o Otago

Gold. It's here because of gold. Au, The only reason this place ever became a town of stone and gardens. Enormous churches, paved streets. It flowed out of the mountains and rolling dry plains, from the metamorphic dirt to the prospectors to the assayers to the buyers to the ships to the empire of londoners and back again, that's the reason it's possible to live so far out on the monastic pacific. And at dusk, when you emerge from a library that's closer to Tierra del Fuego, Easter Island or the Ross Ice Shelf than home, there's a glowing clock face that says so. Little candles burning in dungeons of knowledge behind leaded glass - this is the future of studying the past.

University of Otago clock on the Waters of Leith, Dunedin