The Kauri Timber Export Industry
The long straight, branchless trunk produces durable straight grained timber and a resin once highly prized for the manufacture of high quality paints, varnishes and polishes. As a result, it was the basis of the first export trade from New Zealand, and was cut and milled with voracity hard to believe considering the technology of 19th century New Zealand. The ingenuity and tenacity involved in recovering timber and gum from some of the back country areas can only inspire awe and respect for our pioneering forefathers.
The first written records of any detail are those of Marion du Fresne in 1772, whose men felled a kauri at Manawaroa Bay in the Bay of Islands, and shaped it into a ship’s foremast. The Royal Navy quickly realised that the long branchless trunks were ideal for ships spars and so began the export of this excellent timber. The spars were being shipped across the Tasman within the early days of the settlement of New South Wales. Exactly 25 years after Cook rediscovered New Zealand, the crew of the Royal Navy vessel ‘Fancy’, cut more than 200 spars at Doubtless Bay and from the Coromandel Coast.
By the second half of the 19th century the kauri was being ruthlessly exploited for all building purposes. The Australian registered Kauri Timber Company owned and milled huge areas of kauri forest in this country for use in Australia and the West Coast of America. It owned and operated as many as 30 mills at one time towards the close of the century, at a time when an estimated 35,000 square kilometres of land was either milled or cleared for pastoral farming.
The timber was used locally, and still is, for boatbuilding, and while some of the exported timber was also used for this purpose, (the English barque ‘Berean’ boasted a 60ft knotless poop deck of kauri) the vast majority went as housing timber. Millions and millions of board feet of this wonderful timber were loaded onto ships in the Kaipara, Hokianga, and Coromandel areas and sent overseas to be turned into houses and furniture in Sydney or San Francisco.