CHAPTER 5

THE TIMBER INDUSTRY WITHIN HAURAKI ROHE

The Pakeha Side of the Equation

In their attempts to explain how Hauraki lands came to be opened for gold mining and timber milling, historians have customarily concentrated on why and how hapu there came to give way to outside pressure. But it is also illuminating to look, as it were, at the settler side of the equation. Once we appreciate how insistent were Pakeha pressures, economic and political, we begin to understand why Crown officials tended to negotiate for timber and mining rights with such urgency.

The sustained drive of settlers to gain control of Hauraki resources is traced in the story of the timber industry in the region.

Dimensions of the Hauraki Timber Industry Statistical problems

There are no satisfactory statistical measures of the colony's timber production—and therefore the output of Hauraki mills—in the nineteenth century.45 In government returns, only timber exports are given; how much timber was absorbed in the domestic market is not. The only informed estimate I am aware of is given by Captain J. Campbell-Walker, Conservator of State Forests, who calculated that during 1875, 45% of the output of New Zealand sawmills (103 million superfeet) came from the Auckland province.46 But these figures would not take into account the preparation of baulk timber which made up a significant proportion of timber exported from Auckland; so we can safely assume that over 50% of timber felled for construction purposes came from that province. Auckland's dominance of this colonial industry increased: by 1882 the province was responsible for 91.8% of New Zealand's off-shore timber trade, almost entirely in kauri.

During the 1880s, timber production was the largest single industry in the colony, and Auckland (within whose provincial boundaries kauri was only to be found) the greatest timber-producing province.

The southern geophysical boundary of the kauri runs more or less from Maketu to Kawhia. Within this regional confine there were, in the nineteenth century, three centres of concentration of kauri milling: the west coast of Northland (great centre of production, Northern Wairoa); the east coast of Northland (great centre of production, Mangonui/Whangaroa); and the Coromandel Peninsula where, by 1876,

45 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 38, where J. Campbell-Walker discusses the problem.

46 Ibid., p. 39.

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