An Industry Characterized by Spoliation

If the passing of the Turua bush indeed presents in microcosm the story of what happened to the much greater kauri forests of the Hauraki region, important questions suggest themselves:

•    Why did the kauri timber industry acquire an unstoppable momentum in the later nineteenth century, moving towards what Germans call a Raubwirtschaft (a 'robber economy'), able to survive only by ruinous exploitation, destroying resources as it went along?

•    Why, over the same period, were Pakeha needs with regard to those forests, considered so compelling that they took precedence over Maori rights and needs (including paying an adequate price for timber rights and bush lands), and over accepted standards of conservation?

Every informed visitor who came to New Zealand in the 1870s and after deplored the settler tendency to treat the kauri pine as though it were an illimitable resource, a profound colonial misconception. Such wastefulness astonished J.A. Froude the historian, when he travelled through the province in 1885: 'They [colonists] are cutting [kauri] down and selling it as fast as axe and saw can work.'61 Early conservators had alerted the government in two separate published reports to the disastrous consequences of this relentless onslaught. Their warnings were disregarded; the second conservator (T. Kirk) was dismissed as a retrenchment measure in 1888 and his department closed.

This paper now attempts to answer why there was an unstoppable onslaught upon the kauri forests within Hauraki rohe and why this development was hostile to the interests of iwi there.

Early Milling of Bush

Compared with the later decades of the nineteenth century, felling of kauri went on until the 1850s at a modest pace. Settlers were certainly wasteful62 but their small number kept these domestic demands within bearable limits. The main export demand was preparation of masts and spars for shipping, especially Admiralty contracts.63 As demand for that market became irregular after 1848, kauri millers increasingly directed their product towards the local construction industry.64 P.H.H. Taylor records that the 1861 census returns showed that of the 6,063 houses in Auckland, 5,236 were of wood;65 according to Hochstetter almost entirely kauri timber.66

61 J.A. Froude, Oceana, London, 1886, p. 213.

62 See Paul Monin, Waiheke Island, A History, Palmerston North, 1992.

63 AJHR, 1877, C-3, p. 20; Stone, Young Logan Campbell, pp. 134-35.

64 P.H.H. Taylor, 'A History of the Kauri Timber Industry', MA thesis, Auckland University College, 1950, p. 42.

65 AJHR, 1862, D-9, cit. Taylor.

66 R. Hochstetter, New Zealand, Stuttgart, 1867, p. 144.

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