•     cutting out the cream of the bush. Milling rights, wrote Scholefield, became 'simply and solely an executioner's warrant to pick out the eyes of the forest, to slay and ruin the rest, and then go elsewhere';74

•     trying to compensate for the decline of the New Zealand market by making massive exports to Australia at sacrificial prices.

By 1886 the timber companies were in deep financial trouble, and their shares of little value. In 1888 a Melbourne-based consortium bought all the major kauri companies-including the three big Coromandel Range companies-at fire-sale prices. These concerns it converted into a conglomerate, the Kauri Timber Company (KTC). Though operating as a quasi-monopoly, the KTC did little better financially than the predecessors which it had taken over. Like them, it was overcapitalised, and had poor gearing. It tried to overcome the depressed conditions of the industry by keeping costs down, driving a hard bargain when buying forest land from Maori, and promoting export drives. Ruthless exploitation of the kauri forests continued. By 1906, a year of peak production, the end of New Zealand's finest timber was near. 'There were no forests of young kauri reaching maturity'; only scattered stands in inaccessible locations such as remote parts of the Coromandel range.75

Gains and Losses of Intense 'Mining' of Hauraki Bush

What in sum were the losses and gains to the colony of New Zealand arising out of the ruthless milling of Hauraki's kauri forests under the conditions of Raubwirtschaft?

1.    In terms of resource management, the swift destruction of a priceless resource was an environmental disaster. Twice officially alerted to this danger, the Crown, nevertheless, did nothing.

2.    The damage to the economy and society of Maori was enormous whether one thinks of forest as taonga, or as food (bird, berry and fern-root), medicinal source, and building resource, or as an asset that could have been exploited by Maori themselves during the twentieth-century renaissance.

3.    The costliness of the technologically advanced milling machinery which the competing timber companies felt they had to install, in the context of the narrow profit margins of the industry, and of the burden of debt servicing borne by government and timber companies, was presented as

74 G.H. Scholefield, New Zealand in Evolution, Industrial, Economic and Political, London, 1909, p. 52, cit. by Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', p. 69. Campbell-Walker had drawn attention to wasteful felling in the 1870s. Logs only were cut: 'the rest including top, lop, and branches, are left lying in the forest . . . fine pieces which would be of great value in other countries are thus left to rot or burn'. AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 40. Selective felling in the 1880s notoriously damaged or destroyed saplings and rickers.

75 Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', p. 83.

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