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The next five years will smash records, UN saysBeing a night owl may not be great for your heart but you can do something about itUS adult cigarette smoking rate hits another all-time lowAyesha Curry’s Cast-Iron ‘Fruit Cake’ is foolproof when dessert time is tightPope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Vatican's role in legitimizing slaveryFlorida demanda a OpenAI y a su CEO Sam Altman; alega que la empresa ocultó riesgos de ChatGPTA participant reacts as he marches in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30 2026.
Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Juliet Thorn and Greg Thorn, dressed as their steampunk personas Lady Sarsaparilla Ovabyte and Captain Bob McSpoon, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 29, 2026. A participant rides a tractor during a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026.
Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Fiona Hilton, left, Sandy Jones and Priscilla Martin, right, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026. Participants march in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026. A participant reacts as he marches in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30 2026.
A participant reacts as he marches in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30 2026. Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Juliet Thorn and Greg Thorn, dressed as their steampunk personas Lady Sarsaparilla Ovabyte and Captain Bob McSpoon, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 29, 2026.
Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Juliet Thorn and Greg Thorn, dressed as their steampunk personas Lady Sarsaparilla Ovabyte and Captain Bob McSpoon, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 29, 2026. A participant rides a tractor during a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026.
A participant rides a tractor during a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026. Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Fiona Hilton, left, Sandy Jones and Priscilla Martin, right, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026.
Steampunk NZ Festival attendees Fiona Hilton, left, Sandy Jones and Priscilla Martin, right, pose for a portrait during the annual event in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026. Participants march in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026. Participants march in a parade at the Steampunk NZ Festival in Ōamaru, New Zealand, on May 30, 2026.
ŌAMARU, New Zealand — The woman in the pink frock coat announced herself as steam curled from a strange brass contraption on her back.
“I am Lady Sarsaparilla Ovabyte, of the Coventry Ovabytes,” she said. “We are purveyors of fine cordials. ”, Ovabyte and McSpoon, who usually go by Juliet and Greg Thorn, weren’t the only ones wearing goggles or forks, or emitting steam. They were in the small town to attend the annual steampunk festival, a four-day love letter to being as odd as possible, which draws thousands of visitors from around the country and abroad.
Steampunk fuses Victorian aesthetics and mechanics with a science fiction twist to create a parallel universe imagining what the age of steam might have produced if it had continued to the present day. The genre is limited only by imagination, and the weirder the better. Steampunks pride themselves on a knack for recycling and DIY, honing skills in sewing, metalworking, hat-trimming and steam mechanics as they dream up fantastical personas with outfits to match.
During the year, attendees are bricklayers, engineers, artists and farmers, with many describing themselves as normally shy or reserved. But they had come to the festival to be seen.
“The first time you dress up and go out in public is really scary and then people get such a buzz out of it,” Juliet Thorn said. “It’s so cool that you take on a different personality. ”In its 17th year, whole traditions and sporting codes have sprung up around the steampunk festival, which is among the world’s best-known. Michele Cotten won a fashion show displaying wild and upcycled outfits that participants spent months finessing.
Cotten fused steampunk with the Star Trek universe to create a hooped dress made in the style of a navy Starfleet uniform. It was rigged with Christmas lights to evoke a galaxy and Cotten, a crowd favorite, strutted and posed to whoops from onlookers.
Then there was the teapot racing, in which competitors sent remote-controlled vehicles mounted with teapots around a fiendish obstacle course to the gasps and groans of a watching crowd.
“If you go out of bounds, that’s a disqualification,” said Ross McKay, one of the sport’s creators, who dreamed it up with his late wife and a friend. He has since introduced teapot racing to other steampunk events worldwide. When McKay’s wife showed him pictures of steampunks, he recalled thinking, “What a bunch of weirdos,” but the self-confessed “history geek and science fiction nerd” found plenty to love about the genre.
The retired banker was soon enrolled in night classes for sewing. Now he is Captain Roscoe Dangerfield, Inspector of Nuisances to Her Majesty Queen Victoria III, which combines the historical element of a real Victorian job with the fiction of a monarch who never lived.
Ōamaru is the placid home to 14,000 people and 3,000 endangered native penguins, the latter of which live at the far end of town in a colony so pungent it can be smelled from the hill above. The town on New Zealand’s South Island doesn’t feature the sweeping vistas popularized by the Lord of the Rings films, whichAn architectural quirk has put Ōamaru on the map as what locals call the steampunk capital of the world.
The town features a completely preserved Victorian street by the harbor, a legacy from the 19th century days when Ōamaru was a commercial and mercantile powerhouse as a departure point for meat, wool and grain exports from New Zealand to Britain. The cream-colored stone buildings now form the backdrop for the festival’s steampunk adventures.
Later in the year the town also hosts a Victorian festival celebrating a historically accurate version of the era, with the events coexisting peacefully after the steampunks and Victorians decided the town was big enough for everyone. Steampunk, a term coined in the 1980s, gives participants an opportunity to rewrite Victorian-era social conventions on the basis that if you are flying on a magic carpet or travelling through time, it doesn’t matter if you make the rest up.
“We’re an equal opportunity society,” said Iain Clark, who co-founded the festival and is widely known in the community as Agent Darling. “Women, unlike in Victorian times, can be anything. We have female engineers, captains of industry, captains of airships, adventurers, explorers, scientists. ” Sometimes all in the same week.
Bringing a different outfit for each day of the event is common and fitting rooms at the festival’s headquarters allow for quick changes, with nothing strange enough to raise eyebrows. In the street, a Star Wars trooper trudged past, followed by a pack of wolves. A French tourist nervously adjusting his crocheted and leather gloves was introduced to steampunk only three days earlier and immediately fell in love with the genre.
“You can be creative and you can be somebody else and no one cares,” said John Syben, who was attending his fourth festival. His partner, Chris Sinclair, said the pair previously had been “far too tame, so we’ve gotten more and more outrageous every year. ”Graham-McLay is an Associated Press reporter covering regional and national stories about New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Islands by putting them in a global context. She is based in Wellington.
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