Kauri Museum Matakohe

The Kauri Museum at Matakohe is much larger and more serious than a rural district museum has any right to be. Its subject is the industry that stripped the north: kauri, a tree that grows for centuries and yields enormous straight timber, was cut out of Northland between the 1820s and the 1920s at a pace that left only fragments of the original forest, and the gum bled from the trees was dug from the ground and exported for varnish and linoleum, employing thousands of diggers including a large Dalmatian immigrant community. The museum holds full-size sawmill machinery in operation, a recreated boarding house and gum store, enormous timber slabs, and the largest collection of kauri gum anywhere, some of it with insects trapped inside like amber. It is honest about the destruction as well as the craft. Allow longer than you expect - people routinely underestimate it. Matakohe is a small settlement with little else.

History

The site began as the Old Time Transport Museum, set up in 1957 by the tram enthusiast Graham Stewart and Merv Sterling, which added kauri displays in 1960. For the centennial of the Albertland settlers a pioneer museum opened here on 29 January 1962, renamed the Otamatea Kauri and Pioneer Museum in 1966, and in 1969 it built a replica kauri dam with Herman Lennan, who had helped build the original in 1921 (Wikipedia, Kauri Museum).

Highlights

• The working machinery - full-size sawmill equipment, demonstrated.
• The gum collection - the largest in the world, some with trapped insects.
• The timber slabs - the scale of what was cut.
• The industry's cost - the museum covers the deforestation directly.

When to go

Any season - it is indoors and a good wet-weather option. Allow three to four hours; most visitors budget less and run out of time.

What to expect

Ticketed. Matakohe has almost nothing else - this is a destination in itself, not a stop. It is two hours from Auckland on a winding road.

Nearby

Dargaville and the Kaipara are north; Waipoua Forest and Tane Mahuta are beyond them.

Key facts