Matakohe Kauri Museum
The Kauri Museum is the perfect insight into Northlands pioneer past.
The award winning The Kauri Museum tells the fascinating story of the pioneering days through the use of kauri timber and kauri gum.
The Maori had many uses for the gum, which they called “kapia”. Fresh gum was used as a type of chewing gum, also highly flammable, the gum was also used as a fire-starter, or bound in flax to act as a torch. Burnt and mixed with animal fat, it 
made a dark pigment for traditional tattooing. Kauri gum was also crafted into jewelery, keepsakes, and small decorative items. Like other forms of amber, kauri gum sometimes includes insects and plant material.
Young kauri, known as rickers, were felled in their thousands to provide ship masts and spars. We are able to date the kauri gum up to 43 million years old in the museum and the gum was New Zealand’s largest export at the turn of the 19th century. Used in linoleum, paint and varnish, by the 1890s, 70% of all oil varnishes 
made in England used kauri gum. From the 1930s the market for gum dropped as synthetic alternatives were found, but there remained niche uses for the gum in jewellery and specialist high-grade varnish for violins. Proclaimed in 1952, Waipoua and the neighbouring forests of Mataraua and Waima, are now under the protection of the Department of Conservation. There is no milling of mature kauri trees nowadays, except under extraordinary circumstances such as for the carving of a Maori canoe
Explore the many exceptional displays and galleries inside the museum from the magnificent collection of antique kauri fu
rniture and the largest collection of kauri gum in the world, to restored machinery, including New Zealand’s earliest tractor, a 1929 Cat 60, and a turning steam sawmill. As one of Northland’s best attractions, you will be able to view a two story life sized replica boarding house, a Pioneer School and the historic Matakohe Post Office with a fantastic collection of telephones.
