gum Once Brought £1,000,000 A Year

Northern Advocate, 30 August 1948, Page 4

gum Once Brought £1,000,000 A Year

Kauri gum has brought probably £30,000,000 to the Auckland Province since digging began over 60 years ago. The export business was at its peak at the turn of the century, and thousands of diggers of several nationalities were then employed on the fields. So easy was it to find good gum that grades which today would be worth up to £IOO a ton were frequently rejected by the Auckland merchants and were used for filling building excavations in the city.

Sir John Logan Campbell was one of the first, if not the first, exporter of kauri gum, and in the years when he was in the trade, exports frequently reached 10,000 tons annually.

£SOO A TON White gum sold at prices which reached as high as £SOO a ton, and black gum sometimes reached £250. Annual exports returned as much as £1,000,000. However, the frenzied activity in the fields had the inevitable result of thinning out the yield as the century progressed. Although it continued to average about £500,000 for several years after the First World War, the decline since then has been progressive and inexorable.