From heaven to hell and back again: Rebuilding a forgotten timber town

Dust now rises between the trees of the Kaingaroa Processing Plant — one of the village’s main employers.

A $2 million new building is taking shape within the pines, as the village makeover - underway for the past few years - continues.

The first plantings of Kaingaroa Forest were at Waiotapu in the early 1900s.

Now owned by Kaingaroa Timberlands, a partnership of investors, the plantation has grown to be one of the oldest and largest in the world, producing up to 4 million cubic metres of logs each year.

Tall pines dominate the highway north to Rotorua, marking the Kaingaroa Village territory. The small, isolated village is home to about 470 people; nearly 90 per cent are Māori.

Some of the houses are well-maintained. A handful are freshly painted. The front yards are freshly mown and flowers bloom in gardens.

Other homes appear abandoned.

Broken glass hangs in windows, overgrown grass creeps up the walls, corrugated iron is nailed to windowpanes. The charred wooden framing of a burned roof is exposed to the elements. The paint is cracked and discoloured.

Lydia Thompson’s home is one of the tidy ones.
Her single-storey whare was one of hundreds left in urgent need of repair post-restructuring in the 1980s.

It was once cold and damp without electricity or running water. A large hole in the roof where a tree fell has been patched up and the guttering, downpipes and electricals repaired.

The kuia says she is now in a warm, dry home after funding announced for the village in 2019 did a “world of good”.

“It has helped our marae, our roading, and it has helped our lives. I embrace it, gee I feel lucky,” she says. “It was like a beautiful gift.”

Thompson’s daughter, Lea Thompson, invites us in.

The kuia, wrapped in her bright red jumper, is rocking in her armchair.

She sticks to the notes she has written on a piece of paper until she starts chatting about Kaingaroa — the place she has loved for more than 60 years.

The 85-year-old’s face lights up and she hugs the air as she remembers the glory days of the village. She arrived in 1961 and says the village was beautiful then.

“The fresh air, the people, the different nationalities … Oh man, it was a wonderful, wonderful place to live.

“It was a village complete with happiness and joy.”

Kaingaroa Forest School was thriving and there was no crime. Residents could sleep with their windows open. You didn’t need to lock your door.

Thompson pauses and slumps back into her chair. She sighs and says she wishes she could have those golden years back.

“It is like a dream. Did I dream it, or did I not? But it did exist in my life, it really did exist.”

Lives changed in the village when thousands of employees lost their jobs in 1987.

“That is when the hardship started.”

Thompson says working families had to adjust to being “on the dole”.

“We had to survive from payment to payment.”

She remembers the shame she felt lining up for a benefit cheque each week.

“You felt so low.

“Those years were difficult seeing the decline of our village that was seemingly going backward, which was very sad.”

Thompson’s daughter, Lea Thompson, was born and raised in Kaingaroa.

The 49-year-old says children enjoyed a sense of freedom growing up in the village.

“We were taught respect, to have good manners and old school values.

“The house was immaculate. We took pride in our homes.”

Cam Laing remembers the same sense of freedom.

Sitting in his black-and-gold decorated Rotorua office, he says growing up in the huge forest taught him to dream big.

Big thinking has seen the “bush boy” become an architectural designer.

Laing, 39, was raised in Kaingaroa by his parents John and Barbara Laing. John Laing was Kaingaroa Forest School’s deputy principal.

In the early 2000s, aged 18, Cam left the forest to study at Auckland University, an experience he describes as a “big culture shock”.

Growing up in Kaingaroa was “amazing”, he says.

“I wouldn’t swap it for anything. The friendships there were everlasting.

“We called ourselves the bush boys.”

He spent afternoons with his mates, hatchets in hand, building huts in the forest.

“It was almost like an isolated utopian society.”

There was golf, rugby, tennis, netball, BMX, and indoor basketball.

“If there was a sport you wanted to do, you could do it here.”

“We weren’t about participation. It was about winning and showing what this little town can do.”

The once-thriving sports and recreation centre in the middle of the village now sits derelict.

Faded paint lines sketch out what was once a basketball court. The hoop lies on the ground. Graffiti covers the walls.

Laing remembers some of the buildings being vandalised. The village was crumbling before their eyes.

“Municipal buildings deteriorated. Suddenly, they were just empty shells.”

Laing believes the lawlessness that began to plague the town came from a sense of entitlement born of living in one of the biggest pine forests in the Southern Hemisphere.

Some community members tried to keep some sense of order.

“Kaingaroa had too much pride and was too staunch to let its village go.

“We were K-roa hard.”

A black and white photo of two dozen men in suits and ties sits proudly on the mantelpiece at kaumatua James Doherty’s home.

He points to the photo and says in the old days they used to play music at the working men’s club which is now covered in dust, broken glass, and rotting wood.

“It was heaven,” he says.

The fire crackles as his wife Myra prepares a meal. Doherty, 86, says work brought him to Kaingaroa in 1956.

“My father said, ‘Your aim is to get a job with the government. Getting a job with the government was a job for life’.”

That was until the major restructuring and corporatisation of the New Zealand Forest Service in the mid-1980s.

Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand records that in 1984, the Forest Service was being criticised by environmentalists for its management of native forests, and by economic analysts and businesspeople unhappy with returns from exotic wood sales.

By 1987, the Forest Service was disestablished. Its regulatory, non-commercial functions were taken over by a small Ministry of Forestry and all publicly-owned native forests became the responsibility of the new Department of Conservation.

The government’s plantation forests were passed to a new state-owned enterprise, the Forestry Corporation of New Zealand, which inherited 550,000 hectares of exotic forest planted by the Forest Service and 50,000 hectares of leased Māori land.

Timber towns such as Kaingaroa bore the brunt of the change and more than 3000 employees in the wider area lost their jobs.

The bitterness was intense. Some angry forest workers threatened to burn the plantations, Te Ara records.

Forestry had created a “dependency culture” in the village, Doherty says. That lifeline was ripped from many workers overnight.

“They all had income, they were all employed and overnight they were made unemployed.”

Doherty says some workers - forestry carpenters, mechanics, electricians - had nowhere to go. Forest Service bush workers “weren’t so bad off” but some were left jobless.

“Can you imagine being forestry workers on wages to being switched overnight to contracts? They had no skills in terms of managing themselves and overnight all those contracts fell over and they were competitors against one another.”

During this time, the Government sought to sell the forest to private interests.

But the New Zealand Māori Council triumphed in its ‘Lands’ case against the Crown in 1987, a ruling that had a significant effect on how the Treaty of Waitangi was interpreted by the courts.

By 1989, the Crown Forests Assets Act was passed, separating forestry land from forest-cutting rights.

For Kaingaroa, the cutting rights were to be sold, and the land would stay in Crown ownership and leased to forest companies, until Treaty claims in the region were resolved.

Doherty recalls going to Parliament to represent the village.

“We put up a big fight.”

Assets of Kaingaroa village, including houses, shops, workshops, school, kōhanga reo, and marae, were transferred “back to the people of the village” and the Kaingaroa Papakāinga Trust under a licence to occupy arrangement with mana whenuaNgāti Manawa. The trust is governed by the Kaingaroa Forest Village Incorporated Council.

Doherty says there was a 12-month transition period for the transfer, overseen by the Ministry of Māori Affairs (Manatū Māori) and the Iwi Transition Agency (Te Tira Ahu Iwi). But, he says, there was no funding to help run the village.

Doherty recalls that when the Forest Service was disestablished, the plan was for all forestry villages across the country to be dismantled and the land planted with trees.

“The plans had already been laid out. Kaingaroa was the only village across the country to put up a fight.”

That is why, in Doherty’s view, the government was angry with the people of Kaingaroa.

“That is why the Crown’s response to the people of the village was: ‘Don’t expect any help from the government’.

“We were on our own from that day forward.”

Villagers were also angry.

“One of the biggest issues we faced in that 12 months and going forward was [some] people of the village were so angry at the government that whatever they could lay their hands on in the village got vandalised. They smashed our water pumps and sewerage lines.

“I was trying to tell them that what they were doing was theirs, but the reasons were all the buildings represented the government and that government has taken away their livelihoods.

“It went on for years but for the first 12 months, it was hell.”

The remnants of that destructive period can still be seen in the village today.

Doherty says it was predicted the village would cease to exist within five to 10 years of the changes.

“We had no plan because we were supposed to be gone and because of that they just forgot about Kaingaroa.”

Richard Prebble, who was Minister for State-Owned Enterprises of New Zealand at the time, says the Government was concerned about the village.

“A good number of us had visited the village, so we actually knew the place,” he says.

“It wasn’t a place that Ministers hadn’t been to. I have personally been to Kaingaroa on a number of occasions.

“We were worried about the future of the village and its viability. We were also concerned that New Zealand Government has a history of building special villages for various projects that were never intended to be permanent. And there is nothing more permanent than a temporary village.

“They were there for a particular economic project.”

Prebble says Cabinet at the time gave serious consideration as to whether they were better to compensate everybody and move the village and were skeptical about the assurances by residents who wanted to stay.

But in the end, the view of the Cabinet was people were entitled to make their own decisions.

“We gave the community the opportunity, so the Cabinet was actually very sympathetic and didn’t want to be maternalistic. Perhaps we should have been.”

Prebble agrees the village was left to fend for itself.

“But that is true in every village in New Zealand. The government does not guarantee that any village anywhere is going to be economically viable.”

Prebble says the forestry as it was set up was not economically viable.

"The government was running its commercial forests at a loss. The taxpayer just could not afford to continue to subsidise the forestry companies by selling wood at a loss.

"When the forestry state-owned enterprise was set up it switched to using contractors. Many of the contractors did very well. They found they could be 400 per cent more efficient. They found they did not need a village inside the forest as the Ministers suspected.

“Government had concerns about the long-term viability have unfortunately proved to be correct.”

It took 20 years to reach a settlement and for forest lands to be returned to their traditional owners.

In 2009, the 189,000ha of Kaingaroa Forest land was returned to eight iwi as part of what was then the biggest Treaty of Waitangi deal in history, dubbed the Treelord Treaty Settlement.

The handover of the forest land to the Central North Island Forest Iwi Collective of eight iwi made Māori the largest forestry owners in New Zealand.

The forest plantation continues to be owned by a private company Kaingaroa Timberlands Ltd, which now leases the land.

The impact of that period of upheaval remains, with the biggest change, in Doherty's view, a lack of respect shown by some of the younger generation in the village.

“It really changed people. The thing that has changed so much from those times until now, is respect.

“The respect is now gone. The restructuring created a new culture.”

The Tribesmen gang, which has a strong foothold in the town, also grew out of those chaotic years.

Former chapter president Kani Petera Hunt was a “pad rat” at the Tribesmen Motorcycle Club in the late 1980s.

Hunt - nicknamed EI - met his “Mrs” Mavis Boynton in 1988 and moved to Kaingaroa in 1989. The couple has six children - three girls and three boys - and 14 mokopuna.

Hunt, 59, loves Kaingaroa for the “sense of freedom that we get from being isolated”.

“All the troubles and that go past us.”

Hunt, who describes himself as a rangatira in the gang, says its previous incarnation, the Wairap Mob, emerged from the village’s forestry camps.

“That’s the OG gangsters”.

Hunt says in the early years, people serving prison sentences were sent to Kaingaroa to work on the pines. In his view: “That’s why there were a lot of outlaws here. They were slaves to the pines.”

In the early 1980s the Wairap Mob became part of the Tribesmen Motorcycle Club.

“Prior to that, we were just thugs on drugs. We only had ourselves to look after.”

In the early days, Hunt says he would tell youngsters not to steal in their hood.

“Because we don’t have anything. What we have is what we need, and we don’t want to take it off anybody.”

After the restructuring, Hunt says people had to look at other ways to make a living.

“So, we took up growing dope in the Kaingaroa Forest. That was to supplement our meagre earnings from the dole.

“We didn’t get into too much thieving and all of that around the hood because we had our own earnings.”

While the older villagers had moved on, younger ones were still dabbling in the “naughty stuff”, he says.

“Now it’s our turn to nurture them through the gauntlet. Show them the right path.”

Tribesman member Hunt hopes with the new project “everybody’s mindsets will change”.

“The whole village is looking good... The money is getting spread around the village.”

He dreams of a bright future for the village’s tamariki.

Hunt says the cost of living is rising and gaining access to the kai in the forest will help show the younger generation where the kai was, how to get it, and prepare and eat it.

“We don’t need handouts, we just need access to the forest so we can feed ourselves.

“That’s all we want out of anything is just enough to survive and make sure our tamariki are fed, sheltered and clothed.

“It’s our turn. Our elders have all had their turn and it’s our turn to step up.

Resident Lea Thompson says it has been good to see positive changes being made to the village.

“If someone told me 10 years ago [it would be like this] I wouldn’t have believed it."

Her mum and Kaumātua Doherty have seen the village at its best and at its worst and they will now get to see it potentially be rebuilt again, she says, as the last few years of investment and the anticipated community hub have built stability for the village.

“It has created a future, one we never thought we had.”

Walking into Kaingaroa Forest School the children’s smiling faces can be seen through the classroom windows as they wave hello.

The school principal Mary-Louise MacPherson-Hall welcomes us in for coffee.

MacPherson-Hall, who was a pupil in the 1980s, says being at Kaingaroa Kaingaroa Forest School then felt like being home.

“Everybody was here to love you, to grow you, to teach you, and to help you be the best that you could be.

“Everything was at our fingertips. We wanted for nothing. We had the safety of the whole village. Everyone knew everyone.”

When the redundancies rocked the village, she says the sense of community was lost.

“That made it hard to have aspirations, hard to have dreams. I watched people start to shut down. The connections that were so important had changed.”

Now, the principal says the significant strength of teachers, staff, families, and the Board of Trustees surrounding the tamariki - and a strong school curriculum embedded with Kaingaroa’s history - was helping to shape a strong next generation for Kaingaroa.

Some school leavers today were pursuing careers in Māori law, the Navy, and the police outside the village, she says.

“I am confident the village has made the first big steps towards reclaiming its future.”