Today was the last day of the conference. We had an abbreviated program today, and only the plenary session was interesting to me. And it was very interesting, mostly because of the excellent presentation approach. They also advertised next year’s conference venue, in the south of Spain. There’s quite a lot of incentive to attend this conference again next year. Overall, the conference has been quite rewarding, and the visit to Dunedin has been a lot of fun. I’ve also met some interesting people here and would hope to catch up with them again next year.

The afternoon has been taken up with visiting one of the stately homes in the city—Olveston House. It was built to an English architect’s design at the turn of the 20th century and has been preserved in its original state. It’s a beautiful old house with goregous rooms and beautiful furniture. A very comfortable place which has an amazing array of ‘modern conveniences’. It was, for instance, installed with electricity when built, powered by its own generators. The bathroom had a heated towel rail, and there were 7 live-in servants to serve the family of four that lived there. All very comfortable. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photographs.

The other fortunate aspect of visiting Olveston House was that it is well up one of the valley walls and just down from the house was a dead-end street with an amazing panoramic view of Dunedin. The panorama is shown below. In the bus trip back we also stopped at Mornington Park in the south of Dunedin which also has a beautiful panoramic view, which is also shown below.

This night was the conference dinner at Larnach Castle, high on the Eastern peninsula opposite the main centre of Dunedin. The castle is a classic folly, beautiful, well-designed and standing out like dog’s balls on the peninsula. The evening was very pleasant, including being piped into the Castle by bagpipes, listening to a rectitation of Robbie Burns’ “Tribute to the Haggis”, and then actually sampling Haggis—which tasted mostly like stuffing!

The evening passed very pleasantly with some excellent company at my dinner table and a little dancing to a passably good band. The evening completed the most interesting conference I’ve been to in some time and Dunedin leaves a very pleasant impression.

Dunedin in Panorama (from just below Olveston House)

Otago Harbour (from Mornington Park)