The unthinking harvest

The New Zealand timber industry was firmly based on the fine huge trees of the forests as they were when the Europeans first arrived—the massive rimu, totara and kahikitea, and the invaluable kauri tree. The first timber was cut by hand. The chopping used to be done in relays, and with each cut of the axe the resinous gum dripped down the handles onto the men's hands, raising blisters and biting deep into raw flesh.

Once the news about the fine native timbers of New Zealand got back, expeditions made sure to bring in handsaws and pitsaws to cope with the forest giants. Cook, on his second voyage to New Zealand, had a tree cut down and sawn into manageable planks. This was probably the first instance of pitsawing to be carried out in this country. As New Zealand timber came to be more and more in demand for ship building, these contrivances were set up everywhere in the bush, and all settlements had their sawyers and smiths.

The problem then arose of how to transport the newly felled logs to the mills for sawing. Bullocks were imported to do this job, and often little bush tramways were built to make the job easier. On downhill slopes log chutes were cleared, so that the logs could slide down easily without using animal labour. These chutes were made greasy by having small streams diverted onto them, which kept the floor of the chute muddy. Digging the chutes and diverting the streams entailed much labour, but once the job was done it was usually found to be well worth the trouble.

Bush tramways, long disused and green with fern and moss, are a common sight in the depths of remaining native forests. At first teams of bullocks or horses were used to haul the bogies of logs, but later steam took over the job. The first steam operated tramway was used in Marlborough in 1870. The loco was powered by waste wood from the cuttings, so was self-sustaining fuelwise, but the fire risk from the impressive gusts of smoke and cinders was high, especially as the timber became thin from logging out, and dried.

Primitive all these methods of cutting and hauling might seem today, but so many people were working industriously at timber harvesting, that vast amounts of wood were being removed from the landscape. Stand after stand of ancient trees disappeared on lines of bogies to the increasingly distant busy mills. Whole towns were built on the basis of New Zealand timber: Oxford, near Rangiora, was one example of the hundreds of these timber-based settlements. The first settlers in Oxford began to cut timber in 1851, and in 1860 the first mill arrived, carried 32 kilometres by bullock wagon. By 1876 there were eleven sawmills working in the settlement, some of them a great distance from the town, following the receding timberline. Throughout New Zealand this situation repeated itself again and again: mills were set up in the forest; the timber surrounding them became thinner and thinner until by the end of the 1880s the trees were gone. The mills were surrounded by bare, denuded slopes and valleys.

The harvest had been completed and the crop had disappeared. Today there is nothing to show that Oxford was, for almost forty years, a booming timber town.

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