The Dunedin bar has grabbed headlines throughout the year, but what has it taken to keep the doors open? Sam Brooks talks to Woof’s co-owners about running Ōtepoti’s hottest venue.

There are a lot of bars in Dunedin. Throw a stick in the Octagon, and you’ll hit a bevy of them filled with students, pub band enthusiasts and people just looking for a good night out. Many of them are actually pretty great – you can see a table of mates playing a session of Irish music on Albar on a Tuesday night, get the best red wine cocktail you’re likely to drink at Pequeno, or, if you’re willing to go a bit further north, try out some fancy gins at Zanzibar.

However, there’s only one place in Dunedin, or perhaps anywhere in the world, where photos of prime ministers David Lange and Robert Muldoon share wall space with Lisa Kudrow’s iconic character Valerie Cherish and avant-garde Irish popstar Roisin Murphy. That’s Woof (usually stylised with an ! at the end).

After five, Wednesdays to Saturdays, Woof fills up with a variety of people of all ages and from all walks of life. There are the duos who want a quiet drink in a booth, the groups who pull the chairs around and talk over beers for hours on end, and the shivering smokers and vapers huddled around tables outside.

If you’re there on those nights, you’ll also probably catch a glimpse of co-owners Josh Thomas and Dudley Benson, who have built and maintained Woof! since 2020, from the exclamation point up.

When I meet up with  Thomas and Benson, it’s a reliably cloudy early-summer Monday in Dunedin. I’d already been to their bar several times in the past week – once with a friend and her niece for a quiet chat on a Thursday, once with a group of theatre friends to celebrate their opening night for a boozier chat on a Friday, and once on Saturday to celebrate the closing night of that same show, huddled around one of the outside tables until last call. Despite only arriving in Dunedin a few days earlier, I already feel like a regular – and that’s exactly how Thomas and Benson treat me when they join me at a table. We’re here to chat about owning Dunedin’s best-loved bar, how they keep it that way, and how it felt to be thrust into the national spotlight over their response to Covid-19. (Full disclosure: The three of us have multiple friends in common, because New Zealand is small, and the queer, arts-adjacent community in New Zealand is even smaller.)

While the pair of them are co-owners, Thomas was the driving force behind the decision to open Woof. At the time, he had been working in TV, events and the arts for decades across the country and he wanted out. “I’d had a gutsful of funding applications. They’d driven me, literally, to absolute tears,” he says.

He and Benson, an acclaimed musician whose album Forest: Songs by Hirini Melbourne was a finalist for the Taite Music Prize, had been in a relationship for a decade. “He’d spent that time supporting me as a musician, and helping me achieve my dreams. Now it was my turn to support him,” Benson says. A year into realising that dream, they split up – albeit extremely amicably. Not only do they still co-own Woof together, they continue to live together, in an apartment together that backs onto the venue..

Back in 2020, “Dunedin really needed a good bar,” Thomas says. “It had good ones, but they were quite small. Me and my friends got really sick of having nowhere to go.” He identified a need for somewhere that was a little larger than Albar and Pequeno, the other two “artsy” CBD bars, and which had a really warm, personal touch. “I’ve always loved looking after people and I’ve always loved giving people a good time,” Thomas says. “A bar seemed a really good way of bringing my skills and those desires together.”

Offering an alternative to Dunedin’s plethora of pubs and student bars was at the forefront of their minds when Woof opened. Another key element of the bar’s identity took longer to emerge.

“I knew it was going to be an expression of our queerness as the owners, but I didn’t know that was going to increasingly become such a loved and cherished part of Woof,” Thomas says. These days, you’re as likely to find a straight person at Woof as you are a queer person. The crucial difference, though, is that Woof doesn’t specifically try to appeal to the straight market. They’re just welcome, along with everybody else. “That’s happened very naturally, but the original kaupapa was just a fun inclusive, eclectic bar,” Thomas says.

The fitout of Woof – featuring fairy lights, deep sofas, an inside green house, and at least two Almodovar posters – came quite naturally as well. Thomas’s design background meant he was “very picky, spatially” – he knew what he wanted from the start, although he says he still looks around every day and sees something he wants to improve. Eventually, they got a feel for what worked and what didn’t. (Beautiful antique furniture emphatically does not work, apparently.)

While both work full time at the bar, the two have taken on different areas of responsibility. Thomas does most of the duty manager shifts (although Benson does what he calls a “princess shift”, showing his face as host), and handles most of the daily practical tasks involved in running a bar. “Admin, kind of,” he shrugs. Benson is in charge of music, naturally enough, works on cocktail development alongside the head bartender, and handles social media.

“We are always talking about Woof,” Benson says. “We’re constantly soundboarding and thinking of ways that we can deal with issues, or improve it. That doesn’t really stop for us. We live and breathe it.”

“It’s such a fun, comfortable part of my life, and I care so much about it, that there’s just a quite natural, easy flow between work and life,” Thomas says. “Even though we might be talking about it a lot, it doesn’t dominate. It never becomes a chore.”

The road to success for Woof has not been an easy one. The bar opened just 10 days – six working nights – before the first level 4 lockdown in 2020. That false start, while devastating at the time, ended up as something of a boon.

“There was a community desire to support us as soon as the lockdown was over,” Benson recalls. “As a result, our business and community model has really held from level to level, from regulation to regulation.”

A big source of that support has come from how seriously Woof takes pandemic health measures, most notably their decision to maintain vaccine passes when most venues lifted them earlier this year. “We asked our patrons, we asked our staff, and they wanted us to continue,” says Thomas. “We really stood very firmly in that ground, that was a huge growth in our social conscience.”

As a result, the bar found itself a target of the anti-vaxx rhetoric (which often also happened to be, of course, virulently homophobic) and weathered particularly virulent abuse from Derek Tait, a Destiny’s Church pastor and leader of the Freedom and Rights Coalition (FRC). They were savaged by one star reviews from trolls based both here and abroad, and Benson was covered in the media after calling up some “reviewers” to ask them what they were playing at.

Woof has also attracted much more positive attention, thankfully. The bar celebrated its biggest week after choosing to maintain vaccine passes past the regulated date, and Taika Waititi was spotted hanging out there in September. 

The media attention might have brought it national fame, but it’s Woof’s unique place in the Ōtepoti community that really matters to Thomas and Benson. This is a queer bar that manages not to “just” be a queer bar, but a community place in its own right. In a world where gay bars – I specifically say gay, not queer – still try to court a cishetero patronage, Woof is successfully a space that is both explicitly queer and open to everybody. (If there were any doubt, there are signs in the bathrooms saying they don’t tolerate racism, sexism, transphobia, queerphobia, or ableism.)

“Woof! really attracts anyone who’s wanting a place to go that is inclusive, that is comfortable, and welcoming, and personal,” says Thomas “We’re lucky to have the full spectrum – people in their seventies and eighties, then young students.”

“… who are trying their first Lagerita!” adds Benson. (The Lagerita has been on the menu since they opened, and is 70% of a Corona bottle, topped up with lime juice, a shot of tequila, and a shot of triple sec. If it sounds good, that’s because it is, in fact, very good.)

Through the hate, Woof found its family. Thomas and Benson found they didn’t have to defend themselves online; the community would do it for them.

“People really took ownership of the place,” Thomas says. “They cared and wanted to see the place survive. It became a bit of a base for people. Of course, they felt safe here.” He mentions his mother, who is in her seventies and has various health challenges – would she feel safe coming in for a drink? For Thomas, it was a no-brainer.

Woof’s co-owners have come out of the experiences of the past year with an even stronger sense of purpose. Earlier this year, when the FRC organised a march through Dunedin, Thomas and Benson offered Woof as a platform to stand against them, in coalition with the anti-fascist Ōtepoti Ropu. “It was as if we took a busy, packed Friday night of our people to The Octagon with signs and with pride against this disinformation, this anti-queer, anti-trans hideousness,” says Benson.

“We might’ve started out as a bar, but it’s grown into a community,” Thomas explains. “That community’s political. They care about politics, they care about those around them. It’s just become a quite natural part of what we do.”

That sort of activism is hardly standard business practice – why would you take such a strong political stance and risk alienating people? Thomas and Benson don’t see it that way. It’s not as though the people who they’re theoretically turning away are people they’d want in the place, they say.

“This is an extension of who we are,” says Thomas. “So of course it’s going to be riddled with our values.”

Woof isn’t just a place of activism, though. It’s a place to relax, to be safe, to be with people aren’t going to look at you like you’re not meant to be there. It’s a space where a picture of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beams out at you while you drink the best absinthe-forward cocktail you’re likely to have. It’s a space where you rub elbows with people who might look and sound completely different from you, but with whom you share a sense of respect and a love of Lageritas. It’s a space that can host a wild dance party, then mount a successful resistance to misinfo and fear-mongering barely two hundred metres down the road. That’s Woof, the bar that Dunedin didn’t know it needed until it came along.