In this photo a team of Kauri bushmen pose with the massive tree they’ve just felled. They’ve built special staging so the two “cross-cutters” can stand high enough up the trunk to work the saw. Another man on top of the log drives wedges to keep the cut open and stop the saw jamming.

Note the dimensions on the cut face. They tree has a girth of 36 feet and they’re cutting a log from it to a length of 70 feet. That works out to 68,040 “superfeet” of timber.

To give you a sense of scale, Robert estimated they’d have cut ten million superfeet of kauri off the McCarroll land, equivalent to about 147 of the seventy foot (21.3m) logs that the man on the ground has his hand on. This tree yielded at least two of those logs, so 147 logs equates to something under 75 trees of that size. In reality, of course, there would have been more, but smaller, trees. That’s my amateur calculation — correct me if I’m wrong.

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In the 1950s my grandfather Hugh gave a series of four talks on the local radio station, 1XN, about the days of the Kauri Bushman. They’re vivid and informed by his own hard work in the bush. I wish he’d done one more about clearing the land after the trees were felled. Dorothy asked Radio New Zealand if they had audio of her Dad’s talks, but they said no. The frustrated archivist said they had a massive library, but it seemed like nothing that people like my mother asked them for. It would be wonderful to hear Grandpa’s voice again, but we do have the transcripts.

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