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From issue: May 2001

On the Trail of Kauri

by John Parker

Montana Wines has sponsored a major upgrade of a trail through one of West Auckland’s surviving kauri forests.

Ben Copedo of the West Auckland Historical Society in the Cascades/Kauri area of the forest which is traversed by the Montana Heritage Trail. Photo:Montana Wines

It’s an irony of history. From the mid nineteenth century until the early years of the twentieth, Auckland’s west coast kauri were viewed by many as a commodity to be bled for gum and felled for timber. Now they are in danger of being loved to death. We all want to hug a kauri, but the tree’s sensitive surface rooting system is happier living under deep, undisturbed mulch rather than coping with the stress of hundreds of tramping boots and sneakers as their wearers approach close to these magnificent forest giants.

So it’s timely that some of Auckland’s finest remaining stands of kauri will benefit from the development of the Montana Heritage Trail. Approved by the Auckland Regional Council on 31 August 2000, the project will see an eight-kilometre trail in the northern part of the Waitakere Regional Park improved. The trail, which begins and ends at the carpark at the endof Falls Road off Te Henga Road, winds through an area with around one hundred towering kauri, ranging up to six hundred years in age.

The Arrow Farm, then owned by the Sisam family, about 1905. Photo: Collection of Ben Copedo

In association with Montana Wines, the Regional Council will substantially upgrade the popular walking trail, with Montana making an initial contribution of $100,000 per year for two years, plus up to $20,000 a year for the following eighteen years towards maintenance costs. The agreement ends in 2020, when Montana will have the option to extend the sponsorship for another ten years. The sponsorship signs, discreet brass plaques 80 millimetressquare, will leave trail names unchanged and will accord with existing Regional Council parkland standards.

Walter Sisam in 1889, with his son Walter Henry and daughter Caroline, outside the house built in 1876 of timber slabs. Photo: Collection of Ben Copedo

Of particular joy to kauri lovers will be the upgrade’s provision of access by way of lookout platforms and stretches of raised boardwalks which will protect the tree roots. Innovative engineering technologies will allow construction of these platforms and boardwalks with thinner and more widely spaced supports, to lessen the impact on the environment. Principal work on the Montana Heritage Trail will take place over the next two years. For most of this time, the trail will remain open to the public.

Montana has roots in the region as strong and deep as those of the kauri. Montana’s original vineyard was developed in the Waitakere area in the 1930s. The company has since moved its vineyard operations to Gisborne, Hawke’s Bay and Marlborough, but sees its sponsorship of the heritage trail as preserving its early links with the area, as well as affirming its interest in responsible and sustainable use of land.

One of the giant kauri on the Montana Heritage Trail. Photo: Montana Wines

Te Kawerau a Maki, the enduring tribe of Auckland’s West Coast (despite periodic incursions from Ngati Whatua and from Ngapuhi), based their settlements around Te Henga or Bethells Beach. The tribe used the area now traversed by the Montana Heritage Trail principally for seasonal foraging and gardening. The area was also used occasionally by Kawerau as a campsite for respite from warfare or pursuit. Te Punanga, a refuge, was the name given to ground in the vicinity of the present carpark at the end of Falls Road. It is now open grassland, merging with the fairways of the Waitakere Golf Club.

Largely because the kauri in the area were difficult to reach and work, trampers on the Montana Heritage Trail can view one of the few tracts in the Waitakere Ranges unscathed by the sawmilling which began in the 1830s and continued for over a century. But itwas a close-run thing; in 1922 the Kauri Timber Company, founded in 1888 by a group of Melbourne businessmen, proposed blowing up the Cascade Falls to create a driving dam in order to log the remaining stands.

The Montana Heritage Trail winds through the Cascades/Kauri area of the Waitakere Ranges. Photo: Montana Wines

They left it too late. Change was afoot. Concerned by the rapid disappearance of the kauri, an increasingly influential lobby, including names like David Goldie of Goldie’s Bush fame, farmer and philanthropist Earl Vaile, botanist Thomas Cheeseman and Swanson schoolteacher Bill Ingram, agitated for conservation and protection of the remaining kauri forest. A campaigning Henderson Town Board defeated the driving dam proposal in the early 1920s.

A joint purchase by the Auckland City Council and the Government of a 445-hectare block in 1925 was the first in a series of purchases and substantial gifts of land that have confirmed the Waitakere Ranges and its kauri as an inestimable public and conservation domain.

Hauling kauri logs by bullock team in the Waitakere Ranges, at a time when much of the area’s forest disappeared. Photo: Collection of Ben Copedo

However, some kauri in the area were still endangered because of their gum, an ingredient in high quality varnish. West Auckland historian Ben Copedo recalls that his uncle, Len Sisam, appointed in 1925 as the first Waitakere Park Ranger at the age of nineteen, was always alert for poachers who would use the thick bush cover to scale and bleed off the sap of a selected tree. Armed with written authority from the owners of the Cashmore and Smyth blocks situated round the present Upper KauriTrack, Len would patrol the area with his trusty dog, Dread, whose nose and hearing foiled poachers and preserved the kauri.

The area has its poignancies. Dread died in the 1940s, around the time Len Sisam left the ranger’s position. The dog was buried near the present ranger’s cottage, a task the upset ranger had to leave to others, such was the bond between man and animal. Len Sisam’s other dog, Alf, died under a falling tree and was buried near the Upper Kauri Track.

Conservation and the need for water supply for a growing Auckland went hand-in-hand. The Auckland City Council steadily acquired land from the 1890s for Auckland’s water needs. There are now five reservoirs in the Ranges, including the Waitakere Reservoir, to the east of the Fenceline Track section of the Montana Heritage Trail. Old totara posts and wire, erected to keep the unauthorised out of the reservoir before water treatment became common, are still visible through the regenerating scrub and bush.

Not so visible are the former farms in the area. All visitors to the Montana Heritage Trail will pass through land, now occupied by the Waitakere Golf Club, which belonged to the Sisam family. Walter Sisam emigrated from Alcester in England in 1862 as a nineteen-year-old, along with his brothers Tom and Alfred, on the Matilda Wattenbach. He left his father’s flourmills for a back-breaking life working the fifty-plus hectares of land he and Alfred acquired around 1865. They called it Arrow Farm in memory of the river which powered their father’s flourmill. The first dwelling was a corrugated iron hut, the second a house built in 1876 entirely from hand-split timber.

Other dwellings followed, but the going was tough and sustenance from livestock was hard-earned. However, the farming rights remained with the Sisam family until 1940, some fifteen years after the farm was bought by the Auckland City Council as a future public domain, when young Len Sisam opted for the life of a full-time ranger rather than a farmer.

Beyond the southernmost corner of the Montana Heritage Trail, on one of the highest points of the trail, a few rusting pieces of corrugated iron are the remains of a farmlet and modest house built by Bill Nutting. The house, on an appropriately high spot, was named Simla, after the Indian hill town where Nutting’s father or uncle had served. When water in the catchment dams blocked convenient access, the house was abandoned around 1910.

At Smyth Corner, at the junction of Upper Kauri Track and Long Road Track, the Smyth family once worked a dry-stock run, long since returned to bush. Regeneration has dealt a similar fate to the Smyth Hut.

And trampers will look in vain for the nikau and reed thatched whare, at the north end of the Upper Kauri Track, of Hokianga Maori Johnny Diamond. Employed by the Kauri Timber Company to bleed gum, Johnny Diamond built huts for accommodation in the early years of the twentieth century while he went about his job. When considering the heroic but thoughtless materialisn of the kauri-felling days, it seems fitting that the bush should have the final say, and fitting that the Montana Heritage Trail will allow us to admire the surviving and regenerating kauri, leaving nothing but footprints.

John Parker is a freelance journalist based in Auckland.