page_title: Waipoua Forest
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Waipoua Forest / History
caption_attribution_description: English: The jungle inside Waipoua Forest. This photo has been taken by Prof.Chen Hualin.
context_page_description: Waipoua Forest is a forest, on the west coast of the Northland Region of New Zealand's North Island. It preserves some of the best examples of kauri forest remaining in New Zealand. It is notable for having two of the largest living kauri trees, Tāne Mahuta and Te Matua Ngahere.
  The forest was declared a sanctuary in 1952. A community-based volunteer organisation, the Waipoua Forest Trust, helps maintain the forest. The sanctuary is bordered to the south by the 350 hectares Professor W.R McGregor Reserve, named after W. R. McGregor.
  In the 1940s, McGregor successfully campaigned to end logging of the forest and to have it declared a sanctuary, a status it achieved in 1952.
  Today, the forest is a significant drawcard for visitors to Northland, with approximately 200,000 people visiting Tāne Mahuta every year. This has led to concerns about the health of the forest and the spread of kauri dieback disease. There are also easy walking tracks to Te Matua Ngahere and the Four Sisters, and a longer hiking track south leading past the 7th-largest kauri tree, the Yakas kauri.
context_section_description: The Waipoua Forest was bought from Māori in 1876 for a little over £2,000. At the time it covered about 80 square kilometres (31 sq mi).
  In 1885 the Waipoua Forest came under the provision of the State Forests Act, and an area of 90 km² was constituted a State Forest Reserve.
  One of the reasons for its escape from destruction in earlier days was its remoteness combined with the difficulty of extracting its timber. Another was, that like the Warawara to the North, rainfall was more consistent and abundant so that Māori and European fires had not engulfed it (as happened to the Kaihu, Puhipuhi and large parts of the Coromandel forest in the 1870s and 1880s).
  In 1907 the Waipoua Forest, the Warawara forest and one or two other smaller reserves were the only virgin kauri forests left belonging to the state.
  In 1913 a Royal Commission on Forestry recommended that a specially selected area of 0.8 square kilometres (0.31 sq mi) of the Waipoua Forest, and the whole of the Warawara Forest of 50 square kilometres (19 sq mi), be established as national kauri forests for the people of New Zealand.
  In 1926 a road was put through Waipoua Forest to provide access to the lands of neighbouring settlers.
  In the 1940s it became known that the State Forest Service was cutting kauri at Waipoua. In 1947 the Whangarei Progressive Society, in association with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, the Waipoua Preservation Society, and other organisations secured more than 43,000 signatures on a petition asking for the 'declaration of the Waipoua State Forest as a national park under a board of trust, and that all milling and other state forest activities should cease'. The petition consisted of thirteen volumes of signatures, which was presented by the MP for Marsden, AJ Murdoch in a wheelbarrow to parliament on 25 September 1947. Its hope was that 160 square kilometres (62 sq mi) at Waipoua should be set aside for all time, inviolate from interference by man. Other petitions followed, and on 2 July 1952 an area of over 80 square kilometres (31 sq mi) was proclaimed a forest sanctuary.
  The zoologist William Roy McGregor was one of the driving forces in this movement, writing an 80-page illustrated pamphlet on the subject, which proved an effective manifesto for conservation.
  In the late 1960s, in violation of the 1913 recommendations, adopted de facto, the National Government initiated clear felling in the Warawara forest. This was not stopped until 1972 following a large public outcry and fulfilment of an election promise of the incoming Labor Government. In this short period, approximately 1/5 of the forest was felled (about 1/4 by timber volume).
caption: The jungle inside Waipoua Forest.
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