Giveaways
WAY up north in New Zealand, where the Aupori Peninsula leading to Cape Rēinga begins, there is the town of Kaitaia and, 8 km further north by road, the village of Awanui.
And a further 13 km on, Gumdiggers Park, which I mentioned in an earlier post called ‘The Hub of the North,’ but which I hadn’t yet visited then. Now I have!
I visited Gumdiggers Park in February of 2025, and it was amazing. It gives you a real insight into the hard lives of people who dug for kauri gum in the swampy ground, hanging out wet clothes overnight and putting them on again in the morning whether they had dried or not.
Soluble in butanol (butyl alcohol), the gum was used for making varnish. Kauri gum was produced in huge amounts over the millennia prior to human settlement by kauri trees as a means of healing or covering their injuries.
Millions of kauri trees fell into the swamps that covered much of Northland at the time and either rotted away, leaving the gum (which did not rot) or were, in many cases, preserved themselves.
The gum diggers probed the ground with rods to find the gum and the buried kauri trees, up to five metres or more below the surface.
For most purposes, kauri varnish has long since given way to more technologically sophisticated and less resource-plundering alternatives. However, kauri varnish lives on as the basis for the kauri-butanol test for the strength of solvents in general. The solvent under test is added to kauri varnish until the solution turns cloudy as a result of the gum coming out of solution. The more that can be added before the varnish turns cloudy the stronger the solvent, at least by this test.
The first gumdiggers were Māori, soon joined by Europeans, including an influx of people from Dalmatia who came to be known, informally, as the Dallies.
A plaque said that the gum is the origin of the Kiwi expression ‘gumboots’ for Wellington boots or wellies (UK), worn by the gumdiggers to try and keep their feet dry. The gumboots were originally made of leather, but later models were made from rubber, just like the gumboots and wellies of today.
The gumdiggers had to pay a tax on the gum they dug out, which helped to support the finances of the government of the time. On the other hand, their efforts don’t seem to have been very remunerative. A photo of some Māori gumdiggers in front of a huge mass of gum appears above a caption saying that all this gum took a week to dig out and that they earned one pound from their efforts, the equivalent of about NZ $250 in modern money.
As the Four Yorkshiremen would say, ay, we had it tough in them days.
Then again, like a lot of New Zealanders in those days, the gumdiggers probably supplemented their meagre wages by living off a still comparatively unspoilt land (which they were busy spoiling) to some extent; a practice that was also a lot easier to get away with before the founding of the Department of Conservation.
Travelling shops came to the diggings back then, just like the vans that deliver groceries in the suburbs today. But in between visits from the travelling shops, I don’t doubt that any too-inquisitive weka soon wound up in someone’s billy. Kiwi eggs, big enough to feed a family, were also highly prized, especially when fried in kākāpō oil.
New Zealand’s Northland is one of the very few places on Earth where large numbers of fallen trees from before the end of the last Ice Age are preserved in peat swamps.
In the Northern Hemisphere, these sorts of swamps were mostly erased by the ice sheets. But in Northland, they contain fallen trees dating back 100,000 years and more.
Many clues as to the nature of the past environment are captured in these ancient dead trees, which are often in a miraculous state of preservation — still with tree-rings — as if they had been cut down just recently.
Indeed, furniture and other articles made from swamp kauri, as it is called, are almost indistinguishable from the same items made from kauri trees felled in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The fact that tree rings tend to be closer together when trees grow more slowly — a pointer to cool weather and other forms of hardship — means that scientists can read the fine, year-by-year details of the climate during the Ice Age.
By examining swamp kauri tree-rings, and comparing them to other kauri that fell earlier and later but at overlapping dates, the scientists have generated long sequences of tree-ring data across thousands of years in the middle of the Ice Age.
Other events that have been studied with the help of New Zealand swamp kauri include the magnetic pole reversal that happened 42,000 years ago. The pole reversal temporarily weakened the Earth’s magnetic field and thereby allowed space radiation to penetrate to low levels, destroying the ozone layer, which filters out most of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. That was perhaps one reason why our ancestors took to living in caves at the time.
And huge volcanic eruptions, such as the Oruanui Eruption beneath Lake Huka, the ancestor of today’s Lake Taupō, some 25,700 years ago: an eruption so spectacular that it deposited diatoms (tiny fossils) from the floor of Lake Huka onto the Chatham Islands some 850 km to the southeast. That’s what I call a bang!
The effects of all these weather fluctuations and calamities are recorded in New Zealand’s swamp kauri, both in the width of their tree rings and in other data such as their physical and chemical composition, also influenced by environmental conditions at the time and pinned to known dates by the tree rings.
Here’s a video of the kauri forest at Gumdiggers Park, in which I talk about some of the history and the science. Incidentally, the spindly trees are not kauri but rather something more scrubby, either mānuka or kānuka.
On a completely unrelated topic, Gumdiggers Park also had a terrarium full of geckos: fat green lizards that clambered about rather slowly and with a lot of panting.
Geckos come in many colours; but these were green.
I had never seen a gecko in New Zealand before. We have many species of gecko, but they all seem to be stealthy and well-camouflaged; more adept at blending into their environment, which is usually some sort of deep forest, than the slender, darting skinks that often catch your eye in a New Zealand garden as they rush about.
There are a couple of weird things about geckos. The first is the almost magical adhesive power of the feet of most species, which allows them to climb walls like flies, even though they are much bigger and heavier than flies.
The second is that instead of eyelids most species of gecko also have a transparent scale, called a spectacle or brille (German for spectacle lens), covering each eye and keeping it moist.
Their spectacles (great name) get dusty from time to time, and so they lick them clean with their tongue, which is either cute or gross depending on how you look at it.
The gecko terrarium was really the highlight of my visit!
Adult admission to Gumdiggers Park is NZ $15 as of the time of writing, and well worth it.
If you liked this post, check out my award-winning new book about the North Island, available from my website a-maverick.com.
Subscribe to our mailing list to receive free giveaways!
