A Living Giant

Industry: Timber & Gum

Timber

Māori Use and European Trade for Shipbuilding

Māori used kauri wood for generations prior to its commodification by Europeans. Kauri timber, with its mythological ties, workability, light weight, resistance to rot, even woodgrain and straight, strong bole was the preferred source material for carving, home building, weaponry, crafts and waka (traditional war canoe). Shipbuilding was one of the few European manufacturing industries to predate colonization and the one that first entangled kauri with commercial value. It was for kauri masts and spars for sailing ships that early traders came to New Zealand coasts in the 1790s. In 1818, the Rev. John Kendall and Samuel Marsden walked from Kerikeri to Hokianga to assess whether the harbor entrance was navigable for shipping. In 1820 he arrived on board the Admiralty Supply vessel Dromedary accompanied by the Naval consort vessel Prince Regent. The much larger Dromedary decided to return to Whangaroa to seek a cargo of spars, leaving Prince Regent to take the place as the first recorded sailing vessel into Hokianga. It left with a load of kauri spars, under the command of John Kent of Koutu.

Meanwhile, British naval supply vessels stopped at the Firth of Thames so often and for so many loads of spars that one ship, HMS Coromandel, gifted her name to the region in the 1820s. After Ngāpuhi chief Patuone visited Sydney in 1826 to promote the Hokianga as a trading base, New South Wales merchants opened a mill and ship yard in Horeke, naming it Deptford after the Royal Navy establishment in England (fig. 25). They built several ships, including Sir George Murray in 1830, which became the catalyst for the drafting of He Whakaputanga and subsequently the Treaty of Waitangi.⁹⁰ Ell, 5.

Figure 25. Auckland, Waitakere & Coromandel: Firth of Thames & Horeke Detail.

Horses grazing on pasture, Mitimiti.Photograph by M. H.

Building the Economy

“Way back, everything went to the ships. All the logging was brought into the Hokianga, straight across from Opononi and up in Rawene, where they had the ships come in back in those days. I’ve seen the sketches of them, it used to be quite a big area actually.”

– Charlie Dunn

Shipbuilders and kauri millers formed many of the first European settlements in Northland as they forged inland to meet the rising demand for timber.⁹¹ Ell, 7. Temporary sawmill settlements were erected to house workers and their families but they were typically abandoned after the sawmill shut down. Timber milling set up the modern economy in Northland before farming and dairy took over. The latter two industries arose from a political incentive to establish farmland for European settlers and as a result, large tracts of indigenous forests were cleared and burned to give way to pasture, all without ever being milled. The resource conflict between milling and pasture lasted through the early 20th century, when indigenous milling began to decline.⁹² “Timber Industry.”

The timber industry is split between indigenous and exotic timber. During the indigenous timber industry, sawmills processed rimu, matai, kahikatea, totara, red beech and kauri. The latter was a high value timber with a robust export market. Kauri timber volume is calculated from its straight-sides and barrel-like body, or bole. Its bulk is usually estimated as a timber volume measurement, combining the girth of the tree with its bole.⁹³ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 20. Each mature kauri tree provides enough timber for three or four houses, and even untreated, kauri wood resists damp and borer insects. During colonial times, over 220,000 ft of kauri timber was exported to refit the British Navy at Trafalgar. During the boom in the kauri timber industry, lumber was exported to Australia, North America, Britain and China. There are even accounts that say kauri was sent to rebuild the wharfs in San Francisco, California after they were damaged by earthquakes because the wood did not rot and could sustain rough coastal waters.⁹⁴ Joanna Orwin, “Kauri Forest - Using Kauri.” However, not all kauri was exported. A good portion of it stayed in New Zealand and was used domestically in wharves and bridges, furniture making, coachwork on railway wagons, as roof tiles and wooden pavements, as mining put props, and for butter churns. Because of its quality and the quantity early on, most Auckland homes built last century are made of kauri and of the timber used today, most is recycled from old buildings still sound after a century.⁹⁵ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 24.

Māori and Pākehā alike participated in the logging economy when it was first established, working in the bush to extract the logs and in the mills to prepare them for export. All along the supply chain there were opportunities to work, so despite the transience of the industry, places like Hokianga saw their economic birth in the age of timber. As the industry shifted in the 1930s from indigenous timber to exotic timber, like radiata pine trees, the jobs shifted with it. Lowland forests were converted to farms and rugged hillsides to pine plantations, which drove the industry while indigenous forestry faded in the 1980s.⁹⁶ “Timber Industry.”

Māori played a major role in the timber industry from the earliest kauri mills to exotic Pine milling, and many joined Pākehā along the way who were profiting off of their natural resource and taonga species. Most Māori I spoke with for this project shared their personal experience with the timber industry. Everyone had some sort of tie to it, whether it be a grandparent who milled kauri, themselves logging kauri in youth or felling the modern timber export, pine, in adulthood. Of these people was Ana Bercich.

Rolling hillsides of the formerly logged Warawara ngahere, near the entry point in Pawarenga.Photograph by M. H.

Ana Bercich, a woman from Mitimiti with whom I spoke about eco-tourism and kaupapa Māori (Hapu-based curriculum), mentioned that she used to work up in the Warawara bush over school holidays to help with logging practices. She even helped form a company to do the logging. Her words exposed the normalcy of moving with the seasons on a contemporary timescale. Similarly, Charlie Dunn told of his family’s participation in kauri logging and milling in the Hokianga and Warawara bush. “It used to be that you would come up from Auckland to Opononi and it was just vast green everywhere,” he said. The trees in those areas today are merely remnants of the great kauri stands that once lined the harbor and stretched all the way down the coast past Auckland.

When Charlie Dunn’s great-grandfather immigrated from Ireland at 18 years old, he married the chief’s daughter and inherited 35 acres of land from her family. The land includes the once forested hillsides of the northern Hokianga which were ravaged by kauri milling during the age of timber. A generation after the inheritance, Charlie’s great-uncle and grandfather participated in milling kauri up in the Hokianga and further North in Warawara. Today, all that covers those hillsides are sand dunes and burnt kauri stumps, but it has remained in his family ever since. By the time Charlie reached 18 years old, both his grandfather and grand-uncle had died. “That guy, my grand-uncle, would have been 6’8’’ and hard as nails, he died at 89. My grandfather died at 88. My dad died at 52,” Charlie shared.

His memories of them revolve around their Irishman tendencies. Mainly, he remembers their inability to speak in Te Reo, or English for that matter, and affinity for getting a piss on, usually with whiskey. They would make their own home brew, he remembered, “They made whiskey out of anything they could get their hands on, any fruit, they would make brew out of it. My grandmother had a pear orchard out here,” he said, gesturing toward the back windows of his kitchen. “She had about 8 or 10 trees there and these guys would come and pick all of her fruit that she didn’t want. The ones that were no good and turned them into alcohol and put them in cream cans. I don’t know how they didn’t poison themselves. Well, they probably did, that’s why they went so mad. They were crazy old buggers.”

Charlie speculated that his grandfather and grand-uncle didn’t know the damage their milling caused. For the older generations, milling was all there was until dairy farming came around when he was in primary school. The consequence of the work wasn’t at the forefront of anyone’s mind who was actually in the workforce, or even the minds of the subsequent generations. In Charlie’s view, the work ethic of that older generation surfaced in discussion far more often than the ethics surrounding the work they actually did. “They worked a lot on the farms, cutting down trees, building posts, digging drains by hand – there were no [mechanical] diggers back in those days. That’s how they were, that’s how the old fellas were. I see the young Māori now, they don’t want to work. These guys, they stood in the drain in wet clothes digging all day and all they wanted was their food. That, and a bit of alcohol.” he said with admiration.

Charlie insisted that the main reason they even logged trees in the area was because they were dead or dying. Most of the trees that were felled and milled were already dying and some were even rotten right through the middle. Men made the decision to get them out of the forest and extract what they could from them. Charlie told of how the men who worked in milling had schemes going where they would come to the area and teach young men to do carpentry and wood joinery work. A lot of the wood that they milled stayed in the area to be used for carpentry practice and for patching up the local maraes in Pawarenga and Mitimiti. When I pressed him on why so many trees stood dead or dying, he mentioned the gum bleeding that took place during his grandparents’ time and before. They bled the healthy trees of gum and that is what killed them over time.

Gum bleeding is a relic industry, outlawed back in Charlie’s grandparents’ time after the unexplained deaths of kauri exposed the brutality of the practice. Before the ban, many of the kauri atop the northern head of the Hokianga were bled to death. Kauri gum is highly flammable and the remnant reserves left in the ground and in fallen trees caused some of the old fires that ultimately stripped the land of what remaining kauri it had after the first waves of milling swept and left the region. Hence, the burnt kauri stumps topping the dunes.

Industrial clear-cut, Water Power & Infrastructure

The timber industry pushed innovation and infrastructure into Northland. Early on, kauri stretched from coast to coast of Northland, but as Māori cleared kauri from the coastal ranges near initial trading harbors, they quickly depleted the accessible stands of quality wood. As the industry expanded past masts and spars to include demand for kauri boards and framing, special techniques were invented to transport huge loads from the rugged hillsides of Northland, Auckland and Coromandel to the coasts where most milling and export took place.⁹⁷ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 22.

“Bullocks and steam haulers dragged the logs to railheads or riverbanks. Giant dams, themselves built from kauri logs, controlled water flows and provided water power to push hundreds of logs downstream. At the river mouth logs were held behind “booms” of timber in floating islands of timber awaiting the mill.”

– Gordon Ell, excerpt from Kauri: Past and Present.⁹⁸ Ell, 14.

Water power was the main mode of kauri transport and milling from the 1840s until the industry faded in the 1930s with water-powered mills and steam driven saws replacing the man-power in larger mills.⁹⁹ Ell, 7. Because workers relied on water to transport kauri, the industry schedule followed the water cycle. Trees were felled in summer and autumn from the high ridges and then dragged and skidded down to the gorges to be stacked above and below the kauri dams. Drives (the release of dams), were usually held in winter when there was plenty of water to move the accumulated logs.¹⁰⁰ Ell, 18. Though the stream bed would have been cleared of undergrowth before a seasonal drive, many logs would get jammed and dams often had to be refilled in order to detangle them. Not only was this method wasteful, it was also destructive. Timber was often damaged during dam releases as logs struck against rocks in the stream bed or tumbled over waterfalls which, subsequently, damaged waterways.¹⁰¹ Ell.

In addition to water transport, once the industry mechanized, bush locomotives moved timber as well. To get timber from the western Waitakere Ranges to the Auckland mills on the east coast, logs were hauled by bush locomotive along a coastal railway which can still be traced today to the north head of the Manukau Harbour.¹⁰² Ell, 22. From the hillsides of Northland, bush tramways that ran along rugged forest terrain, like that of Warawara Forest Access Road, carried the timber out of the bush. These bush trams were placed along sharp curves, steep grades and wooden viaducts.¹⁰³ “Timber Industry.” The back-breaking construction and dangerous use of the trams made for a hazardous work environment for folks in Charlie’s grandparents generation. While they never did see the industry fade, at least they had their home-brewed whiskey in hand.

Kauri logging hut, detail of doorway, Warawara ngahere.Photograph by H. H.

Tramping to the Hut

Before modern machinery, back when water power ruled kauri transport, skids were frequent and railways were being built through native forests, a hut was constructed deep in the Warawara bush to accommodate its growing number of visitors. The hut, constructed with kauri wood shingles, still stands in Warawara as a remnant of the once bustling ngahere.

Two weeks after our first tramp in Warawara, Hugh and I entered the bush again. Doug Te Wake, a man from Panguru with blood ties to the ngahere who works as a Senior Community Ranger for the DOC Kaitaia helped us map our route (fig. 26). We would enter through the old DOC track entrance in Mitimiti, follow the path up over the shrubland and into the bush, make our way to a nice old-growth stand of kauri, trek higher up the mountain to reach the old kauri logging hut, and then turn around and exit the bush before sunset.

We entered the bush around 11 a.m. on November 14th, 2019. After six hours of tramping we had yet to reach the old kauri logging hut and as it neared 5 p.m. I questioned our ability to make it out before sunset. We managed successfully in terms of locating native plant life, but had grossly underestimated our tendency to linger and fixate on the awesomeness of the bush.

Figure 26. Warawara Ngahere: Tramp II.

Trail marker at Mitimiti entrance of Warawara ngahere, Mitimiti.Photograph by M. H.

Unlike our first tramp in Warawara, the second didn’t follow the formerly bustling Warawara Forest Access Road. When we entered from Mitimiti, we followed a path roamed by local hunters and the occasional private trapper or DOC ranger doing pest control. All of which were few and far between, given that the only indication the path existed was the inch-wide neon-colored trappers’ tape that materialized every 10 yards, if we were lucky to catch a glimpse of it. Our navigational arsenal included a sketch I made from Doug Te Wake’s verbal directions and a line drawn on a topographic map, which he kindly laminated for me in the Kaitaia DOC office after one of our meetings. Hugh, equipped with the compass app on his iPhone, the laminated topographic map and the digital satellite images that he collaged from Google Maps the night before, offered directional guidance. Unfortunately, his lack of peripheral vision made noticing the slivers of trappers’ tape that hung like pink, blue and orange sirens from various tree limbs difficult, especially once any semblance of ‘path’ dissipated an hour into the tramp. So navigating the bush by sight, memory and instinct, rested with me.

In such a vast area of forest, though notably far less than before logging took its bite, it was awesome how little evidence there was of past generations who navigated it. Yes there was the logging road, the wooden spit and little bridge, the remnant kauri hut, the newly constructed overnight hut, the colorful tape hanging from branches, sharp-bladed ‘cutty' grass tied into knots by innovative trampers, and the DOC gate on each edge of the forest. Despite that collective human footprint, the bush retains an ability to swallow a tramper into a timeless space void of directional guideposts or the subtle marks left by those who walked the same route prior. All this is to say that it takes more than a few rounds of footprints to flatten a path in the bush.

In fact, the hints of past forest-goers, when they were visible, made what is absent even more present in my mind. For example, the lack of giant kauri trees due to logging practices, the lack of possums due to 1080 drops, the invisibility of and public battle over the 1080 drops, and the incredible lack of infected kauri. We never did see evidence of Kauri Dieback in Warawara, though we knew of its presence looming just outside the edge in the three infected trees on private land bordering the bush.

Kauri logging hut, Warawara ngahere.Photograph by H. H.

When I finally caught a glimpse of the structure through the endless sea of ponga trees, I felt a new surge of energy. Time had turned on the hut. The bush crept in from all sides, panel-sized holes broke through the walls and plants crept around the base of the structure as well as in the roof that buckled occasionally to create inadvertent skylights. Like the rest of the bush, the hut seemed to be on the cusp of saturation, the kauri wood dry to the touch but smelling of wetness and moss.

It was clear that visitors past the days of logging, perhaps DOC employees, adventurous youths or grateful overnight trampers, had used the hut as a gathering place. The graffiti, egg crate and empty bottles inside suggested as much. Despite the markings of modern life, the hut exuded history. Abandoned gumboots sat on the Earth beneath the sagging roof to remind me of the era the hut stood in its prime. An era when men built Warawara Forest Access Road to make their way to the kauri stowed deep in the bush, when gumboots, wellingtons, or wellies as they are now called, were brought over and utilized by the poor chaps who worked the gum fields so that they could stay dry for just a bit longer as they trudged in the sinking mud, spearing the ground for nuggets of kauri’s amber treasure. An era before Kauri Dieback Disease revealed itself and a rāhui over Warawara barred the overnighters all together in hopes of protecting the ngahere from harm.

Further, the hut’s presence signifies why it was built in the first place. I view Hugh, my collaborator, as a builder of structures and a recorder of memory. Time is not stagnant in the forest nor elsewhere, and Hugh responded to its transience by calling out the consistent usefulness of the now decrepit structure.

Kauri logging hut, detail of kauri slats used in construction, Warawara ngahere.Photograph by H. H.

“The kauri hut stands as a fulcrum for the meeting of the Warawara’s history of exploitation with the living relationship that those who use the ngahere are fostering in the present day,” Hugh wrote. “For one, the kauri hut was built during the height of the timber era as a meeting point for loggers working the forest. It is hard to imagine that at one point there were bushmen sending kauri timber to mill. But the hut, constructed of kauri slats, stands beside its living brethren to remind us of the exploitative and destructive capacity of which we humans are capable. The hut symbolizes the scar inflicted by industrialists and systems of exploitation that prove more destructive with every passing decade,” he cautioned. “But the kauri hut is also a microcosmic dwelling inside the grander shelter of the ngahere. In the post-timber era, it has provided a roof to those who try to keep the forest in equilibrium, be they elders, conservation workers, pest trappers, and the occasional tramper looking for shelter in the ngahere.”

Just as the hut provided a place of gathering and shelter for the bushmen of the timber era, it acted as our anchor in the tramp. To that, he recalled, “When the hut came into view, I let out a gasp. Were my bad eyes our guide, we would have walked right by it in its state of decay and camouflaged palette of browns and greens. But to stop and take in that old structure meant that we weren’t lost (’15 minutes more or we have to turn back!’), but in fact that the ngahere had welcomed us in. To arrive at that glorious dwelling in the middle of the forest meant that the Warawara wasn’t completely interested in swallowing up two foreigners. It had centuries-old scars to share with us and mature, living, beautiful kauri trees to show us – two aspects of a vulnerable history that this ngahere was living through to this very day. With the internal trauma of having been clear-cut and bled to near death, and with a contemporary disease at its perimeter, the Warawara ngahere stands determined to recover.”

Between the two of us we managed to exit in a tight race with the dwindling sunlight. As we began our descent, the last clearing behind us, I remembered Charlie’s advice to follow the sun.

Mouth of the Taikarawa Stream, Tasman Sea, and Mitimiti Beach from the Warawara trappers’ track, Warawara ngahere.Photograph by H. H.

Plummet of Native Forests & Forest Sanctuaries

Prior to European contact, kauri was the characteristic tree of Northland, Auckland and Coromandel. When Māori selectively felled kauri for their waka and home-building, there was an abundance of suitable trees to choose from, making their extraction hardly exploitative. It was only once the Europeans arrived and stripped the land of kauri to cultivate it and produce ship masts and spars that New Zealand entered the modern age of industrial resource extraction.

It is not surprising that only 4% of those original kauri forests remain today, for at the industry’s peak, in the year 1906, there were thirty six mills in the North that collectively produced 443,000 cubic meters of timber.¹⁰⁴ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 2, 15. During 1906, Waipoua was declared a state forest to protect it from the devastation that struck the Hokianga and other coastal ranges. By 1920 the newly formed State Forest Service decided to allow selective logging of old and dying kauri to allow light to penetrate and regenerate undergrowth. Meanwhile, fire rapidly exhausted the remaining resource and by the 1950s, production was .005% of that peak year.

In 1952, Professor W. R. McGregor allocated over 9,000 hectares from Forest Service management to be preserved in a reserve and in 1998, Te Roroa elders Stephen King and Alex Nathan formed the Waipoua Forest Trust to commemorate their traditional guardianship of the forest and ensure that Māori stakeholders would play a role in decision-making regarding it. The Waipoua forest now includes the 9,105-hectare Waipoua Kauri Sanctuary, the largest remaining native kauri forest left in Northland. There is no longer milling of mature kauri trees in Waipoua, though there are exceptions, for example, for the carving of a traditional waka. In the rest of the country, special permission is needed to fell kauri on private land and most remaining kauri live in public reserves.

Swamp kauri glazed wood grain, The Matakohe Kauri Museum Inventory.Photograph by M. H.

Swamp Kauri & Artisan Industry

In the mid-1800s, the practice of digging for buried pieces of kauri gum unearthed a new industry, one that siphoned interest from the plummeting indigenous timber industry. Swamp kauri is kauri wood that has been excavated from ancient kauri forests buried thousands of years ago. Once recovered and dried, swamp kauri, with its rich dark hues, quickly became the basis for an industry of furniture manufacture and artisan crafts.¹⁰⁵ Ell, 24 The rarity of the source material and laborious craftsmanship that precedes a finished product positions swamp kauri items as an artisan good within a commercial industry. Thus, the market for swamp kauri caters to the visitor economy and Pākehā residents of New Zealand.

While Māori are forced to seek the approval of kaitiaki on a Cultural Material Committee in order to harvest live kauri for cultural practices, Pākehā entrepreneurs are able to commoditize the native taonga by extracting and reclaiming swamp kauri to sell at a luxury price point. While there are regulations under the Resource Management Act of 1991, Forest Act of 1949 and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act of 2014 pertaining to excavation, extraction and milling of swamp kauri, many Māori in Northland – one of the poorest regions in the country and the region where swamp kauri are harvested – believe those regulations are too loose and unfairly expose the resource and landscape to exploitation for profit by non-Māori actors who lack the ideological aversion to resource extraction that Māori hold.¹⁰⁶ “Swamp Kauri: Sustainability and Resources.”

In early October 2019, I befriended a man named Dooly Smith. Dooly was in his eighties and a permanent volunteer at the Dargaville Museum. When I met Dooly, he shared that he had spent most of his life in Dargaville, a town birthed in the gum era and situated on the Kauri Coast around 40km south of Waipoua, and offered to give me a tour of the museum collection – a fair portion of which was memorabilia donated by his family. We discussed kauri and the intergenerational ties it has to the people and landscape in Northland. Dooly was involved in an effort to clean up the Wairoa River from the ecological consequences of logging. The Wairoa River is the largest tributary of the Kaipara Harbour and it flows right through the township of Dargaville (fig. 27).

Figure 27. Te Taitokerau–Northland: Nelson’s Kaihu Gallery, Dargaville, Wairoa River & Kaipara Harbour.

Wairoa River, view from Dargaville Museum, Dargaville.Photograph by M. H.

The river is visible from outside the museum so me and Dooly went to look at it, murky brown water and all. Before logging, the river ran clear throughout the Kaipara and its tributaries. Years of water flotation to transport kauri and then pine contributed to erosion along the river banks which introduced increased sediment levels and bacteria in the river. The activities caused the river’s murky coloring and degraded the habitat for marine species like tuna and galaxiids. Unfortunately, even once kauri retired as an export, logging continued on in the form of pine trees, halting a comprehensive restoration of the Wairoa.

As we parted, Dooly suggested that I visit Nelson’s Kaihu Kauri Gallery, a local mill and artisan shop 30km North of Dargaville and a straight drive via State Highway 12 (fig. 27).¹⁰⁷ “Home.” Nelson worked in the timber industry for ages, mainly in pine sawmilling, and started working with reclaimed kauri back in 1991. Gradually, ancient swamp kauri became the main species processed at Nelson’s. He transitioned his plant to cater to the extraction and processing of the enormously sized raw material sourced from the peat swamps around Dargaville. His showroom, which opened in 1997, features work from 40 craftspeople, most of whom work with the swamp kauri wood Nelson produces.

Dooly figured that was as good a spot as any to see the aftermath of commoditized kauri. Nelson, however, declined to chat – perhaps because the ancient kauri industry remains an ideological battleground in modern New Zealand – but welcomed me to visit the showroom.

Clear-cut land and pine forest, Prime Farms, Mōtatau.Photograph by H. H.

Pine Felling, Forest Regeneration & A Multi-generational Outlook

When Hugh and I visited Kevin Prime’s home in Mōtatau on October 26th, 2019, there were flowers everywhere. Potted plants sat on the floor and hung from the ceiling and floral bouquets dotted most surfaces including the long wooden table at which we sat. I thought that someone recently passed away, graduated, or got married, but perhaps the place perpetually burst with flora. Sun beams cut across the room through the unobstructed windows and I watched dust, pollen and other particulate matter dance briefly in their glow and disappear as they floated out of the spotlight. It reminded me of sunrise peeking out from a mountain ridge in the desert, even though the light in the room had to have come from the plump mid-afternoon sun, sitting lazily in the sky. I was petting one of Kevin’s cats intermittently since we arrived. Eventually my feline allergy, or perhaps the pseudo-nursery, overwhelmed my system, causing my eyes to itch and drip. Kevin noticed and suggested we move to sit outside.

As we settled onto the porch, a breeze punctured the still, summer afternoon air. The wind chimes rustled, letting out an ethereal assemblage of sounds. Kevin sat, looking slightly amused, and offered to give us a tour of his property.

When the indigenous timber industry shifted from kauri toward exotic timber like pine, many Māori landowners rode the wave to keep up with the changing economy. Kevin discussed his family’s decision to do just that, along with his own land use decisions, as we got into his truck.

Kevin’s grandmother was fascinated by, as she called it, “some Pākehā tree from America,” called the Monterey Pine, Pinus radiata. Today, thanks to his grandparents, father, himself and his children, P. radiata grows on 780 hectares of Prime Farms. As we rumbled down a dusty hillside, Kevin explained that he buys pine seedlings from local nurseries that improve their product quality every year in order to match market demand. They are constantly modifying seedlings to grow faster and to have more gaps between the branches or whorls, both of which are considered quality characteristics found in higher-priced lumber. One way they measure the quality of a species is the growth factor (GF), which designates the speed that a tree will grow to its peak size in maturity. He stopped the car in a clearing littered with logging debris and gestured to a newly clear-cut hillside. He explained that those trees had a GF of 16, whereas the trees on the newly planted hillsides were GF32, a higher quality purchase.

Kevin admitted that planting pine isn’t as economical today as it may have been for his predecessors. Pine trees have about a 30 year return from the time you plant them to when they are mature enough to yield quality timber. Once that happens and he clear-cuts a hillside, he can sell the high quality buck logs to local mills and export the remainder to China, Japan, India and the United States, which typically recovers the cost of the operation. But since an entire hillside can be clear-cut in a single day of work, there is a fair amount of waiting around for the next hillside to mature. Also, they are limited by the number of pine that can grow on a hectare. On average, the highest is 400 per hectare and that is with spacing about 20 feet or 6 meters to give each tree its needed root space and canopy space. As we looked out at a hillside sprinkled with pine, Kevin said that they were unlikely to re plant it for clear-cuts.

As we hopped back into the truck, he conceded that, aside from the economics, the environmental cost of planting and felling pine compared to planting natives has caught his attention. The physical damage clear-cuts inflict on the landscape is obvious, especially with the earlier methods for tree removal that he employed. For example, when using a roller crusher on a hillside that had once hosted mature tea tree stands, “the machine rolls down the entire cliffside until it reaches the creek and runs the ropes loose, leaving slash and pine tree debris in its wake,” Kevin lamented. It wasn’t hard to recognize the negative effects on the landscape.

Sky haul machinery overlooking a patch of clear-cut land, several generations of pine forest in the background, Prime Farms, Mōtatau.Photograph by H. H.

Kevin joins a steadily growing group of landowners that has responded to their environmentally destructive past by altering their behavior in the present. One of Kevin’s behavioral changes is an increased investment in experimental forests (small tracts of existing native growth that are left to regenerate naturally into thriving kauri forests). In his experimental forests, pine trees have popped up alongside natives, proving that selective felling of pine and native forest regeneration can coexist. Kevin said he often points to his experimental forest when trying to convince fellow landowners to plant natives on clear-cut hillsides instead of re-planting pine.

Kevin has also turned to tea trees to aid his pursuit of a multi-generational land transition. Since tea tree shrubland is the first stage of native forest regeneration after clear-cuts, Kevin has begun planting native tea trees on some formerly stripped hillsides. Like with pine, he buys the tea tree saplings from an eco-nursery and believes that pine may grow on the newly regenerated hillsides as they have in his experimental forests. “All the tea trees that we are replanting are all eco-sourced, so all of the seeds are from here,” he guaranteed. “We get the guy to come here and get the seeds here and they take it back to their nursery and germinate them and put them in little pots and then they sell them back to us. We call them ‘eco-sourcing’. We think that is why ours have done so well. Even though we were told that this myrtle rust is going to kill out all the tea trees, it hasn’t done it here.” Thanks to Kevin’s foresight today, the land is in the first stage of a four-generation journey toward sustainable, selective felling of mature pine trees amidst a thriving native forest.

Clear-cut hilltops and new pine growth, Prime Farms, Mōtatau.Photograph by H. H.

As we rumbled along in his burnt orange pick-up truck, Kevin continued to point out freshly cleared hillsides, towering sky haul machines, excess logs, newly planted and naturally growing tea tree, natives like kumarahou, matihetihe and gorse, tracts of experimental forests, beehives, cattle and the various structures that used to house his family members. He even pointed out the plot of land where his childhood home once stood. When I asked why they demolished it, he explained that it had burned down in the early 1970s in a mysterious fire.

Occasionally, the ground grazed the truck’s undercarriage, causing an all but concerning scraping sound. Apparently, this truck sat lower than Kevin’s last one and he was still getting used to it on the unpaved logging roads. It had other quirks too, like that the radio turned off each time he shifted gears from park to drive. I noticed the radio glitch when a gear shift interrupted a discussion on the Māori news station about the anniversary of British navigator Captain Cook’s arrival and the inherent differences between the Treaty of Waitangi’s English and Māori texts. Kevin and I had been listening to the segment as we waited for Hugh to take photographs of a sky haul sitting on the ridge. When Kevin switched the radio back on, the discussion had ended and The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” accompanied our drive around the next ridge.

Industry: Timber & Gum

Gum

Gum wound on Kauri trunk, Waitakere.Photograph by M. H.

Māori Use & Settlement of Dalmatians

Northland Māori were the first people to utilize kauri gum. They would mix it with plant juice for chewing gum, use it as a fire starter, place it on torches to attract fish, and mix the black ash of burnt gum with shark oil to form their moko tattooing pigment.¹⁰⁸ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 25. Until the 1840s, northern Māori surface collection of kauri gum, like their carving of kauri for waka and medicinal use of native plants, was part of their living connection to the ngahere. Their practice of sustainably utilizing natural resources accounted for most of the gum collection in Northland for a time, but just as the superior quality of kauri wood attracted trade and industry from European settlers, so did the promise of work digging for gum attract immigrants to the gum fields up north. The new arrivals were neither Western European nor Māori, but faced discrimination beside Māori throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dalmatian immigrants, known as “Dallies,” who came from the Adriatic coast of modern-day Croatia, escaped prejudices in Northland by relocating to the gum fields where their hard work helped foster a sense of community in a foreign landscape. While they were accompanied by other Croatians, Austrians, and even some people from the Balkan States, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, the Dallies still made up the majority of workers who arrived in the 1880s.¹⁰⁹ Michael Brown and Aleida Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 5. This new wave of immigrants trickled into the northern gum fields in 1885, and by 1900 there were over 5,000 workers on the fields.¹¹⁰ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 27. In their home countries, many of these unmarried men were agriculturalists, working in the vineyards and olive groves, though the ones from the Adriatic islands were mostly fishermen. After Austria introduced conscription in 1881, large swaths of Dallies emigrated to escape military service in the Austrian army, and most stayed in Northland after the gum industry ended to work in the burgeoning wine industry.¹¹¹ Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 5.

The rise of Northland’s gum industry illuminated rising tensions regarding land ownership and use as dictated by the Crown. First, work on the fields and in the camps was largely segmented along racial lines. Russians, Turks, Italians, English, Māori and Dalmatians kept to themselves and even occupied separate meeting hubs in town.¹¹² Brown and Spoelstra, 8. The barrier was largely based on language, but it also had underpinnings in government actions like the Crown designating lands as reserves for British and native Māori diggers at the exclusion of Austrians and other minority groups.¹¹³ Brown and Spoelstra, 15. Not only did the Crown land reserves employ mainly British-born diggers to promote the expulsion of foreigners, it was also common practice for European settlers to acquire land from the Crown under the pretense of farming and secretly extract gum from it.¹¹⁴ Brown and Spoelstra, 10. After collection, those landowners would plow up the soil to comply with their use agreement and destroy the evidence of their digging before forfeiting their holdings back to the Crown.¹¹⁵ Brown and Spoelstra. This deceitful practice deprived future settlers of arable land and skewed the gum market in Northland to benefit associates of the Crown.

Industry Arc

In 1769, during the early days of European exploration, Captain James Cook and his botanist Joseph Banks recorded small lumps of a resinous substance along the beach at Mercury Bay. The substance was presumed to be the excretion from the mangroves that lined the coast, but similar accounts by French explorers dated later that year suggest it was fossilized kauri gum. In 1772, M. Marion du Fresne, the Captain of the Marquis de Castries, identified the “kauri pine tree” as the source of the resin.¹¹⁶ Brown and Spoelstra, 5. This resin stimulated yet another formative kauri industry that would intensify the strain on existing forests and extend the exploitation of kauri as late as the 1970s.

Like the growth of its keeper, kauri gum extraction and export developed in stages. The very first crates of gum left the Bay of Islands amidst cargo taken to Australia and England in 1814 and by 1856 export trade was fully established.¹¹⁷ Brown and Spoelstra, 7. The industry found its footing in the 1840-60s with Māori collecting surface deposits and establishing initial digging, and saw its heyday from 1890-1910, at which point mechanization entered the industry in the form of tub washers and pumps at make-shift gum plants.

For the first 50 years, kauri gum was the largest export from Auckland, surpassing wool, gold and even kauri timber.¹¹⁸ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 27. After a disease called phylloxera decimated the Dalmatian vineyards in the 1890s, all but destroying the wine industry in Dalmatia, Northland saw a large influx of Austrian workers. At the same time, some experimental gum diggers started to collect gum from live trees by “bleeding” standing kauri in the bush.¹¹⁹ Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 9. Gum bleeding caused so much damage to kauri that it was banned in 1905, though the scars on surviving kauri remain today as evidence of the practice.¹²⁰ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28. By the mid-1910s, the world markets were either bursting with product or closed due to war-time decision making, and production began its decline.¹²¹ Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 18. In the 1930s, synthetic alternatives began to replace kauri gum, the numbers of active diggers dwindled, and the industry began to fall until it ended in the 1970s.

Development of Tools, Gum Centers & Gum Digging Camps

“The work was back-breaking, arduous and physically demanding. Because the gum was most often found in hollows, swamps and marshes the diggers were always covered in mud, their feet and clothes were wet, with sweat ever present on their brows. Long hours needed to be worked to make a modest living, and when the day’ s work was done the diggers wearily trudged back to their shanty, washed with cold water in a bucket and then prepared a simple meal in a camp-oven. Without electricity, refrigeration, running water, radios, or any other home comfort which we today take for granted– they somehow managed. When the meal was eaten they scraped gum by candlelight till they could stay awake no longer. Were these really the good old days?”

– Gordon R. Sunde, President of the Dalmatian Cultural Society in Auckland.¹²² Brown and Spoelstra, 2.

Gum digging was grueling, arduous work. Diggers spent long days prodding the ground for gum, soaked from wading in water-filled gum holes and muddy swampland. After returning to camp, they sorted their nuggets and polished the higher grade samples to elevate their market value. Several areas up north became gum digging centers and, unlike the transient sawmill communities of the logging industry, the gum centers developed permanent structures for gum buying stores, dance halls and post offices, and served as the base of many early communities in Northland.¹²³ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28.

As I mentioned in the Species Profiles of chapter III, early gum diggers were the first non-Māori residents to recognize the various uses of native plants, like the soapy residue of kumarahou, nicknamed “Gumdigger’s soap,” and the warm, aromatic drink that came from brewing the leaves of manuka, which they tagged “tea tree.” Further, gum camps were essentially built with native plants. Diggers used the high quality timber of mature tea trees for huts and bedframes, mangemange for mattresses, nīkau palm leaves for shelter roofs and mud to keep it all together.

Digging the gum fields of Northland required tools like a steel spade fitted with straps up the handle, sieves to separate earth from gum, and a sturdy knife to scrape off the outer layer of resin from gum nuggets. Akin to the innovation wave of the timber industry, many inventions arose to aid gum diggers with the daily tasks of their trade. For example, while early settlers made do with leather wading boots, the rubber soled wellington boots that arrived in New Zealand in 1875 quickly exploded as the footwear of choice to keep the feet and legs of later diggers dry in the swamplands each day. In the mid 1890s, John Ivan Botica, a gum digger and ex-sailor, revamped the industry by introducing the first gum spear with a coiled wire at the tip. A gum digger would plunge the spear into the ground until the wire screwed into the buried object, then carefully withdraw the spear to identify the sample and determine its value. Botica’s spear-tip invention, called the “joker” or “toggle,” was used by many gum diggers and greatly improved the efficiency of their work as it prevented the useless time and labor spent digging up poor quality nuggets or worse, burnt wood.¹²⁴ Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 13.

End of Industry

Kauri gum is valued for its color, transparency and hardness, all of which correlate to the length and location of its burial. The highest grade gum is hard, dense, brightly colored and without bubbles. It was likely unearthed at shallow depths on the drier hillsides cleared of forests during Māori times, and was the preferred source material to melt into oil for high-quality varnishes. Lower quality kauri gum is soft, has a black or milky color and is porous. Once the better stores of gum were used up, poorer quality resin was used for making linoleum and other synthetic varnishes. It was likely buried deep in the swamps and wastelands that mark the sites of the vanished kauri forests of prehistoric times.¹²⁵ Brown and Spoelstra, 8. In the gumfields, diggers probed swamplands using Botica’s joker to test the samples’ grade before digging up to five meters deep to unearth nuggets from those “fossil” forests.¹²⁶ Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28. It was this swampland gum digging that led to the discovery of ancient timber buried in fossil forests which, once dug up and dried, became coveted material for making the artisan crafts of the swamp kauri wood industry, like those sold in Nelson’s Kaihu Kauri Gallery today.

Little grows on the white soils of Northland’s vanished forests. While a few areas remain as gum reserves, like the Ahipara Gumland Historic Reserve, others have been converted into farmland, pasture and kumara (sweet potato) fields, adding to Northland’s newer industries. Alongside the reserves and pastures, a segment of former gum land has been adapted to fit into Northland’s contemporary tourism economy. Gumdigger’s Park is a seasonal attraction where evidence of gum digging practices is preserved, native shrubland reestablished, and gum camps recreated at the over 100 year-old gum field to educate and entertain visitors about Northland’s past (fig. 28). Amidst a lush network of tea trees, kauri and ponga, Gumdigger’s Park transports visitors back to a time when Dallies populated Northland. It is 25km North of Kaitaia, and when I visited on December 13th, 2019, I encountered remnant gum holes, replicas of a campsite and gum store, and a vast expanse of native tea tree shrubland. Over just a few decades of regeneration, the landscape resembled the maturing shrubland that gum diggers of the past would have lit aflame to clear the land for digging.

Figure 28. Kauri Gumfields.

Gordon Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 8.

Ell.

Ell, 5.

Ell, 7.

“Timber Industry,” Department of Conservation/Te Papa Atawhai, accessed July 14, 2020.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 20.

Joanna Orwin, “Kauri Forest - Using Kauri,” Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, September 24, 2007.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 24.

“Timber Industry,” Department of Conservation/Te Papa Atawhai.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 22.

Ell, 14.

Ell, 7.

Ell, 18.

Ell.

Ell, 22.

“Timber Industry,” Department of Conservation/Te Papa Atawhai.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 2, 15.

Ell, 24

“Swamp Kauri: Sustainability and Resources,” UKEssays, November 2018.

“Home,” Nelson’s Kaihu Kauri Gallery.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 25.

Michael Brown and Aleida Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara (Dargaville: Academy Press, 1997), 5.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 27.

Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 5.

Brown and Spoelstra, 8.

Brown and Spoelstra, 15.

Brown and Spoelstra, 10.

Brown and Spoelstra.

Brown and Spoelstra, 5.

Brown and Spoelstra, 7.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 27.

Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 9.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28.

Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 18.

Brown and Spoelstra, 2.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28.

Brown and Spoelstra, The Figs and the Vines: Gumdigging in Kaipara, 13.

Brown and Spoelstra, 8.

Ell, Kauri: Past & Present, 28.

︎ Home

︎

︎ Home

Seedling to Giant & Touring the Tree

Industry: Timber & Gum

Timber

Māori Use and European Trade for Shipbuilding

Building the Economy

Industrial clear-cut, Water Power & Infrastructure

Tramping to the Hut

Plummet of Native Forests & Forest Sanctuaries

Swamp Kauri & Artisan Industry

Pine Felling, Forest Regeneration & A Multi-generational Outlook

Industry: Timber & Gum

Gum

Māori Use & Settlement of Dalmatians

Industry Arc

Development of Tools, Gum Centers & Gum Digging Camps

End of Industry

Notes

︎ Home

︎

VI. A Living Giant

︎ Home

Chapter Contents

VI. A Living Giant

Chapter Contents

VI. A Living Giant

A Living Giant

Seedling to Giant & Touring the Tree

Industry: Timber & Gum

Timber

Māori Use and European Trade for Shipbuilding

Building the Economy

Industrial clear-cut, Water Power & Infrastructure

Tramping to the Hut

Plummet of Native Forests & Forest Sanctuaries

Swamp Kauri & Artisan Industry

Pine Felling, Forest Regeneration & A Multi-generational Outlook

Industry: Timber & Gum

Gum

Māori Use & Settlement of Dalmatians

Industry Arc

Development of Tools, Gum Centers & Gum Digging Camps

End of Industry

Notes