Barry Brickell's History of Coromandel Peninsula

A Brief Outline for Visitors
With input from the late A.M. Isdale, historian, from Thames.
Barry Brickell, Driving Creek, 1988, re-revised 2007.

The Coromandel Peninsula is a rugged, mainly ancient, volcanic range of mountains forming the eastern side of the great Hauraki Gulf. The tertiary aged volcanic rocks sit upon an up-faulted basement of Mesozoic aged greywacke rocks which form most the New Zealand sedimentary foundation.

Pre-European Maori history extends back to about 900AD, to such tribes as Ngati Huarere and Ngati-Hei, using Arawa genealogies. The later Tainui-descended tribes of Ngati-Maru and others moved in after about 1600, and the classical palisaded pas, of the kind first described by Captain Cook in 1769, eventually occupied every suitable coastal as well as some inland hilltop sites all around the Peninsula. Evidence of these, now regarded as sacred sites, exists today in the form of earthworks, massively terraced remnants often clearly visible, from Tainui invasion times. Captain Cook also explored the Waihou River and his botanist made a study of the forest trees as they ventured up as far as near Kerepehi where there is a monument. A report was sent to the British Admiralty.

The first Europeans to become interested in the Peninsula’s abundant natural resources were from the British Navy, which needed huge amounts of masts and spars to defend its far-flung interests against Napoleon of France. 1795 saw the first Admiralty timber ship at Coromandel (then Brampton) Harbour. The British East India company, also showing interest, dispatched ships to New Zealand as well. An 1801 cargo of inferior kahikatea from the Hauraki Plains put timber merchants off New Zealand timber, and then the Admiralty demand for kauri stopped with the Peace of Amiens Agreement in 1802 but this was short lived. In 1805 magnificent kauri masts and spars from New Zealand gave Nelson an advantage at the Battle of Trafalgar over the French because of their strength, height and durability.

Kauri exploitation had been secretive, but kauri later gained an international reputation. Maori were employed as bushmen as early as the 1790s to fell and drag whole trees in exchange for European tools and goods. But in the far north an especially innovative Ngapuhi chief, Hongi Hika, traded for muskets from around 1814 with visiting whalers and even missionaries. In 1819, he made a fruitful visit to England resulting in the gain of yet more munitions. Armed with these tools of devastation, he began several years of raids and massacres on pas elsewhere,linking this Peninsula, and as far south as the Bay of Plenty and even Rotorua. Such acts of revenge between tribes, formerly skirmishes, became devastating conflicts due to the introduction of firearms.

The local name Hauraki (wind from the north) was grimly exemplified, as the raiding parties came, and the tribal survivors moved to the head of the Thames Valley. In 1820 the British Naval ship HMS Coromandel named after India’s South East Coast was dispatched from England conveying convicts to Sydney and going on to trade in kauri spars. The name Coromandel is an anglicised abbreviation of Cholamandalaru, an ancient tribe of Dravidian people (Oxford Reference Dictionary) who inhabited the East Coast of India. This suggests that timber trading indeed went on between NZ and East India Company strongholds such as Batavia, where the British Admiralty also had interests.

In the mid 1830s British timber enterprises were established at Whitianga and Coromandel with trader-settlers, with first sawpits and later driving dams, that gave birth to the vast kauri exploitation that was to last for the next 100 years with 1000 million cubic feet of very high quality logs being extracted.
Around the beginning of the 1850s, a kauri log coming down Driving Creek to a Ring Bros. sawmill is said to have picked up a lump of quartz with visible gold. Charles Ring had previously gone to California with a timber cargo and put in some time gold prospecting. (A good deal of the San Francisco which burned in the 1906 earthquake was of Coromandel kauri). On his return, Charles Ring spent a day at Driving Creek, October 15, 1852, bringing gold specimens to Auckland on the 16th. This resulted in New Zealand’s first official goldfield, under Commissioner Charles Heaphy. There was a small short-lived “rush” of 300 at most. (I have a faded copy of Ring’s pencil sketch of the original gold diggers at Driving Creek.)

The big rushes came in the South Island such as Gabriel’s Gully, Otago in 1861. There was a revival of the Coromandel field in 1862, ten years after Ring’s discovery as Governor Grey resolved Maori opposition with royalty payment to the native landowners. Such payments, as well as various land claims, are still a subject of contention in the checkered history of Coromandel goldmining.

During 1862-67 Coromandel paved the way for something bigger. Unlike most South Island gold, the local stuff was not recoverable from alluvial deposits, but intimately locked in the hard quartz reefs, which required crushing machinery and separating equipment. This did not deter the avaricious nature of the European gold seekers, so they rapidly formed syndicates and companies, acquiring mostly questionable English capital.
Thus company structures with Auckland investors and machinery were ready for the opening of the Thames goldfield in 1867 following pioneering work in the Driving Creek area north of Coromandel Town. Maori culture had no value for gold, but when James Mackay sent in two Maori prospectors trained in Nelson, they soon made the required discovery. A real rush followed.

Thames soon saw the first flood of itinerant diggers which gave place to companies, which in later years attracted Australian and English as well as Auckland finance. The larger companies survived the turn of the century, and one, the Martha at Waihi, till 1955. But many were short lived, despite the occasional bonanza.

Today several interesting remains of crushing batteries, underground mine workings, tramways, waterworks and villages, form tourist attractions scattered throughout the Peninsula, often in wild remote places, now being opened up thoughtfully as our historical awareness and respect for the environment increases. Many are sited in regenerating native scrub and forest, as the original cover was largely devastated by fires lit by the would-be farmers who came after them. Miners used what timber they needed and cleared the bush only for their particular requirements. Indeed, it was farming and kauri gum hunters’ burn-offs getting out of control that explains much of the present-day scrub and pine ecology we now see over much of the Peninsula. This fact needs to be properly emphasised. For instance government employed Gold Wardens mounted on horseback often fought against farmers in attempts to save forests for mining timber. While conservation in modern terms was not the aim, nevertheless various pockets of forest were saved when the gold ran out. Few pockets of original kauri forests remain intact.

Prospecting drives (crude tunnels) are very abundant throughout the goldfield area, as small parties and individuals, often in desperation, tried their luck at gold finding, as evidenced by the variety of gambling and cogent names they gave their claims, such as “Luck at Last”, “Who’d a Thought it”, “four in Hand” and the like.

Today, with remarkable advances in the technology of mineral prospecting, mining and extraction, together with the often high world gold prices (now erratic) a whole new vista has opened up, for large multinational exploiters. Abundant low grade ore deposits, formerly of no value, are being actively claimed over much of the Peninsula. Much of this land has conservation value, and debate continues over both conservation-versus-exploitation and mining legislation issues. The pressure is building up and decisions at government level on specific claims in forest park lands have sparked controversy, which could affect future mining legislation. The last 20 years have seen the birth and rapid development of the conservation movement, as younger, educated people with urban experience have been coming to live on the Peninsula in increasing numbers, obviously attracted by its natural environment.

Of all the forces that have reshaped the ecology of the Coromandel Peninsula during the “exploitation” phase of European settlement, it is fire which has done the most damage. The early kauri bushmen seldom directly caused fires. In fact, they tended to be respectful towards forest containing valuable trees in order to promote natural regeneration. Some even set aside reserves to protect special trees or areas where particularly fine stands of kauris grew (the “309 Road” Reserve for example). However, their dams were the first instruments in the washing of soil and silt from said “driving creeks” (after which the writer’s home district was named) to begin the horrendous erosion process that continues to this day. And the “heads” (a good third of a kauri tree) and other debris left by the timber men, meant that forests which normally would not “carry fire” could be subjected to conflagrations covering thousands of acres. The gum diggers like the early farmers who started in the mid 1840s, were much more interested in open ground than the miners, who usually preferred forest close by to draw on for pit props, battery buildings, water races and suchlike. The gum diggers used matches freely, reducing “cut-over” forests to the “desert stretch of desolated realms” as well as bleeding the surviving kauris for gum. With settlers, “clearing ground of rubbish” by fire was practically a religion, helped by legislation encouraging large-scale farming with monetary concessions. By the turn of the century, much of the accessible forest cover had been burned off the hills and the river estuaries had become unnavigable with silt.
In 1882 the first refrigerated shipment of meat cargo left New Zealand for England. Because of refrigeration and our colonial links with “Mother England”, meat and then also butter rapidly became the most important exports from New Zealand together with wool until the Great Depression of the 1930s. thus, after the timber industry, gold mining and gum digging declined before the turn of the century, desperate but inexperienced settler men and their families tried grass growing for a living.

Many were not trained farmers and lacked knowledge of soil fertility. Their first attempts after the “bush burn-off”, and before the fertile ash was washed away, spurred them to further efforts. The lush new growth among blackened stumps on steep slopes afforded a living for perhaps a few more years before erosion, gorse, poor fertility of the exposed clay, and terrible back-breaking physical work, caused many would-be farmers to walk off their land. These included hundreds of World War I returned servicemen on government allocated poor-land holdings.

The better-off ones, among those of earlier times, had farmed well on the lower alluvial ground, and have made a good living to this day. During the farming booms, much Crown land was converted from lease to freehold (including the writer’s) before tracts of now “worthless” hill country began to revert back to bracken, gorse and scrub. No kauris re-seeded, as the seed trees had been burned out. Except for sporadic farm, and later, Forest Service burn-offs, this scrub land of 60 – 70 years ago is slowly regenerating into young forest, mostly rewarewa, and in restricted localities, kauri, rimu and other first stage native forest trees. Slowly, the vegetative cover is returning to the Peninsula hills so erosion is lessening after one hundred traumatic years. New conservation-minded groups are now planting kauri and other native trees in much of Coromandel’s scrubland, e.g. “Kauri 2000” and the writer’s own native forest restoration project.

It was possible to form the Coromandel forest park in 1975 from forest, if not virgin forest, because the government during early years of this century had withstood much pressure from wouldbe farmers, to retain certain areas of forest. In 1918 the whole total area of the Peninsula was given as 1,500,000 acres, with the Coromandel Range looked upon as “grand hills for sheep”. In 1919 “the areas at present open for exploitation in the Hauraki Mining District comprise 185,068 acres”.

Today, a new era of small industries based on local natural resources, and affording a sustained living for a limited number of people, is once again, after 150 years of exploitation becoming possible. The lessons of intelligent living in a bountiful land are hard learned, but with education and example, exploitation of natural resources can be replaced with sustainable management, for the benefit of future populations. The restoration of native forests on steep, erosion-prone land must now become a priority.
Much of the once farmed steeper, erosion-prone clay land around the Peninsula has now reverted to scrub as attempting to farm it has become uneconomic. But such land has now attracted commercial forestry companies from about the mid 1960s resulting in extensive fast-growing Pinus radiata plantations. The long term sustainability of pine forestry on steep Coromandel land is questionable. Factors contributing to this are: rising fuel prices, long transport distances, overseas exchange rates, erosion, road maintenance and associated safety issues. Tourism has the potential of being rather more sustainable as people become increasingly aware of the fragility of our environment. Corporate commerce has had a major and rather devastating influence in shaping the ecology of the Coromandel Peninsula over the past 150 years. Many native species of our biota have become endangered or rendered extinct by invading mammalian pests and weeds It is now time to reverse this trend by intelligent management, but who has the resources to do it? But just now (2007) we seem to be sniffing the winds of change.

Over the past few years, communities using mostly voluntary labour have been formed to carry out pest control by trapping and poisoning. In approximate order of increasing destructives, introduced mammalian pests are: rabbits, pigs, goats, dogs, hedgehogs, hares, rats, mice, weasles, ferrets, cats, stoats, deer, possums. Together, these are capable of destroying the whole range of indigenous animals and plants except for the hardiest of the latter such as manuka, kanuka, native rushes and some other unpalatable species. Communities of conservation-minded people have established pest control areas at Moehau, Kuaotunu, Whitianga and Whenuakite with other areas already in consideration. The Department of Conservation is also exercising pest control over the peninsula on a larger scale but their use of aerially applied 1080 poison is currently causing some public controversy. Unfortunately, this is largely unfounded. Brush-tailed possums introduced from Australia for a potential fur industry are the most destructive of all vegetarian mammalian pests.

At Driving Creek, north of Coromandel town, an indigenous wildlife sanctuary is being set up surrounded by a fully vermin proof fence to exclude pests down to the size of small mice. It will allow for the safe breeding of a whole range of indigenous biota from birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish down to insects presently threatened with extinction. Release into larger pest-controlled areas will then enable once endangered species to re-populate once past the highly vulnerable stage of youth. e.g., kiwi.

To conclude. Following the colossal exploitation of Coromandel Peninsula’s natural resources from 1820 to the present day (187 years), awareness of diminishing biological and soil fertility is at last becoming recognised. While bringing on the new generations who visit and live on this beautiful but vulnerable peninsula, let them not become the volcanoes which built it up in the first place, but destroyed its wildlife later on.



Take a look Barry Brickell's Driving Creek Railway and Potteries.