Declining Industry Still

Northern Advocate, 26 September 1946, Page 7

Declining Industry Still

Kauri Gum —No. 1

(By I. W. KEYS)

Now in its decline after 100 years of activity, grossing more than £25,000,000, New Zealand’s kauri gum industry is still big business:' This year the post-war market has risen to unprecedented levels' with prices ranging from £4O to £l3O a ton, and diggers say they are still rising. These are the values realised by the digger on the field from Auckland City buyers. What the commodity commands on the overseas markets of Great Britain, the United States of America, and Australia for use in the manufacture of high-grade varnish and linoleum is probably unknown in New Zealand. Some authorities estimate that in 40 years the kauri gum industry will be dead. Others consider there is still as much gum remaining in the soil as has already been taken out. Today’s activities are confined almost wholly to the Far North, and only a few fields are operating on a large scale. Except in isolated cases, the digger of a few decades ago with his spear and spade, has gone for ever and nothing but a few rotting, tumbledown shacks remains of the huge camps which dotted the length and breadth of all Northland. To catch the high post-war market, the gumdigger of 1946 uses science and. machinery. Plqnt is expensive and therefore confined to the enterprising few. DAY OF MACHINERY In the biggest-scale operations, the gum is no longer dug from the soil, but washed out. TheSe washings, almost without exception, are from fields which have been dug by hand

in past years not once, but as many as three times, and returns are still big. But where 4 'modern machinery is being used today there should not be a particle of gum left for posterity as has been the ca«e in the older workings which helped to make Northland history. No other aspect of New Zealand’s economic and social development presents a story so romantic, varied and colourful as that of kauri gum exploitation, and no other story has been recorded so inadequately. Yet in 1886, according to Official Year Book figures, the amount of the commodity exported was 4900 tons totalling £257,000 in value, and in 1906 the export was 9200 tons valued at £522,500. As late as 1936 tonnage exported was 3200, realising £96,200, and in the following year, so great have been the market fluctuations, the same quantity realised £151,600. In that year Mr H. C. Heays, of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, reported to the Technological Section of the Philosophical Society that from January. 1853, to December, 1937, the Dominion had exported approximately £23,500.000 worth of kauri gum, of which more than £10,000,000 worth had been sent overseas in the 20 years from 1891 to 1910. In the years prior to the 1914-18 Great War, literally thousands of men were engaged on the rich gumfields north of Kaitaia. NOTHING FOR COMMUNITY Of the vast wealth won from former forest sites, little evidence remains. It contributed nothing to roading, and to land development only a limited degree. Today a wiser counsel prevails. All kauri gum reserves are on Crown lands, and gum obtained from these areas pays a 10 per cent royalty which is earmarked for future land development. Only last year the paucity of the industry’s contribution to rural development in an area which, under the present system of local body finance, faces an almost impossible road maintenance burden, was the subject of bitter comment by the Mangonui County Council. The case in point was the road giving access to Ahipara Hill, still the most productive gumfield in the north. Deriving little or no rating revenue from this area, the council was expected to maintain this access. It pointed to the valuable gum-royalties derived from Ahipara Hill, and sought Government assistance. When school buses ceased to run on the road’s rough surface the Government established a precedent and voted £IOOO from Public Works Departmental expenditure to reopen the access. But no departmental officer will admit that the cash came from gum royalties. Governor Hobson, in 1845, wrote that a “brisk export trade had sprung up in timber, flax and kauri gum.’’ FIRST EXPORTS According to a thesis by Mr R. W. Firth, M.A.. in 1922, the firm of Brown and Campbell made the first export to the London market in 1844, realising