Middle Earth Tour Day 22. Rainbow Warriors and Gum Diggers

Middle Earth Tour Day 22. Rainbow Warriors and Gum Diggers

Today I did sleep in though I did need the sleep as the night before  wasn’t feeling 100% at all. I was thinking the plan was to head towards Dargaville on the Kauri coast. I had been out that way before though that was to visit the other towns that Granny had lived in like Paparoa and Maungatapere. I was feeling completely recharged and ready to take off though I think I could have easily stayed in bed for another hour if I had been allowed, but I did want to go out to the museum. I do have a list of places I would like to visit though we do tend to get to them when we do travel. I don’t get to every location and I do always seem to find something to have a look at when I tend to do a search though there are times where I might have to get my own transport to end up at some out of the way location that I havnt thought about yet. The reason I wanted to visit the museum was that there were the sails to the Rainbow Warrior and after I found they were there I wanted to visit the museum over the last few years. Plus the museum book I had purchased several years ago recommended the visit too.

The day was really nice and while I wore a light jumper it was still a nice day out there and nothing that would bring me rain at all at least I hoped not as then that would suck even though we were in the car. Claude and I headed out to Dargaille via Maungatapere which wasn’t that bad a road though we had done part of the trip the day before. The road was not that busy as it was just after 9am and we did make good timing. One of the towns we passed through was really only the pub and other buildings was Tangiteroria bit of a mouthful though loads of fun typing into a GPS as it gets confused. We will talk about the confused GPS later on as it gets to be a bit fun. We made it into the town and the museum I could see perched on the hill though we still had to follow the signs to the museum. The Wairoa river looked very muddy and that was all I could see when I did look out at it. Even when we took the goat track up to the museum I could see the river was big and brown. I should point out that at least the goat track wasn’t as bad as the one that goes up to the Byron Bay lighthouse.

I was impressed by the size of the museum from the outside and could see the sails from the Rainbow Warrior just down the hill. I thought this might be the only things that were at the museum, but I was happy to wait until after we went through the museum. There were murals on the outside to life in the district as it was another gum digging area like north of Whangarei though its basically all over the place where there are swamps. We were the first to enter, but as soon as we paid for entry there was a rush on with people from some vintage car club. We sat down to watch a video about the swamp Kauri trees being retrieved from the swamp and each slab taken were around $8,000 each and they go overseas too. The man who does it is apparently the strongest wood cutter type person in New Zealand and while we were watching the video someone from the car club actually knew the bloke and was giving us all a running commentary about the video. Thats how I knew how much each slab from a 30 ton tree that was dug up cost. He does go to each farm asking if he could get the kauri out and pays the farmer a certain amount per metre or foot. There is supposedly meant to be another 10 years worth of Kauri left before it is all taken as its only really a job done in summer. The speaker had said he once spoke to someone from a survey ship that had pulled in and he was a working with a fuel truck at the time and they told him once he asked about looking at the maps that how all the Kauri ended up in swamps was that there was a huge tsunami in the past. One of the old fella’s we ended up talking to said his family had been in the Dargaville district for over 100 years and his family name was Montgomery, how I remembered that is I took a picture of the picture he had showed the both of us. Good using pictures to jog the memory of an event.

Once we got off again and into the museum we were looking at the various displays and I was wondering if this was all the museum had even though the buildings on the outside were bigger. I wondered what Claude was looking at though there was a lady asleep on a chair and he remarked that she looked real and the lady replied that she was though she was resting on a chair just under the World War One displays of the people who had gone. I had only gotten as far as the telephone exchange before we all were asked if we wanted to see one of the machines working. This was a Blackstone Gum washing machine. It had been restored in 1998. The history of the machine was that it had been used from around 1928 and was last seen in a working condition in 1943. It had been around 1973 where it was removed and placed into a storage shed for around 20 years though many parts were rotten or broken. According to the information the restoration took around a year and the person sometimes worked on it for close to 7 days a week. The person who was going to run the machine explained a bit about it though I did make a video of it too. The year of production on the machine was around 1914. All around the display were Skelton spades that have the name of a Dalmatian family and to show what were used in the gumfields when people were digging in the swamps. The Dalmatian people are also known as Yugoslav people. We are shown the licenses and the different grades of the gum that is used and shipped overseas. Someone had actually used the gum to carve out the different war memorials in the area that included one I had visited before and that was the WW1 memorial in Hukerenui that used cannon balls from a local siege site of Ruapekapeka.

The next few displays ended up being about the culture of the Dalmatian people as they have plenty of different things. Though I do wonder about the Boomerang collection since there are heaps of those on the wall. I did find a display of thimbles and porcelain beings that were all playing the accordion, which I thought was interesting. There really were different accordions from the Dalmatians area where the people had come from and some had some really nice patterns. The building the musical things were held was in an area that I had thought was an old church, but was actually the old library from the town of Aratapu. The library had been built in 1893 and moved to the museum in 2007. The only thing that remains of a booming town of 2000 people is now the hotel and the old hall. The town was once a thriving area for the industries of timber, gum and flax during the 1800s. It is interesting when you see information about thriving towns that become ghost towns once businesses close like the post office. It does seem like some of the places I have recently passed through that are on a map, but there is nothing at all.

The biggest display that I ended up in was to do with the maritime things in the local area including the many shipwrecks that seem to be in the area. There was also a very special one that I had not realised was actually there. There were many objects that had been taken from shipwrecks  and that included a swivel gun and small cannon taken from the ’L’Alcmene’ in 1977 by several divers including one Kelly Tarton of the underwater world in Auckland fame. The ship had been wrecked in 1851 off the Dargaville coast and was actually a French naval ship known as a corvette. One of the displays I was interested in happened to be all about the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that had been sunk at the Auckland harbour docks by some French frogmen. They showed the story of the vessel as it had been sunk, when it was on the dry dock and then when it had been sunk again as a diving wreck. It was all to do with the nuclear testing in the pacific that the boat had been sunk. Some of the other displays include model ships, but with a difference as the information includes where they happen to be located. One was the Cutty Sark where she is in London or should I say Greenwich, the remains of the Wasa near Stockholm, The U.S.S. Constitution aka ‘Old Ironsides’ is located at the old Charleston naval yards in Boston. There is the story of wrecks in the area including on the Kaipara harbour including having the first shipwreck that was recorded in 1840 that was carrying Kauri spars. Everyone in those days seemed to have a hand in something. There were displays of the various lighthouses including one part of one being the lighting mechanism from the Pouto lighthouse.

Off to a side door both Claude and I did go to finish the displays off that we had not seen as we were called away. They were about the locals in the area including as usual someone bearing the name of Dargaville. He is buried in Auckland in one of the cemeteries there. I did find the museum to be interesting including little stories like about one of the police officers seeing a man about stolen turkeys and finding himself had been consuming them when he had been given a soup. One of the last displays we looked at were of several Maori canoes one was a war canoe that had been buried, but uncovered and another one seemed to end up in different parts of the river from the early 1800s to be used by some in the community until it was given to the museum. A really colourful story like it knew it would end up in a museum, but had its own journey. Once we had left the museum I went for a walk to have a look at the masts or sails from the Rainbow Warrior. If you did not know the boat then you wouldn’t really know of the significance of the masts. Once we had a quick look at the vintage cars that were still at the museum we were off down the hill. We did stop to visit a family member in the RSA cemetery before heading to town for lunch.

Once we had made it to the town of Dargaville, I was directing Claude into how much room we had to park the car as we were in front of an entrance for a business that had a driveway. An elderly man had walked out thanking us both for parking in the correct parking place and he asked how long we were in the area for as the Kauri museum was having an open day tomorrow and he was going to be there with his vintage car. He did mention that people usually didn’t care that they had parked in front of his place even though here were markers pointing out the parking places. We both had to go inside as he wasnted to show off the picture of his car to us both. He actually had three cars and he was from England too. After 10 mins we explained we were in town for some food and he told us to go to the bakery as they were the best in town and that they maybe Chinese, but they were just as kiwi as he was. He was a pretty interesting character and all that was from parking the car. Once we had eaten lunch we had a short walk into town to have a look. There was a statue to the Gum diggers in town and there was a wooden carving of it in the museum. Claude went back to the car and I went for a short walk where I found the old post office and also the theatre. I didn’t take too long even though Claude was reading a book I didn’t want to keep him waiting for too long as it was already just after 3pm.

When we got onto the road we were heading south of Dargaville where we were going to take some country roads. I was looking at the map and we were close to an area that was called Bradleys Landing. No idea why it was called that, but I wanted to stop there and all there was is just a road and one part could have been an old wharf though it was unsealed. The area was also known as the kumara capital though not sure if you would be proud of that one. Claude wanted to take the back roads out to Tangiteroria and off back to Whangarei. I liked the idea as the map said there were small towns supposedly and half way along a metal road he had sorted out the GPS that was confused and tried to send us back to Dargaville. We were trying to find Arapohue, but the GPS really didn’t like us though luckily we had a paper map that we were also following.  The GPS went quiet for a while and I marvelled at the map as some places were called Windy Hill though that could be the road. We seen plenty of farms as Claude explained they are the life blood of the country as they produced stuff for market and I did see cows making their way home too. The GPS did eventually make up with us when we were close to Tangiteroria as it was starting to tell us directions. We really did appear where we were meant to and we headed back to Whangarei. It was funny as we had to stop at Maungatapere as traffic was backed up, but it wasn’t in the direction we were going. Seemed there was an accident on the main road so everyone were being sent the long way round.

It ended up being a really good day out and I was happy to see country that we had not seen before though I am still not convinced if you really want to call yourself the kumara capital of New Zealand. That could be a little embarrassing. I am happy to have finally visited the museum that I had wanted to do so for a long time and now have gotten to see relics from the Rainbow Warrior. Tomorrow maybe another day as we could be looking at other stuff in the area like the kiwi north museum. I do know that I would like to visit the train at Kawakawa as they seemed to have opened up the bridge so they can now go the full way and not to the bridge that had been damaged.