Kaitaia / Ahipara

Kaitaia

Kaitaia is the most northern town in New Zealand and the largest town centre before Cape Reinga. It has a good shopping centre, a variety of cafés and restaurants, a museum and a Visitor Information Centre.

With a history as a friendly, do it yourself community, Kaitaia continues its reputation today for being affordable and welcoming. It is a busy farming town, with sheep, cattle and dairy farming, as well as vineyards and fruit growing – avocados are a speciality.

Forestry and agriculture also have a strong presence in the Far North in particular with Juken New Zealand which has become an important part of the community, creating employment for locals in the forests and at the Northland and Tri-board Mills. In the Far North, the Aupouri and Otangaroa Forests together with other leased forests have a productive area of 30,000 hectares.

Kaitaia’s tradition of long-standing businesses is well known and the town is enriched with many long-established families. Alongside locally owned and operated shops, cafes and restaurants, Kaitaia has an indoor sports centre, facilities for bowls, golf, tennis and squash, a shooting range, a fine public library and a choice of schools. The surrounding areas are home to many skilled craftspeople working in wood, pottery, paint, glass, ceramics, flax, bone, and greenstone.

Like most rural towns, Kaitaia has an annual Agricultural & Pastoral Show. The show is well over a hundred years old, one of the oldest in New Zealand, it provides a time when the community traditionally gathers to enjoy itself.

Kaitaia’s population grows immensely during the summer months as the tourists pass through on their journey to the Cape. Local businesses reap the benefits of the holiday influx and the town caters for most accommodation requirements. It is also a starting point for tours which leave Kaitaia daily.

Its Maori and European history is long and rich. Kaitaia has a strong and energetic Dalmatian connection stemming from the days of the gum digging boom, a time when gum gathered from fallen kauri trees fetched high prices. People of Kaitaia have established a vigorous Dalmatian Cultural Club.

The Far North Regional Museum has moa, kiwi and gum digging displays alongside flax snails, textiles and early transport and communication history. It is also home to the Northwood Photographic Collection important work of Arthur Northwood and his brothers from early in the last century.

Nearby, a glow worm grotto is the main attraction of Millennium Nocturnal Park, located at Fairburn where our native flightless bird, the kiwi, can also be seen.

Kaitaia is home to the Ancient Kauri Kingdom. Here kauri extracted from a number of buried prehistoric forests, some more than 50,000 years old, is handcrafted into furniture, arts and crafts.

A strong organics and permaculture movement is evident in and around Kaitaia. The Far North Organics movement began in 1989 and has been growing steadily since then.

Kaitaia is home to many Christian churches. The establishment of the Mission Station at Kaitaia, under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society in 1834, stems from the time when, in 1832, Rev Joseph Matthews, searching for a suitable site on which to build a new mission station, arrived with a Maori guide from the Waimate Mission Station.

Kaitaia Hospital is a crucial cog in the community and was shifted from Mangonui to its present site in 1934. It serves a widely scattered population over both rural and urban communities.

The general hospital is situated on a hill in the centre of Kaitaia. The campus occupies about four acres and as well as the hospital, there is a nurses’ home, a recreation hall with swimming pool, a maintenance workshop, and six houses for medical staff. The facility is currently undergoing a significant upgrade.

The hospital offers an acute admission service with backup transfer services after hours. There is also a large group of support services, including physiotherapy, social work and mental health teams.

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Ahipara

Sitting at the southern end of the world famous Ninety Mile Beach is Ahipara, an unspoiled sandy beach that curves its way up the Far North’s western shoreline almost to Cape Reinga.

Renowned for spectacular sunsets, it also boasts one of the best left hand surf breaks in the world. Apart from taking time to relax and soak up the scenery, one can fish, surf, gather shellfish and go horse riding, dune riding, body boarding, kite flying and hang gliding.

Ahipara is based 14 kilometres west of Kaitaia. The first church and school was built in 1872 and was supported by several stores, a post office and a boarding house. Ahipara has a proud history of Maori settlement, gum digging and sea adventures. The name Ahipara means ‘Sacred Fire’ and this ancient fire was kept burning constantly for the village on the ground where the school is now located.

Te Rarawa is the prominent iwi in the Ahipara area. The traditional area (rohe) of Te Rarawa is described as the area from Hokianga to Maungataniwha, down through Victoria Valley River to Maimaru, across from Awanui Bridge west to Te Oneroa a Tohe (the Ninety Mile Beach) at Hukatere then down to Mitimiti and Hokianga.

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Shipwreck Bay

Shipwreck Bay is aptly named as it is the burial ground for many unfortunate ships, which can still be seen at low tide. Access to Shipwreck Bay is by road, but access to the Reef and Tauroa Point is limited and is very reliant on the tides. Low tide is the only time a car or 4x4 vehicle can manoeuvre around the rocks from Ahipara. Close by is the Ahipara Gumfields Historic Reserve and the remnants of ancient kauri forests. Bullock teams carted the gum to the beach at Shipwreck Bay for transport by sea to Auckland.

At their peak the Ahipara gumfields supported 2000 people, three hotels, and numerous shops. During the 1880s Dalmatians and Croatian immigrants arrived on the Northland gumfields. Through the 1890s more and more of these vigorous young men arrived in New Zealand and, by the 1900s there were nearly 5000 men working the gumfields. This influx resulted in over-production and in the 1950s the price for gum fell resulting in a fall in the market and the population.

Local resentment grew over this peaceful invasion by “foreigners” and a strong Gumdiggers Union was formed to lobby the Government for action to check their arrival. Locals argued that the Dalmatians worked hard, sent all their earnings out of the country, paid no tax and then left for home a few years later and New Zealand saw no return for all the kauri gum they had exploited. In addition, many of the pioneer farmers saw their source of winter income threatened, for unlike the British and Maori diggers who were individualists, the Dalmatians worked together in teams and systematically dug over whole areas, stripping them of all their gum and then moving on.

The local opposition resulted in a Commission of Enquiry and the passing of the Kauri Gum Industry Act in 1898. At this time about half of the 800,000 acres of gumfields was Crown land and the rest was in Maori or private ownership. The Act set aside over 200,000 acres of the richest Crown lands as kauri gum reserves. British and Maori New Zealanders could dig on any Crown land (reserved or unreserved) for an annual fee of five shillings, but aliens (including most Dalmatians) were prohibited from digging on the reserves.

In the 1870s to 1890s, gumdiggers ranged far and wide with popular fields both north and south of Auckland. The most productive and attractive area before the turn of the century was the northern Wairoa swamp lands around Dargaville.

By 1900 to 1910, many of the shallower gumfields were worked out and efforts to convert them into farms began. On some private land, gumdiggers had assisted this conversion, for the owners required them to dig on a face, stack the unearthed wood and leave no holes behind. The land was materially improved and ready for ploughing. On most Crown land and some of the private land however, the gumlands were pockmarked by thousands of gumdiggers’ potholes and the annual firing of the scrub had destroyed the surface soil. These lands required a great deal of nursing to make them productive farms.

As the gumlands in the south around Auckland were converted to dairy farms, vineyards and orchards, the centre of gumdigging shifted to the Far North around Ahipara and Houhora.

Today the Ahipara gumfields are still a main feature of the area. Every day quad bikes and campervans visit the area to enjoy a day of history and to see nature slowly healing after its early inhabitants stripped the ground of its kauri gum. The locals in Ahipara are trying to re-open an existing historic walking track that enters the gum sleuths that were used only 60 years ago. Local resources are being used to open a new heritage trail that covers the west coast. There are still families living in the Ahipara gumfields.

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Herekino

The main feature at Herekino is the forest which is considered one of the most important for conservation in the country.

The Herekino Forest track represents an important link in Te Araroa, “The Long Pathway” which is a proposed hiking trail from Cape Reinga to the Bluff. It also forms a key part of a proposed 100 kilometre ‘ocean-to-ocean’ trail from Ahipara on the west coast of Northland to Kerikeri on the east coast.

The track begins at the Herekino Saddle on the Kaitaia-Awaroa Road and exits on Diggers Valley Road. It is 15 kilometres long, takes about 8 hours to walk and is home to many rare and threatened species, including the North Island brown kiwi, long tailed bat and kauri snail.

Local Maori know the forest as Orowhana, and the saddle as Te Arai, the door, where spirits pause before fleeing north to Cape Reinga. Poupou (totems) mark the sacred site and the central pou is carved in honour of Taunaha, an ancestor.

Herekino has been central to the progression of Te Araroa which provided employment and training opportunities for young people in the Far North during the construction. The Council, in collaboration with the Mayor’s Taskforce for Jobs, Te Araroa Trust, Department of Conservation, Department of Youth Affairs Conservation Corps and Department of Work and Income Taskforce Green, contributed to the development of the track.