250,000 acres of forest land were in government hands. Determining with any certainty how much timber came from within Hauraki rohe is (once again) difficult; regional production figures do not exist. And whereas there are tables of timber exports from registered export ports such as Hokianga or Kaipara or Whangaroa, quantities of timber coming from the Coromandel forests are subsumed in the statistics of exports from the 'port of Auckland'.

Sources used

Nevertheless sound qualitative evidence goes some distance to remedy this deficiency. This comes from:

•     two thorough-going nineteenth-century commissioned reports by J. Campbell-Walker (1877) and Thomas Kirk (1886);47

•     archival records of the four major companies working in Hauraki in the 1880s:

Auckland Timber Company,48 New Zealand Timber Company,49 Mercury

Bay Timber Company,50 (these three milling kauri), and Hauraki Sawmill

Company51 milling kahikatea;

•     Kauri Timber Company archives (a Melbourne incorporation).52

We here come to the central question: what elements in the culture and economy of the settler community drove it so quickly to destroy a unique resource of the Maori, the forest with which that native people had had, moreover, a unique spiritual relationship since time out of mind? In a sense the story of the passing of the Turua bush is simply, writ small, substantially what happened to the great native forest resources of the Hauraki region.

Hauraki Sawmill Company—A Case Study Beginnings

This company arose in the first instance out of the lightning growth of Shortland and Grahamstown, 1867-71. The goldfields set up an extraordinary demand for timber:

•     in mines themselves, for pit props, struts, cap pieces, preferably heart kauri for durability; but 'junk timber' was also called into service;53

•     tramways to mines (or bush—usually horse-drawn) had rails and lateral sleepers, both of heart kauri;54

47 AJHR, 1886, C-3. The best secondary sources are Michael Roche, History of Forestry, Wellington, 1990, chapter 3, and
R.C.J. Stone, 'Auckland Business and Businessmen in the 1880s', PhD thesis, Auckland University, 1969, chapter 7.

48 A-204, Northern Archives Record Centre (NARC).

49 A-52, NARC.

50 A-242, NARC.

51 A-38, NARC.

52 Kauri Timber Co. Archives, Melbourne University Archives.

53 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 21.

54 Ibid., p. 40.

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