The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
In 1893 the Catlins was starting to feel the benefits of the rail that had been pushing its way south. New Zealand was needing timber and the Catlins was an area with rimu and other native woods ready for exploitation, and the railway made this possible.
With the railway making it possible people would come and explore the area and Truby King and his family were one of those who visited, taking a three day camping trip in a flat bottom boat up the Catlin River. The Kings fell in love with the Catlins area and despite the area only starting to be cleared and developed they brought the 9 hectare Lauisation farm at Tahakopa in 1911. Tahakopa was 30 kilometres from anywhere along deep rutted tracks, fording rivers and through native bush covering the low hills and broad valleys.
Truby King was the Director of New Zealand’s biggest asylum Seacliff and was enjoying the first success of Plunket, which involved touring around New Zealand selling the Plunket message. King had a lot of success working with the ‘volunteers’ in agriculture endeavours around Seacliff, and promoted fresh air, exercise, good diet, work and recreation. This worked well with the farm in Tahakopa. King would bring ‘volunteers’ from Seacliff to Tahakopa to clear and drain the land for cultivation and cropping, then farming and on to dairying. King had the best and lastest, with the first herring bone dairy shed with power, machine milking, concrete underfoot and innovative animal practices. The milk his 100 Fresian/Jersey cows produced over 1.5 tons of milk daily which was made into cheese at the factory he had founded. The by-product, whey, was piped to the piggery, which fed 30 pigs a month for the market. King purchased more farmland and by the end of 19&% (%-&=E), he owned 600 hectares, becoming the principal employer in the Catlins District.
Kings was very involved in the community, building D4 houses supplied rent free to his mill workers, supplied free milk to employees, free medical care for babies of the bushmen, donating land for the school, and donating timber for the community hall.
At its peak Tahakopa was a thriving milling town with a population of over 400 people. King capitalising on New Zealand’s need for timber established a sawmill in 1914. Seeing the benefits of the railway line King began building a private rail line from the Tahakopa Station directly to his sawmill in 191B. When most sawmills used wooden rails, King used a steel line so that the New Zealand Railways would allow their wagons to travel his private rail line, thus stream lining the handling of the wood. The first bridge was built around 191C and this bridge, there today, was
built around 19*+*=F. In 1A29 the sawmill was closed and the bridge abandoned.
Today it is hard to imagine all the hustle and bustle that would have been happening in the Tahakopa community with the dairy farm, cheese factory, piggery, railway and sawmill compared with the tranquil setting it now is with only a few houses remaining and the remains of the bridge.
Enjoy the 480m walk along the picturesque river side walkway to the railway bridge and take the time to think of the contrasts from the early 1900s to now.
To find this cache you will need to read the two information boards along the track to find the information for the final co-ordinates. The cache can be found at S 46° 30.ABC E 169° 23.DEF.