The great North Auckland sub-province, where railroad communication was longer delayed than in the southern districts, has now come into its own so far as easy and inexpensive transit is concerned. The Government railway through the heart of the north gives direct access to the Bay of Islands and many another place of beauty, history and good sport. In this article the writer epitomises some of the charms of our North Country, a pleasant land at any season, but doubly pleasant as the summer time approaches.

Writing these lines in a city where the climate is usually euphemistically described as “bracing,” one's thoughts go longingly to a land where there is real warmth in the sunshine. Manifold charms call one to the great north peninsula that is almost islanded by the narrowness of the Auckland isthmus, but just now the magnetic quality most insistent in the long list of attractions for the visitor to that part of our Dominion is its climate, mild but not enervating, the nearest approach to the perfect climate that New Zealand, at any rate, can give the traveller and the permanent resident. It is not without its little imperfections; sometimes there is more rain than one would desire. But there is a soft caressing quality in the air, a brightness, an invitation to live the out-of-doors life that lasts practically all the year round. Inland, or on the greatly-indented coast, that is the abiding charm of our Northland. Warm as it is, the heat is always agreeably tempered by the nearness of the sea. I have felt the heat more on a long day's ride across the Kaingaroa Plain, and even on a midsummer traverse of the great Tasman Glacier, than in the northernmost parts of the Far North.

Climate first, then soil. Varied as it is in quality, there is no part of the North that will not grow food, grow the world's best timber-tree, grow a glory of flowers, produce wealth, in abundance, if properly. page 26 treated. There is no part of New Zealand better fitted for man's comfortable subsistence. The world, or some of it, is making that discovery; people who came originally as tourists and sportsmen have decided to cast anchor for good in such places as the Bay of Islands.

The great sea sport developed of recent years takes many to that coast of bountiful waters, the warm blue seas where the giant swordfish and the fierce mako shark show desperate fight to the rod and line enthusiast. But to many more of us there is plenty of interest in the inland parts, exploring places of mingled beauty and history, such places as the Waipoua Kauri Forest, the shores of that solitary lake of the North, Omapere, set in the midst of an ancient nest of volcanoes, the wooded valleys and hills where the nikau palm is in its glory, the battle-grounds where once British bayonet met Maori long-handled tomahawk and where British cannon pounded Maori stockade. Beauty everywhere, and story and legend everywhere, they join hands in this early-settled Northland, which more than any other part attracted Maori-Polynesian sea-rover and pioneer pakeha voyager and trader.

Heart of the Northland.

Kaikohe, in the centre of the widest section of the North Auckland peninsula, is about as suitable a travel-base as anywhere for one who wishes to spend a few days or weeks in the inland parts. Round about it is the rich volcanic country, the puriri country, the greatly contested land of the old hard-battling days. I know of no more interesting bit of country in the North, not even the story-haunted shores of yonder grand bay of Tokerau, the place of many islands. Kaikohe is the business end of the North Auckland railway, the inland branch; the other branch has its deep-water terminal at Opua, on the Bay. The line goes a few miles beyond Kaikohe, round the western side of Lake Omapere to Okaihau and the slopes that look down on the Hokianga headwaters. It has hotels and stores, and all the furni-ture of an up-to-date provincial town. The scenery takes the eye; gentle in character, a land of rich pastures and much timber.

Here you are near Taiāmai, that name of beauty and poetry to the Maori; Taiāmai with its lovely hills of romantic forms, its waving forests, its bright streams, its prolific food cultivations. “E Kata ana nga puriri o Taiāmai”—“the puriri trees of Taiāmai are laughing with joy”—is a local proverbial expression; it embodies love of land and home, it is used as a phrase of congratulation and pleasure, of joy of life. You cannot but feel that joy of life in the grand summer time in this heart of the North.

Fortress-Hills and Battlefields.

All these boldly-shaped volcanic cones that emboss the Kaikohe-Taiāmai country, and indeed all the open land from coast to coast, are carved and terraced, trenched and pitted, the work of the olden tribes, whose descendants live a more placid life on the levels below the ancient fortress-heights. These eye-catching pas of old are numberless. Every hill, no matter how small, was a fortified hold.

There are the more recent battlefields. Ohaeawai, on the roadside between Kaikohe and the township called Ohaeawai (the true Taiāmai) is particularly worth a visit. A Maori church, of the old-fashioned architecture, stands within a strong wall of lava stone, on exactly the site of Hone Heke's stockaded pa which Colonel Despard vainly assaulted in 1845. Graves of British and Maori are side by side within that wall, a churchyard of many a thrilling and touching memory.

A few miles away, on the shore of Lake Omapere, the main road traverses the exact site of another battlefield of 1845, the Puketutu levels, where Colonel Hulme gave the warrior Ngapuhi their first taste of British steel. There was some sharp bayonet fighting on that quiet pasture over the fence, where dairy cows graze contentedly on Omapere's green banks.

Pukenui, or Ahuahu, that graceful hill that overpeers lake and battlefield, was itself a fighting tower and a sentry place in those days. In its crater the Maoris grew food crops to perfection, nourished by sunshine and the good warm decomposed volcanic soil. A garden of food in the very mouth of what was once a furious fiery furnace. And there are many such places in this wonderful heart of the North.

“A little while I stood, Breathing with such suppression of the heart as joy delights in.”
An idyllic setting. The upper reaches of Whangaroa Harbour, North Auckland, N.Z.

A Sanctuary Lake.

Hokianga, Kaitaia, Whangaroa, Man-gonui, Ahipara, places each with its own peculiar magnet of scenery and story, are within easy reach of Kaikohe. Roads feed the railway on all sides. By one road you may go southward to Manga-kahia and the northern Wairoa, and the Wairua Falls.

I have written of Omapere as the solitary lake of the North, but there is at least one other worth the seeking out; it lies a little off the Kaikohe-Mangakahia road, in the region called Tautoro. Kereru or Tautoro Lake it is called; it is the most lovely, lonely, wild sanctuary imaginable, a bush-girt lake of profound calm, with a round wooded islet rising from its centre, an ancient burial isle. Wild pigeons winnow the air from side to side by the tapu waters; tui and bellbird chant in the groves; the bush is one of the earliest places visited by the far-flying shining cuckoo, the pipi-wharauroa, on its coming in the spring of the year. For centuries this has been a burial place of Ngapuhi chiefs. The dead were ferried across to the holy isle by a tohunga in a small canoe. A classic place, spirit-haunted, steeped in mournful beauty.

The Kauris of Waipoua.

Then, second only to the halcyon charm of such places, is the feeling of mingled awe and admiration that comes over one in the presence of that king of our forests, the grand kauri pine. Much as I have seen of the kauri forests, that feeling abides; I can never enter such a bush without something of the Maori veneration for the ancients of the Wao-nui-a-Tane. The tree-worship of the olden woodsmen seems the most natural thing page 28 in the world in such a forest as Waipoua; a forest which one hopes will always be preserved tapu against the saw and axe of commercialism. The sawmiller casts a greedy eye on Waipoua, despite the fact that it is a State forest reserve. It should be safeguarded in every possible way; it is a national treasure that will become more precious as the years go on.

Much has been heard of the Big Trees of California; here is the biggest tree of all, in volume of timber. The great feature of the kauri that made it so valuable to the timber men was its huge bulk and absence of taper. The late Sir David Hutchens, the famous forester who was so enthusiastic about our forests, wrote that “probably one may take the maximum height of the New Zealand kauri as having been about 275 feet.” But its great bulk reduced its apparent height; the spear-like kahikatea looks taller.

The solidity, the bulk, the exact parallelism of the sides from the ground to first branches, give the kauri its character of power and majesty. It seems sacrilege to lay crosscut saw to the remaining groves of so chieftainlike a tree.

“On entering we feel beneath our feet Luxurious carpetings of moss and leaf.”
The biggest tree in the Waipoua State Forest, North Auckland. This magnificent specimen of the kauri measures 49ft. in girth at the middle of the trunk which is 30ft high to where the crown commences to branch out.

“… which has outlived so long The flitting generations of mankind.”

The Nikau Grove.

The kauri is the rangatira, the ariki of the tree world. There is a forest fairy, and that is the nikau palm. Here in the warm forest-fenced valleys of the Hoki-anga and Waipoua and Mangakahia hills you may see the nikau in its unspoiled tropic-like glory. Never can the nature-worshipper realise to the full the loveliness of the forest heart until he wanders into one of these groves, where the slim symmetrical pillars support a green arching ceiling of rustling pinnate fronds. But to see a perfect clump of nikau you must go into the forest, past its sheltering selvedge of taraire trees, where the basking cicada clacks and shrills ceaselessly in the sunshine, and where the pigeon and the tui feast on the fruit, into the untouched kauri groves, deeper still into the hollow dells where little streams murmur over their mossy stones, there is the home of the nikau, where the winds never penetrate its protective wildwood screen.