THE KAURI.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 206, 1 September 1938, Page 10

THE KAURI.

TIMBER IN PERPETUITY. (By J.C.) For the last thirty or forty years the State Foreet Department, under various titles and managements, has exhibited a prejudice against the cultivation of indigenous timbers, especially the kauri. It was contended by the successive foreetere in charge that kauri was too slow of growth to trowble about, and that the country must reconcile itself to the final disappearance of thie, the world's most valuable timber. Great foresters such ae Sir David Hutchiiie showed how the kauri forest* could be regenerated and could supply Xew Zealand with timber in perpetuity. Experienced timber men, such as Sir Edwip Mitchelson, urged the State to save the kauri forests and carry out a programme of regeneration of the cut-"over areas. But until recently it s teeemed hopeless to expect the Foreet Service to take any notice - of the repeated appeals from those who realieed the position and who knew that kauri could again take ite place as Xew Zealand's leading source of timber, supplies' if it were only given a chance to grow, with the necessary protection. Now the good news comee officially that there is a very bright prospect of securing perpetual supplies of kauri, under the Hon. F. Langstone's five-year plan of general afforestation. The Department has at last listened to.the sound advice given year after v-ear bv those who knew what should and could be done to stay the lon-r process of destruction. It ifi most satisfactory to know on the assurance of Ministers that the tree will be given the attention it should have received long ago. For more than a century the kauri capital has been expended, and it is nearly at an end. It has been no one's business*to say that the process of destruction must cease. Xow it has been decided to ration the timber cutting, a measure which lias been advocated repeatedly in the "Star."

Further information, telling . the country just what the Department intends to do with ithe remnants of the kauri forests, will be looked for. It is necessary, as has been said again and again, to take, the long view. Britain, in growing her supplies of oak and other timbers, looked a century or two centuries ahead. Hi-re, until the present policy of State forestry was adopted, the thought was only for the present; and it was not thought possible, or necessary, to restrain the rush of the timber miller and bush owners to turn every tree into money. Every country 'but ours so far provides for a permanent supply of its own best timber trees.