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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 5 (September 1, 1930)

The Best Timber Tree

The Best Timber Tree.

Sometimes it is claimed that America has the world's biggest trees. But if we take timber content as the test, New Zealand's kauri leads the world. The great eucalyptus trees of Australia are much loftier, so are many of the sequoia of California, which also are often somewhat thicker through than the kauri, but as has been pointed out by that great forester, the late Sir David Hutchins, neither of them carry their thickness up like the kauri. It is the shape of our famous tree that gives it its unprecedented volume of timber. The bole has little or no taper; page 30 there is no waste in buttressed base, as in so many trees, and it is often thicker at the top of the bole just below where the first branches come out than it is at the ground. Gigantic columns of wood, there is nothing like them in the forests of America. The bulk of commercial timber in the biggest recorded kauri was rather more than twice the bulk of timber in the largest “big tree” of the Calaveras groves, according to official records.

Our kauri, what is left of it, is a precious possession, but it should be more
The Largest Electrically-Operated Dredge in the Southern Hemisphere. The Golden Terrace Goldmining Company's Electric Dredge on the Shotover River, Queens-town, South Island. (The materials used in the construction of the dredge were transported to the site by the Railway Department.)

The Largest Electrically-Operated Dredge in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Golden Terrace Goldmining Company's Electric Dredge on the Shotover River, Queens-town, South Island. (The materials used in the construction of the dredge were transported to the site by the Railway Department.)

totara posts (projecting above the water in the shallows) that once supported the locally famous storehouse of Korokai. This store, the Maoris tell me, was a pataka richly carved. It was the larder in which Korokai kept his supply of human flesh, for he was a cannibal of cannibals, and his pataka-kai-tangata was seldom empty. It was tapu through and through, for none but Korokai and his chieftain friends could draw upon it, and the flesh of man was sacred food, say the Maoris. Korokai was the great chief of Rotorua a than a tree museum, as some have called it. There is every reason why an effort should be made to regenerate the kauri and increase the forests, for future generations of New Zealanders. Kauri really grows about twice as fast as the principal European timber trees; and just as the English Government once grew oak for the navy we should grow our best timber for those who are to come after us.