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The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to you explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
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"63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache."
Whataroa
Whataroa, (the Long Storehouse), with its two lakes and two major river systems was a rich source of birdlife and fresh-water fish for summer food-gathering expeditions by the South Westland Māori. Fishing camps existed on both sides of the river mouths and fast-moving trading parties from the east coast may have used the Sealy Pass to cross the Main Divide.
Since the 1840s, the New Zealand timber industry has devised ways of getting logs of wood from the bush to the mill. This could be a major challenge – the terrain was usually rough, and a big log might be 20 metres long and weigh 10 tonnes. None were as innovative as on the West Coast. Getting the logs to the mill was a demanding job that required ingenuity and enterprise, and in harsh and hazardous conditions, bushmen developed strong teamwork and a sense of pride. They were fit, hardworking, practical men. Although steam power was used in some of the earliest sawmills, most early logging and log transport systems used horses, bullock teams or lakes and rivers. 1891 saw the first steam log hauler on the West Coast by Butlers Bros. at Kokiri.
Once the logs had been sawn at the mill, the task became easier. The volume of wood was reduced by over a third, and sawn timber could be stacked. Although the earliest European settlers were surrounded by trees, they were able to make little use of timber apart from building houses. Transport difficulties meant that timber could not be easily moved far, let alone exported from the region. In the 1900s sawmills became the main source of employment if you weren't a farmer or shopkeeper. As gold on the beaches and in the rivers was worked out, disillusioned miners followed, moving inland and establishing small farms as well as timber and flax mills.
The timber trade increased once timber could be transported to ports by rail. A number of mills were opened, with modern, steam-driven machinery. In 1910–11, 20% of New Zealand’s timber came from the West Coast. Rimu was the dominant species milled. Beech trees were generally left standing, although they were sometimes harvested for use as pit props in the mines.
In New Zealand’s Westland District, the closure of the local indigenous timber industry alongside rapid growth of the dairy and tourism sectors has produced dilemmas for families and communities as they attempt to adjust to the social consequences of rapid industry change. However, from the 1970s through the 1980s, rationalisation of timber processing and state sector restructuring resulted in the loss of the NZFS (New Zealand Forestry Service) and considerable forestry jobs from the area. By the mid-1990s places lost their timber-processing mills, workers were laid off, and local communities were forced to find ways of absorbing the ongoing effects of timber industry decline.
On April 17, 2014 the West Coast was hit by the tail of Cyclone Ita. Along with damage to buildings, some 200,000 hectares of native forest on the Coast was damaged by the storm. It was a conservation tragedy and a dilemma – should the rimu, the beech, the tōtara, or the matai be left to rot or be salvaged?
Two months later, then-Conservation Minister Nick Smith proposed legislation that would allow the one-time salvage of some of the damaged timber over a period of 5 years. It was in sharp contrast to existing law, which banned logging of native timber on conservation land since the early 2000s. At the time, the West Coast was at the storm's eye of a debate between those who wanted to conserve the forests and those who believed logging could be done sustainably.
The cache is placed near the site of one of the many sawmills that operated in the 20th century. You do NOT need to climb any gates or fences to find the cache.
Cache placed by Victoriousone for the Ministry of Education.