many sponsors who have supported it.

But wait, there's more. Because there are also some hugely eye-catching, imaginative external exhibits in the median strip of the main street, outside the Gallery.




































And also around the corner, on the corner of Itchen and Tyne Streets, there is a building called Steampunk HQ with a simply amazing train engine frontispiece in its forecourt and when you feed it two $2 coins, steam belches forth from its carby tubes, the crossing bells ring and fire springs out of its chimney like some damned missile-bearing vision from the apocalypse:

Steampunk HQ close up

Steampunk HQ, distance view for perspective

 

It is one thing to become so readily engrossed and swept along in the vision and originality of the pieces offered up for exhibition (both inside and outside the gallery) but it is another thing entirely to be able to view these items in the correct architectural setting, because the Victorian precinct of Oamaru is the perfect context and backdrop for this festival with its fantastic array of intact streetscapes. There will be more discussion of Oamaru's Victorian architecture and heritage in tomorrows blog because today we wanted to focus on the wonderments of the exhibition.

It is a great tribute to all the volunteers, sponsors and organisers that these buildings have been revitalised and preserved for the future.  It is also fantastic to see such a vibrant expansion of a new art genre with lots of new ideas flooding in to expand and grow the story of Steampunk.

In the evening ,we went for dinner at the Loan and Merc, a huge restaurant-cum-dining hall on the ground floor of one of the largest Victorian buildings in town and this business is run by Fleur (of Fleur's Place in Moeraki).  This building has three floors with five metre high ceilings and there is a lovely art gallery on the top floor. We had a great evening at the L&M before retiring to Phil and Sally's to solve the world's problems (again).

Loan & Merc entrance

Loan & Merc building (former warehouse)

Tuesday - Whisky and Water

On Tuesday, all the pelting rain and horrible stormy weather that had been missing for the previous five weeks came scampering into full view.  It was plummeting felines and canines all over the place.  The view from the hill was now wet branches lashing in front of a grey background, like a newspaper halftone of a white cat in snow at twilight.

We did chores all morning as we had an invitation to Mark's place for whisky in the afternoon.  We went there and met Diana and Murray and their delightful daughter Morgan, reacquainted ourselves with Gledfiddich, Chivas and Ardbeg, ate haggis, solved most of the world's problems and no more will be said!  Thank you Mark for a great afternoon. We had a bowl of hot stew at home while rain and wind continued to lash the house and went to bed about nine to raise zeds. Only ducks would like this kind of weather, but we don't have any photos of those, so this will have to do

This is NOT a duck!

Monday - Otago Museum

 
Monday arrived and we decided to go into town.  We had a browse around the University bookshop in search of a good history book about Dunedin.  The bookshop has a large cut price section upstairs and we ended up leaving the place with two books - one on building brick ovens in your backyard and one on mixing margaritas.  You can never tell what's going to come in handy.

Zappety Do Dah

Leaving the bookshop we went across the street to the Otago Museum.  They have a butterfly hothouse there, so we bought a ticket and wandered round looking at the butterflies and terrapins in the tropical heat and humidity - a big difference from outside.  The Butterfly House was situated at the back of the kids science section of the museum, so we got to play with the cool toys on the way through.

Thoroughly warmed up, we crossed the hall to see the exhibition of Peter Best's photographs called Hard On The Heels.  Peter Bush is a sports photographer who followed the All Blacks around for about 30 years and the exhibition was of some of his favourite photographs from his career.  The photos were mainly from the 70s and 90s, with few from the 80s and 00s.  It was well worth a look, there are some stunning pictures.

All museumed out, we headed to the Albar (surprise, surprise) for lunch and were introduced to Grace Jones by the proprietor.  Not the singer, but a seasonal brew put out by Emerson's Brewing Company.  It is a very smooth, rich and bitter dark ale, yes dark and bitter but a beauty.  I suggested that Stewart needed very thin, tall glasses to serve it in.

Interior of Albar, Stewart behind the bar

Emerson's Grace Jones

Albar promo board

After a few pleasant pints, we called it an afternoon and headed home to blog.  The weather forecast was promising dire lashings of rain and wind for the morrow, and for once, they were right!

Sunday - the second semifinal

Oh well, 1987 redux.  Rather than commiserating, let's instead laud the All Blacks for a passionate and committed performance last night.  Every member of their team played as though this was their last game on earth and they deserved the victory against a Wallabies side that seemed to have lost its reserves of determination and direction.  It was also good to see that the match was decided by a team winning it rather than a team losing it, as was the case with the other semi final.  So we fly up to Auckland next Saturday to see the All Blacks play Les Bleus on Sunday and on Friday night the Wallabies take on Wales in the match that no one wants to play - the bronze playoff.

Personally, I don't understand why the bronze playoff is necessary.  I'm sure that both Wales and Australia would rather be on the plane heading home and focusing on the future than rehashing the end of of a failed campaign.  And, let's be honest, one of the hardest rugby trivia questions is to name who came third and fourth in all of the World Cups - that should give some indication of the value of the playoff.

So we had a bit of a late start following Saturday night.  As the somewhat unreliable meteorological service weather forecast said there would be rain later (there is always rain later, the only question is how much later?) we went down to Tomahawk Beach in Ocean Grove for a walk to blow away the cobwebs.  The beach is about a kilometre or so long, a pleasant walk and is yet another of one of Dunedins undiscovered gems. The basalt headlands are reminiscent of the Antrim coastline in Ireland and the only people we met were a few dog owners performing their labour of love.

Tomahawk Beach looking east, Sunday 10 am

Tomahawk Beach looking
west to Lawyers Head

Rocky islands just off Tomahawk beach to the southeast

We finished our walk in blazing sunshine and hunted around for a coffee shop, but found all of our favourite haunts in the city closed for Sunday.  So we headed up to Maori Hill to go back to Delicacy, a cafe we found in the first few days of our sojourn in Dunedin.  However, around the corner from Delicacy is a restaurant and cafe called No7 Balmac.  It was open, so we decided to chance it and went in.

Cardamom creme brulee with orange

Steamed currant pudding

This place was a revelation. The menu was fantastic, the food was delicious, the setting was beautiful and the coffee was good.  It's unpretentious and is great value, they use top class local produce and the service is excellent. Following coffee, tea, three cheese souffle, wood-grilled chicken and Waitaki bacon, steamed currant pudding and cardamom creme brulee, we staggered out and debated the necessity of another beach stroll to walk off lunch.  Despite the internal vague voices of common sense, we instead returned home and blogged our Saturday experiences and vegged out in anticipation of  a tense evening of rugby.

Alien at the gates

Pirates was only sparsely populated when we arrived (especially by Wallabies supporters), but it filled up nicely as kick off time approached (except for Wallabies supporters).  We sat down with the usual jug of Buccaneers (served by Leah, see below) and two cheese rolls and got chatting to the folks around us. The friendship and hospitality of the Pirates members has been one of the greatest joys of the trip.  To cap it off, Adam the club president presented us each with a Pirates polo shirt for us to remember them by.  So a mighty thanks again to Mark T, Adam, Mark H, Leah, Murray, Russell, Harry, Dave C and all the others who gave us such a warm welcome and made our time there such a pleasure.  Hopefully, the Super 15 gods will schedule some Western Force v Highlanders matches so we get a chance to visit again soon (or for them to visit Perth). The Ireland tour of NZ in June may provide an opportunity for a hop across the ditch, if Forsyth Barr stadium is awarded a game.
 

The lovely Leah behind the bar

Harry is very confident of an AB win

Mark and Fi supporting the ABs

The stadium full of expectant All Black fans

Unwobbly Wallaby

 Well, the Wallabies looked wobbly from the kick off and as the game proceeded they were always on the back foot and their game plan seemed limited to kicking the ball away.  Myself, I would have chosen the strategy that worked against NZ in 2003 - keep the ball in hand, absorb the pressure and then build the game on your terms, but it seemed that the plan of the night was territory, not possession.  Why they continued with this when Cory Jane (ably assisted by some near interference from his team mates) was catching and running the ball back superbly and Israel Dagg was returning any kick sent to him with interest escapes me.





The supporters were gracious in victory, and as was said earlier, there was no doubt that the better team won on the night.  So we will have managed to get through the entire RWC 2011 without seeing the Wallabies live.  Maybe they would have won if we had sold our finals tickets and bought tickets to "The Match No One Wants To Play"?  We'll never know now.


We leave you with another view from the hill - a picture of central Dunedin taken on Sunday afternoon showing the two rugby stadiums and the city centre with a clouded Mt Cargill in the background.

Sunday afternoon Dunedin: the old Carisbrook stadium at nine o'clock, the new Forsyth
Barr stadium at one o'clock, and Mt Cargill shrouded in cloud in background

Saturday - the first semifinal

ARRGGHH - a good way to start off Saturday's blog, although it refers more to the end than to the beginning.

Saturday started with our last visit to the Otago Farmer's Market.  It will be one of many things that we'll miss about Dunedin when we go back to Perth.  The quality and taste of the food we have bought here has been superb.

Yummy hot crepes

We ordered our usual ham and cheese crepe from the genial and genuinely French crepe stall and our coffee from the Mou Very van and fed morsels of crepe to the brown sparrows.

The jacket worn by the lady with the blonde hair in the photo to the left is colloquially known as a puffer jacket in NZ. Note that it is black, as in All Black.

Eat no evil, eat Havoc!

 

Mike paid a ritual visit to the Havoc stand and got invited to the Havoc Pork shop opening in the High Street next Friday at lunchtime and he will certainly be there with their promise of spit pig and pork pies.


Loaded up with what we needed to complete our last week of holiday, including girdle scones and homemade German apple cake, we headed home and unloaded our supplies.  We then blogged three days of activities to bring ourselves up to date.  Fi went off to photograph her beloved stadium, put petrol in the car ($104 ouch) and dropped in to the NZ Rock and Mineral Show at the Forbury raceway, this time finding the prizewinners exhibition hall, not the sales area. 

Beloved 30,000-seater Forsyth Barr stadium with Dunedin railway station in foreground

We had dinner when Fi returned and then we got ready to go down to Pirates for the Wales v France semi-final.
.
It was good to catch up with our friends at Pirates, whom we hadn't seen for a couple of weeks because we went to Auckland for the quarter finals. 

The majority of the club seemed to be supporting Wales with a few diehard French supporters lurking in the crannies.

The match kicked off and all seemed to be going Wales' way until their captain Sam Warburton made a dangerous tip tackle in the 17th minute and the referee showed him the red card.  This put Wales on the back foot.  France managed to kick three penalties and missed one drop goal, but that was the extent of their scoring.  In the end, Wales could have won it but for a poor day with the boot (they missed three penalties and a conversion) and France won the match 9-8.  Wales and their fans were gutted and France got through to the final with a very lacklustre and unimaginative game, planning more on "not to lose" rather than to win.

There will be reams of speculative discussion on what people say the referee should have done, but the IRB has taken a strong position on dangerous tackles:

Law 10.4(j) reads: Lifting a player from the ground and dropping or driving that player into the ground whilst that player’s feet are still off the ground such that the player’s head and/or upper body come into contact with the ground is dangerous play.
 

A directive was issued to all Unions and Match Officials in 2009 emphasizing the IRB’s zero-tolerance stance towards dangerous tackles and reiterating the following instructions for referees:

- The player is lifted and then forced or ‘speared’ into the ground (red card offence)

- The lifted player is dropped to the ground from a height with no regard to the player’s safety (red card offence)

- For all other types of dangerous lifting tackles a yellow card or penalty may be considered sufficient

Warburton didn't spear Clerc into the ground with malice, but there is little doubt that Clerc's safety was compromised by the tackle even if there was no malicious intent, so the second case applies. The IRB also stress that "any player who puts a player in the air or caused a player to be put in the air has a responsibility to ensure that the player is brought to the ground safely".

While Wales' valiant game was ultimately unsuccessful, I'm sure that given the young age and high skills levels shown, they will be mounting a strong challenge at the next RWC in 2015 in England.


And now we are all on tenterhooks for the All Blacks v Wallabies tonight.  The papers are full of puff pieces as each side tries to claim underdog status and pundits from both sides of the Tasman claim superiority for their team.  We will find out in a few very tense hours!

Albatross and Beer

Early bed and early to rise makes a man bleary and red in the eyes.  Early we were as we wound our way up the Otago Peninsula and out to Taiaroa Head on our Albatross pilgrimage.  We'd visited the Royal Albatross Centre last time we were in Dunedin (Xmas 2008) and wanted to revisit the site.  This is the only mainland nesting site in the world for the Northern Royal Albatross, a huge bird (wingspan 3 m +, body 1.2 m +) and there are roughly 130 birds nesting there.

Taiaroa Head has a long history.  It was settled by the Maori as a fortified village known as Pukekura.  Then it became a fort to defend Dunedin's harbour in the late 1800s (remembering that Dunedin was New Zealand's largest city at that time and the Russians were coming or so they thought) and finally it has become a nature reserve for albatrosses and other wildlife.

In the latter stages of  the drive to the head, we passed a gentleman walking purposefully up the road.  Fi thought he was going to the Albatrosses, I thought he was indulging in the NZ pastime of walking up and down hills. 

It was cold and windy when we got to Taiaroa Head, but at least it wasn't swathed in cloud (as our guide assured us it had been the day before).  The gentleman whom we had passed earlier then arrived, and was in fact, on the same tour as us (guess who was wrong).  Chris was a Mancunian now resident in London, and was also making a second pilgrimage to the albatrosses.

Southern cliffs of Taiaroa Head:
home to seals, shags and kelp

This is not really the best season to view the birds, as they are nest building, which takes them on long journeys away from the Head to pick up suitable material.  This is done by the male of the pair (they mate for life) and is the avian equivalent of nipping down to Bunnings for screws, wood, tools, etc.  We are told that after the constructing a nest, the female will examine it and if it doesn't embody the principles from the latest series of avian Grand Designs, she will destroy the nest and the poor bloke has to go down to Bunnings and start again.  It seems some characteristics are common across species!

Spotted shag nests -
but don't roll over in your sleep

Anyway, we started our tour with a brief film (that contained information such as in the previous paragraph) before heading out to look at some of the other inhabitants of the area.  Gazing from the cliffs, we saw seals, spotted shags nesting in the most precarious positions and 5979 of the 6016 red beaked gulls that live on the head.  While at the cliffs, we caught a brief glimpse of an albatross cruising above.

Then we climbed  up to the observation post and caught a couple of glimpses of an albatross, but none were nesting nearby.  We need to come between December and June to get the best viewing.

We gave Chris a lift back to town and lunched together on blue cod, chips and tea at the Best Cafe.  Chris was going on the Taieri Gorge railway excursion in the afternoon, so we agreed to meet up again when he got back at 6:30 pm.

Early Egyptian temperance message

We, on the other hand, we were booked on the Speights Brewery Tour at 2 pm.  The Speights Brewery has been on the site since 1867.  It is all part of Lion Nathan now, but their Golden Ale is still the South Island's biggest selling beer.  Interestingly enough, they got a head start by sending two barrels of beer to Melbourne in 1891 to an international beer festival and won first and second prize.  That gave them the kudos to become the South Island's biggest brewery.  The tour is well worth going on and includes the Gyle Room, where the speciality beers are still fermented in the three of the original karri brewing gyles.

The chimney at the brewery has a barrel as an ornament at the top.  Apparently this was a result of the architect leaving his drawings out on his desk when he went home for the weekend.  An apprentice sketched the barrel on the top of the chimney as a joke and the sketches were presented to the brewery without being checked.  Mr Speight loved the barrel and so it was built!

The Gyle room with brewing beer and karri gyles

The water for brewing comes from a spring directly under the brewery and you can still fill up your own containers at a tap by the brewery door.  On a certain day at the start of April some years ago, an article appeared in the Otago Daily Times stating that the tap was now connected to a beer vat rather than the spring and the resulting queue stretched around the block before people realised it was an April Fool's joke.

The brewing floor

Mike in the tasting room

After visiting many rooms, heady with the smell of hops, malt and brewing beer and the sight of gleaming copper vats, we ended up in the tasting room, where we could sample six of the Speight's brews for about half an hour.  A big thanks to Hamish, who was a great tour guide and very happy to talk about beer, any beer, at great length.




 We had a couple of hours to kill before Chris got off his train, so we returned to Albar.  It was Friday afternoon and it soon filled up with locals coming in for a beer after work.  I picked Chris up from the station and we introduced him to the Albar and the Renaissance IPA.  After some time spent discussing, beer, rugby and the problems of the world, we hopped in the car and tried to get into Starfish for dinner. Fat chance! Starfish was bulging at the seams, so we headed back to the centre of town and managed to get a meal at the Nova Cafe in the Octagon.  We then said our farewells to Chris and headed home. 

Tomorrow is the first of the semifinals!  For those of you with a taste for coincidences, the four semifinalists for RWC 2011 are exactly the same as those for the inaugural RWC in 1987, which is also the last time it was held in NZ.  However, last time, France defeated Australia and New Zealand defeated Wales, so coincidence only stretches so far.  It will be off to Pirates tomorrow night to support Wales, before the test of friendship on Sunday when the Wallabies meet the All Blacks.