The price of progress

The way some individuals and companies exploit our environment seems to be a very twenty-first century concern. However, photographs published in the New Zealand Graphic one hundred years ago show people were starting to realise New Zealand’s natural landscape and resources had been seriously degraded by extractive nineteenth-century industries and farming techniques.

The first photo in the row below was published by the New Zealand Graphic on 6 May 1893 bearing the stark caption, ‘Our timber trade: the work of destruction in a kauri forest.’ It showed a jumbled mass of logs already felled by bushmen. Bullock teams had been harnessed to drag the logs from the forest; probably to a bush tramway leading to a sawmill.

Sixteen years later in 1909 the Graphic published the central montage of photos entitled simply ‘How the Dominion bush is vanishing.’ The montage showed a doomed kauri tree’s final journey from the forest via bullock team, bush tramway and log dam towards the city sawmill.   

Then in 1910 the paper published the third photo showing two bushmen posing by a tall and massive kauri they are in the process of cutting down. While the photo was captioned ‘Food for the mills – the end of a majestic kauri,’ inset in the picture is the single word ‘Doomed,’ which by this time summed up the perilously marginal existence of any areas of kauri forest left in New Zealand.

Indeed, the New Zealand timber industry’s insatiable appetite for kauri meant logging companies had to go to increasingly extreme lengths to exploit the only remaining stands of kauri. These trees were usually in relatively inaccessible areas; which was the reason why they had survived so long. The first photo below shows extreme efforts to log kauri near Kaihu in Northland, where the bushmen had to build an aerial tramway through the bush to get at the last kauri left.   

The Graphic’s central photo caption describing the Kauri Timber Company’s enterprise to extract another twenty million feet of timber from the Waitawheta Gorge near Owharoa summarises it all: ‘Owing to the growing scarcity of kauri timber, forests are now being worked which a few years ago would not have been looked at.’ The company was so desperate to get at the timber that it installed an expensive, powerful steam winch to control heavy wagons of kauri logs as they rolled down the steep Owharoa incline to a junction with the main trunk railway line to the sawmill.   

More deforestation occurred in the North Island as the main trunk railway line was built between Auckland and Wellington. The third photo was taken near Turangarere and shows the extent of the land cleared from the forest (on the left) wherever the railway tracks had to go through.

Some of the logs cleared for the main trunk line could be put to good use. The first photo below shows bushmen jacking-up a large log before it was hauled to the Government's sawmill at Kakaki, where totara, rimu and kahikatea were sawn up for sleepers, bridges or use in general railway construction.

After the main trunk line was completed, work started on a railway line from Ōngarue to Stratford so that Taranaki farmers and businesses could get access to Auckland markets. The two central photos, which the Graphic published on 21 September 1910 show ‘How deforestation follows the railway’ (or actually just precedes it). The photos have an inset caption, ‘Two sides of the tunnel:’ the upper photo shows the forest cleared from the railway where the line from Stratford goes through a tunnel in the Pohukura Saddle, and the lower shows land two miles further on towards Pohukura beyond the tunnel, where the line was planned to cut through more untouched forest. The third image, which the Graphic published on 9 November 1911 shows evidence of further deforestation where land had been cleared for the railway line and the workers' camp near the Stratford end of the Whangamomona tunnel.

Often after the logging companies’ had been through the forests logging usable trees, settlers burned off much of the remaining bush and scrub, before breaking the land into farm paddocks. The first photograph below was published by the Graphic in 1900.  It was one of Charles Peet Dawes’s photos captioned ‘After the bushman and fire have passed through.’

Then on 23 January 1904 the Graphic published the dramatic central photo showing a burn-off in progress, with rolling clouds of smoke hanging over a blasted landscape of skeletal trees and stumps.   This photo must have impressed the editors so much they re-published the third image in their 12 May 1909 issue; this time with the profound new caption: ‘The growth of centuries vanishing in smoke and flames.’ 

On 21 January 1893 the Graphic published the page shown below of two New Zealand bush sketches. The upper sketch showed a mountain track and the lower sketch showed a similar area from a slightly different angle, with the thought-provoking caption ‘Forest giants after the fire.’

By the 1900s some people realized there was a correlation between deforestation and soil erosion caused by flooding. On 16 June 1909 the Graphic published this series of photos from Manawatu showing land washed away when cleared pastureland had no plant cover to help bind soil or absorb river water. 

The next year, on 8 June 1910, the Graphic further highlighted the direct relationship between deforestation and the advance of water, when the paper published an aerial panorama of flooding at Te Aroha. This happened because floodplains around the Ohinemuri and Waihou rivers had been cleared of forest and the land turned into farm paddocks. There was no natural plant cover to absorb overflowing river water, and the floodwaters spread out as we can see in the picture below.

These are just some photographic examples from the extensive New Zealand Graphic coverage of the degradation of New Zealand’s native bush in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This story was written by staff at Auckland Libraries and originally published on the Heritage et AL blog.