the justification for the low figures Hauraki tribes were offered for purchase of forest land or for timber-cutting rights. (Steam-powered mills had already tended to strip from Maori their earlier activity as tree fellers.)76

4.    When the building boom collapsed in the 1880s, colonial investors holding shares in timber companies suffered financial loss. (But as in the stock exchange boom and bust in Auckland a hundred years later-1987-there were speculative winners as well as losers.)

5.    The settler community as a whole is to be regarded as the great beneficiary of the opportunity to appropriate at bargain prices a superb building material for continuous use during the whole of the nineteenth century. Nor did the working out of stands of kauri destroy Auckland's timber mills, still a significant employer of the city's labour by the turn of the century. After 1900 Auckland's timber mills turned to alternative native timbers such as rimu, now made accessible by the opening up of the interior of the island by railway. (Brett's Auckland Almanac, 1905, p. 169, has kauri as only fourth in order of importance of timber produced in New Zealand.)

This extractive industry sustained the Auckland economy to an unusual degree up to about 1896 when the province entered upon a stage of 'economic takeoff' based on the farming of refrigerated produce, and could then (economically speaking) stand on its own feet.

(g) The kauri timber industry provided at low cost a premium building timber which became an integral part of the infrastructure of urban New Zealand, its residences and city buildings, and its major capital works associated with railways and ports.

This was the largest and probably the most enduring of the material contributions of Hauraki to the making of New Zealand in the nineteenth century.

76 J.L. Hutton, "'Troublesome Specimens": A Study of the Relationship between the Crown and the Tangata Whenua of Hauraki 1863-1869', MA thesis, University of Auckland, 1995, p.67.

35