Kauri Museum

Our plan was to drive back to Auckland. But we still wanted to go to the Kauri museum. The history of the pioneers and the huge kauri trees is on display here. The museum is awesome. In a big hall, we walked through a boarding house, with tools from the European settlers on display. We saw the evolution of saws used to cut the kauri, and the equipment used in the sawmills to cut the trees into planks.

The museum gave an impression of the width of the trees we had seen, and three that had been measured but lost in the late 1800s:
(trunk diameter, height)
4.91m, 45.2m - Tane Mahuta (Lord of the Forest)
5.22m, 37.4m - Te Matua Ngahere (Father of the Forest)
6.40m - Kairaru
7.27m - Father of the Forests
8.54m - Giant Kauri Ghost
Comparatively, the kauri tree that we hugged the previous day, Yakas, was only 3.90m in diameter!

We also looked back into the history of NZ compared to the tree rings of kauri cross-sections. In the picture, you can see the following time scale:
1642: Abel Tasman reaches NZ
1789: James Cook's first of three voyages to NZ
1840: Treaty of Waitangi (between Maori and the British)
1861: Gold discovered in Otago
1893: NZ to first give the vote to women
1953: Edmund Hillary (NZ) conquers Everest (who the Hillary Step is named after)

And we admired the large, golden chunks of kauri gum that were used as jewellery. They caused a giant “gold rush” that encouraged many settlers to come to NZ.Read more