A product almost as valuable as flax in the export trade of the Dominion is kauri gum. It is a solidified turpentine, or fossil resin, which is found in great chunks in the ground in the North Island. The lumps may be the size of a walnut or as big as a man’s head, and single pieces have been found weighing as much as one hundred pounds. It is often as clear as amber, but varies greatly in colour. Sometimes it is a rich yellow, sometimes brown, and sometimes just the colour of champagne. Some of the best of it is sold to the manufacturers of varnish and linoleums, the bulk of it being sent to the United States. Kauri gum is by no means a cheap article, selling for more than four hundred and fifty dollars a ton, and the annual export is worth nearly two million dollars.
Hundreds of men go over the kauri forests with spears and picks looking for this gum. They drive their spears down into the earth and when they strike a piece, dig it out. The gum lies within a limited area, consisting of about seven hundred thousand acres north of Auckland and about thirty thousand acres southeast of that city. Part of this is government land, upon which the right to dig kauri is sold at so much a year.
Most of the diggers are Austrians, but some are Maoris and some English-Australian settlers. The Austrians make a regular business of hunting kauri and work in bands of thirty or more. The settlers dig for the gum when they are not farming, and the Maoris seek it to supplement their funds when food runs low. Many of the Austrian gum diggers make more than twenty-five dollars a week.
This gum appears on the kauri pine, a tree that often grows one hundred and fifty feet high and twelve feet in diameter. The kauri is about the best timber of New Zealand, and is used largely in building and furniture making. The gum comes from the great forests of the past which have rotted away. Some of the standing kauri trees are bled for their resin like our turpentine forests of the southern states, but this method is illegal, and most of the product is still obtained from the deposits in the ground.
Kauri gum is used by the varnish and linoleum manufacturers because it assimilates oil easily and at low temperatures. As the New Zealand deposits are worked from year to year the gum gets more and more expensive and in anticipation of their giving out the question of substitutes has been studied. China-wood oil, extracted from nuts, and exported from Hankow, China, is now being extensively used and has become a keen competitor of kauri.
Kauri gum is the fossilized resin of the kauri pine forests of the past. It is dug from the ground, and most of it is exported to the United States to be used in the manufacture of varnish and linoleum.
We call a tall, straight person a “bean pole,” but the New Zealanders say he is a “flax stick,” borrowing their comparison from the seed-bearing stalk that rises from the centre of the native flax.