..when I was a kid, this was known as ‘swamp kauri’- that was the colonial term. Massive, dirty lumps of timber of dubious quality buried in the peat fields of the Far North. The name has now been been (rightly) dignified.

It’s a fact that this stock is the oldest workable wood in the world— and it’s a beautiful wood: soft, tightly grained, the colour of honey.

I’ve been lucky to have worked with this wood regularly since my flute-making journey began. Ok…it isn’t always easy to work with. It grew when the islands where young, shakey and warm. It was youthful and reckless. The largest land creatures were birds: the mighty moa grazed below. Overhead, Haast’s eagle, the size of a hang-glider, peered down at the canopy. The seas teemed with monster fishes, preyed upon by carnivorous dolphins. The forests wouldn’t see a saw for another 20, 30,40 or 50,000 years. Not that anyone was counting.

An eyeblink ago the first primate lunged ashore and dragged his waka up the beach.

The wood is often brittle, too tight, curly-grained, sap-soaked. But this doesn’t mean the wood is bad—it just means it is hard for the woodworker to wrangle. It wasn’t grown for the lathe and the sandpaper.

Most of the milled stock is now exported in slabs to China, where it serves as countertops for the new affluent classes. I don’t think that’s bad. An expensive item, encapsulated in polyurethane, embraced by a culture that has always honoured ancient things—these nuggets will likely be preserved and re-purposed by future generations.

Today, a tiny fraction of this Taonga is being turned into these instruments.

Ancient Kauri

The Traveller