The Kauri Museum

The Kauri Museum in Matakohe, New Zealand, celebrates the kauri tree’s role in pioneering history, featuring extensive exhibits on timber, gum, and cultural artifacts.

Planning your visit

Kauri trees grow only in New Zealand's far north, reach diameters of several metres and live for over a thousand years, and the settler economy of Northland was built on cutting them down. By the early twentieth century most of the forest was gone.

The museum at Matakohe documents that industry with unusual thoroughness: a full-scale reconstructed sawmill, the largest collection of kauri furniture anywhere, and photographic archives of the bushmen and the log drives.

Kauri gum is the second subject and the more surprising one. The hardened resin, dug from the ground where forests once stood, was exported for varnish and linoleum, and the museum holds the world's largest collection — thousands of pieces, some with insects trapped inside like amber, alongside carved and polished work.

The surviving giants at Waipoua Forest are an hour away and threatened by kauri dieback disease.

Allow two hours. Current availability is listed below.