History preserved with a passion
Gumdiggers Park
Where/what is it?
Behind a fence hung with gumboots, just 20 minutes north of Kaitaia, lie the remnants of the country’s biggest gumfield.
There’s a 30-minute self-guided loop track to follow through some of the park’s 26 hectares of passionately preserved history. Literally preserved: though the gum-digging finally died out in the 1950s after more than 100 years of activity, the gum itself, and the kauri trees that produced it, date back up to 150,000 years.
You can see this beautiful substance in the shop/museum, lumps of glowing amber, some with insects trapped inside, some made into jewellery along with lovely turned items of ancient kauri wood.
Why go?
Maybe you haven’t heard the saying ‘‘Mad as a gumdigger’s dog’’ but you certainly know about gumboots. Or thought you did: here you’ll learn the origins of both those terms, and they’re all about the harsh conditions endured by the people who spent years digging holes in the swamp to extract the gum.
First Maori used it for chewing gum, tattooing and lighting fires; and then there came an amber rush of Europeans, particularly the ‘‘Dallies’’ from Dalmatia, supplying a world need for varnish to apply to everything from carriages to coffins.
The holes they dug are still there, and the flimsy jute huts they lived in have been authentically recreated, as well as a Gumdigger’s Dunny, if you’re feeling brave enough to peep inside.
A video back at the shop fills in all the details of their lives; and also explains what is so far known about the catastrophic climactic events that destroyed the original forests 100,000 years ago.
Scientists are still studying the remains of these kauri – tey’re thought to be the oldest trees on the planet – to help with understanding climate change.