wil THE PUHIPUHI KAURI FOREST. 
yorted as having said lately (cost of living): ‘‘ No man in the com- 
asi worked baie than ah dairy-farmer, yet statistics showed that 
at the end of the’ year they only made from £120 to £150." It is very 
doubtful if the 16,000 acres of burnt forest at Puhipuhi will ever support 
eighty families on dairying at Puhipuhi. On the other hand, any able 
man, with work in the forest and cows or sheep on an adjoining farm, 
could have made his £250 a year out of the two combined—the usual 
European procedure. 
Cost OF REPLANTING PusipuHIT with KaAuwRI. 
To replant the Puhipuhi Forest (allowing interest at 4 per cent. and 
maturity at 100 years, and supposing thinnings paid the cost of main- 
tenance, which may be assuming too much) would cost over £12,000,000. 
Thus, taking full planting at £15 per acre, the cost without ground- 
rent would be—17,000 acres x £15 (planting) x 50°5 (interest at 4 per 
cent. for 100 years) = £12,877,500. A more detailed calculation is 
given at p. 166. 
SUMMARY. a 
Large though the figures of the loss at Puhipuhi are, and recording as 
they do a great national disaster, they are easily credible, bearing in 
mind that as late as the year 1908, when the Kauri industry had declined 
considerably, the Auckland mills turned out over £1,000,000 worth of 
timber, mostly Kauri, while well over £250,000 worth of timber was 
exported from Auckland. The Auckland mills gave employment then 
to 3,600 hands; and besides this ‘‘ between four thousand and five 
thousand hands were engaged in bushfelling and other occupations in 
connection with the timber industry ’? (Lands Department Forest Report, 
1909, p. 17). 
The figures of the value of the Waipoua. and Puhipuhi forests, 
though they mount up to huge totals, are not exaggerated. I have 
careiully verified them. The items on which they are founded are all 
moderate, as will be seen by corresponding items discussed elsewhere 
in these pages. They may be compared with some £1,500,000, the 
total value of all the freezing-works in the Dominion before the war. 
Freezing-works are in the public eye—the least neglect of their interests 
by Government would be at once resented, and rightly so. But this 
valuable Puhipuhi Forest, with its majestic trees, slipped quietly out 
of sight because there was no forest demarcation to separate it from 
the original bush requiring to be cleared for settlement, and because 
there was no Forest Department to take it in charge, 
Locally, when the rich forest was turned into a fern waste, or at 
best a poor grazing-area on impoverished soil, the countryside lost 
half its industry and population, together with those amenities to 
country life which go with a larger population—better roads, better 
shops, and better postal facilities and social intercourse, 
Some small portions of the Puhipuhi area are suit 
or hand cultivation, and under intense cultivation t 
yielded more money and employment than under Kauri forest and its 
products. Such lands, with the abundance of Kauri forest in those 
days, could have been demarcated out. They would have been parti- 
cularly valuable as residential areas for the forest workmen or for those 
farm-and-forest holdings that succeed so well on the Continent of Europe, 
and are now being 80 strongly advocated for the greater success of small- 
holding settlements in the British Isles. 
able for plough 
hese might have: 
