Death of the gods
It’s a cold, crisp July morning in the Karekare Valley. I’ve been walking an hour in icy streams before I leave the track and head up through the dense bush. I’m on a mission to get to a stand of kauri that I’ve been watching for the last 20 years. They are giants. Healthy and strong and perhaps 1000 years old. Thousands like them once stood throughout the Waitakere Ranges, but these are the lucky ones. The cliffs saved them from the axes and saws of the Karekare millers and they have — so far — survived the dreaded kauri dieback.
It’s a new death sentence on these glorious sky-reaching treasures of the New Zealand northern bush. Kauri dieback is sweeping through the northern forests and into the Waitakere Ranges and the islands of the Hauraki Gulf. It’s as great a menace as the ruthless millers were in the last 200 years, but unlike them, it cannot be stopped. At least, not with our current knowledge.
Where greed drove the saw blades, now a water mould is devouring the kauri that remain. It has only recently been given a name: Phytophthora agathidicida. The last word translates as “kauri killer”.
I can see the stand of trees I want to get to long before I reach the plateau. When I finally drag myself into the clearing, exhausted, I feel I’m in a sacred grove. There are at least 60 trees and they are awe-inspiring. This is the New Zealand bush at its best. The only sound comes from tui high in the uppermost branches.
I feel I’m in a temple, ancient and totally transforming. Maori creation legend has it that these magnificent natural pillars pushed apart the earth and the sky and let in the light. It was into forest groves that the Greeks went to party and to sacrifice. They knew the trees conveyed something significant, as did the Romans, the Celts and the Druids.
Their legends and stories got transferred into our nursery tales of forest horrors — Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood and countless others. It continues today with Avatar, the greatest money-making film of all time. All these stories make a real connection between trees and people.
It deeply concerns me that the great trees are dying, and it should concern us all. I’m going in search of answers. My journey to understand what kauri dieback is and what we are doing about it will take me around the country, to Northland and through the forests of Great Barrier and the Coromandel. I will talk to people from the scientific community, Auckland Council, tree experts and the large number of perhaps-crazy but well-meaning advocates of new approaches to halt the disease.
The common threads will be bewilderment and despair, but they are wrapped around a deep commitment to keeping the ancient forest gods alive.
The kauri is a survivor. It’s part of an ancient family of coniferous trees that were once spread across the world. The same event that killed the dinosaurs saw them disappear from the Northern Hemisphere. They lived on in the south on fragments of Gondwanaland, the supercontinent that had begun to break apart 100 million years previously.
One of those fragments was Zealandia, a continent-sized life raft that soon sank into the ocean. New Zealand, we have
