Fredrik Hjelm, arborist and tree climber, ascending to the canopy in search of healthy kauri seeds (Image: Michelle Hyslop).
Fredrik Hjelm, arborist and tree climber, ascending to the canopy in search of healthy kauri seeds (Image: Michelle Hyslop).

AucklandFebruary 10, 2019

Photo essay: the people fighting kauri dieback

Guest photographer
Fredrik Hjelm, arborist and tree climber, ascending to the canopy in search of healthy kauri seeds (Image: Michelle Hyslop).
Fredrik Hjelm, arborist and tree climber, ascending to the canopy in search of healthy kauri seeds (Image: Michelle Hyslop).

In a new exhibition, photographer Michelle Hyslop explores kauri dieback through the personal stories of the people close to the trees and their fight to save – and protect – the giants of the forest.

In December 2017 Te Kawerau ā Maki placed a rāhui on the Waitākere Ranges in an attempt to prevent the spread of kauri dieback, a disease that slowly kills the trees. The focus of the rāhui is protection rather than prohibition. The protection of kauri results in the health of the entire forest. Although there was pushback, the scientists working with the iwi were clear that the infection was spreading along tracks from humans. The iwi decided it couldn’t wait for Council to act; the one thing they can control is people, so they moved to keep them out and to give the forest a break while research and track upgrades are being done.

Being an Auckland based photographer, the Waitakere Ranges was my place to connect with nature and explore the trails with my running friends. The closures affected a wide range of people, including myself and it inspired me to research the disease further. I came to realise not only how many kauri had been affected but the impact it was having on people’s lives.

A couple of friends and I used to go night running at Cascades and we would stop at a kauri called Auntie Agatha and spend a couple of minutes looking in awe. I would think, if this tree had eyes, imagine the things it must have seen in its life.

I received a $10,000 Pro Grant from Canon, which provided me with the funding and equipment I needed to get this project up and running as well as printing the photos for the exhibition.

I started by photographing and interviewing people I knew but the project gained a life of its own as word spread and I was introduced to more and more people who were affected by the disease. I was captured by their amazing stories, from Kevin Prime who uses karakia to protect the kauri on his land to arborist Fredrik Hjelm who collects kauri seeds for people to plant and research. Over eight months I photographed people from Motatau and Waipoua Forest in the Far North to Rotorua, meeting local iwi, scientists, and members of the public who had a kauri story to tell.

The exhibition’s photos have been hung from the trees of Albert Park, between Princes Street and the Auckland Art Gallery, and is open until March 6.

Kaumatua Kevin Prime, of Ngati Hine, Ngapuhi, Ngati Whatua and Tainui Iwi, standing beneath kauri, Motatau (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

None of the kauri trees on Kevin Prime’s 1060 hectares in Motatau have suffered dieback. And although he hosts a mountain-bike race every year, he doesn’t ask riders to clean their bikes before entering his land. Why are his kauri still healthy?

Kevin explains he uses karakia to protect the trees on his land. He calls upon the creator to send spirits of healing to his native trees, and to drive out epidemics, like kauri dieback, from his land.

Karakia is often translated simplistically as ‘prayer’, but Kevin explains that its meaning is richer. The word combines ‘ka’ (about to happen; glow), ‘ara’ (to awaken; pathway), ‘ki’ (to); and ‘ā ia’ (the supreme being). More accurately, karakia means ‘the awakening of communication with the creator’.

Kevin offers his karakia for others to use; when it’s spoken, the speaker’s intention must be to connect with the creator of the trees. Standing among his own trees, he smiles gently. “The use of karakia does not cost anything. All it takes is the belief of the person to think it and make it happen.”

Kelly Kahukiwa, of Whakaue, Pataheuheu and Te Aitanga a Makaki iwi, holding a pūrerehua in the shade of kauri trees. A H Reed Memorial Park, Whangarei. (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

Kelly Kahukiwa and Daniel Nathan, of Te Roroa iwi, lead a project called Te Reo Ngaro o te Rākau (the hidden voices of trees), which melds Mātauranga Māori (Māori scientific observation) with arts, music, education and acoustic technology. Both believe there’s a hidden language that exists inside the trees, and are recording these ultrasonic frequencies from te wāhi ngaro (the undiscovered world), to bring them out of the ultrasonic spectrum and into human hearing range.

Rangatahi (young people) will help record these sounds and rhythms to make music from them. Kelly hopes rangatahi will be encouraged to re-connect with the forest: “we’re searching, we’re discovering, and we want to do this with our young people beside us, doing this with us.”

Although they’re recording all native trees, they’re curious to listen to kauri that are healthy and also kauri with dieback, to see whether the trees’ internal rhythms signal whether they’re sick.

Tammy Downes and her daughter Eloise, enjoying the shade of a majestic kauri tree on their property in Laingholm. (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

Tammy Downes was devastated when she discovered the one hundred kauri trees on her family’s land were all infected with dieback. She has treated the trees herself with the help of Kauri Rescue volunteers. They drill holes around the trunk, inject phosphite, and leave the syringes to expel. The kauri will need ongoing treatment to prolong their lives.

Tammy wants people to get on board and start helping. “If we lose them, if we let that happen, what are we going to say to our children and our children’s children? I want my daughter to be able to bring her children back to her house here, and I want them to be big, strong, beautiful kauri trees.”

Trail-runner Christian Stockle on the Te Henga trail, near Bethells Beach (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

When Christian Stockle moved to New Zealand from the UK six years ago, discovering the Waitākere Ranges was fundamental to him putting down roots here: “you’ve got this incredibly diverse range of pristine trails in forest” on the doorstep of the biggest metropolitan centre in the country.

He sees the forest as an asset for the city’s health: mental health and obesity have become epidemics in New Zealand and moving in green spaces “helps keep you sane” and fit. With the park closed, children are no longer able to learn to move and play in the outdoors. He’s sad about kauri dieback, but also feels the closures are a “knee-jerk reaction” and won’t change the diseases’ presence in the forest.

Kaumātua Dave Paniora and his wife Kuia June Paniora, ko Te Roroa te iwi, Waipoua. (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

Dave Paniora grew up in Waipoua forest, one of twelve kids in a two-room house. Like most of their neighbours, they lived off kai moana and gathering seaweed to sell. “It was a hard life but a good life.” At fifteen, Davey started working in forestry with his father. His father climbed kauri trees to collect their gum. Davey specialised in seed collection; he could gather 8-10 pounds in a season.

Dave’s tree-climbing boots look a bit like crampons – the front spikes stick horizontally into the trunk, and he would hold a set of sharp hooks in his hand and alternate moving his hands and feet. At the crown of the tree, he would attach a 200-metre-long rope fitted with a seat, which enabled him to swing out to the ends of branches to access the kauri seed cones.

He spent 30 years in forestry, and says back then, kauri forestry was “hard physical work” – the trees represented money to be made, not something that needed protection.

Dave’s home is full of his carvings and artwork, including a collection of kauri gum. They are photographed sitting in the home that he and his wife June raised six of her younger siblings, five of their own children and 47 foster children.

Fredrik Hjelm, arborist and tree climber, ascending to the canopy in search of healthy kauri seeds (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

Arborist Fredrick Hielm is working with BioSense, mana whenua, Landcare research, Scion, and iwi to find a strain of kauri resistant to dieback.

For Fredrik, being in the canopy is an incredible experience: seeing hanging gardens of orchids in the boughs of giant trees, and hearing kauri seeds rain onto the forest floor in late summer. He far prefers climbing living trees, which move their branches in wind. Climbing a dead kauri is eerie, he says, because they’re so static.

“I’m emotionally quite engaged in my work. Some of the projects I do, like climbing trees with the different mana whenua, is more fantastic than I could ever dream. I’m humbled to be a part of it.”

Chantal Probst, expert in plant pathology, holding a kauri seedling at Manaaki Whenua, Auckland (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

This kauri seedling was killed by Phythophthora agathidicida, a micro-organism causing kauri dieback. Chantal Probst is a research technician at Manaaki Whenua – Landcare Research. Landcare receives kauri seedlings from Scion and inoculates them with phytophthora. If the seedling dies, its roots are tested to confirm that the phytophthora infection caused its death.

Landcare’s five-year experiment is aimed at establishing whether particular families of kauri can live longer once infected with dieback, or even survive the disease.

Te Amohaere Ngata-Aerengamate (centre) with her sisters Tiare and Truth – Nō Ngāti Porou me Kuki Airani (Caption: Andrea Ewing).

Te Amohaere Ngata-Aerengamate grew up performing kapa haka alongside her whanau, where they found great joy in performing, producing and composing waiata, which communicate a purpose, whether it be current events or history of Māori culture.

Te Amohaere has composed a song specifically for kauri dieback in the Waitakere Ranges called Te tangi o te Kauri (the cry/call of the kauri). She is hopeful the song will be used as an education piece for the younger generation; it’s a catchy, fun tune and simple enough to understand, “Scrub, spray and stay (on the track)”. The song likens kauri trees to people, kings of the forest who live above us and were here before us. It emphasises the responsibilities we have as kaitiaki of the land, to protect kauri and the wider ecosystem.

Lyrics of Te tangi o te Kauri

Me muku wō hū

Scrub your shoes

Wairehu wō hū

Spray your shoes

Me muku wō hū

Scrub your shoes

Kia ū ki te ara tika!

Stay on track!

Kia tū te kauri… hi!

The kauri will stand

He aha te mea nui o te taiao

What is the greatest thing in nature

 

Ko te rākau Kauri

The kauri tree

Ka tangi te ngahere

The forest is crying

 

More Reading

    Ka hemo te kīngi o te Waitākere

    The king of the Waitākere is dying

    Arborists from the Living Tree Company installing the exhibitions photographs in Albert Park. Image Credit: Genevieve Senekal, Canon

    The images and stories of the people affected by kauri dieback will be suspended in the trees of Albert Park until 6 March.

    Keep going!
    Shea Stackhouse and his sword (Photo: Sylive Whinray).
    Shea Stackhouse and his sword (Photo: Sylive Whinray).

    PartnersJanuary 27, 2019

    Sharp objects: A lesson in the fine art of knife-making

    Contributing writer
    Shea Stackhouse and his sword (Photo: Sylive Whinray).
    Shea Stackhouse and his sword (Photo: Sylive Whinray).

    Catherine Woulfe spends a day at the Auckland Blade Show, a celebration of knives of all kinds.

    This story originally ran in Barker’s 1972 magazine.

    To make pasta you force a lump of egg and flour flat, fold it back on itself, force it flat, fold. Maybe half a dozen times.

    Making Damascus steel is the super-heated, marathon version of that process. We’re talking hundreds of layers, days and days of work. And because you start with steels of slightly different shades, a pattern emerges. The resulting blades look like slivers of ocean. To see them is to covet them.

    Damascus is everywhere at the Auckland Blade Show, held in the Parnell Community Centre one weekend in October last year. So is denim, and camo print. Men who spend most of their spare time hunkered in a workshop have pulled on their best jeans, wrapped up their keenest blades, and come to swap yarns and advice. Their arms have patches of stubble; they’ve been testing their edges.

    Sunshine slides down the long blades of $1500 chef’s knives, hops and jumps across hunters and folders and the occasional sword. It sinks into leather sheaths and handles of wood and bone.

    Raw Damascus steel (Photo: Sylvie Whinray)

    This is the first Blade Show since 2006, and organiser Brent Sandow hopes its resurrection will gird the knife-making scene in New Zealand, itself in resurgence. Eventually Sandow would like to set up a guild – a watchdog to make sure standards stay high. The quality on show today is exceptional, he says, but new ‘makers’ are popping up all over. It’s not a cheap hobby, but the knives look terrific on Instagram, and YouTube is stuffed with how-to clips.

    For Sandow, part of the appeal is that handcrafted knives endure: in 500 years, someone will pick up one of his blades and see his name etched on it.

    And steel seems to lend itself to obsession.

    “It’s a very, very deep hole to fall into,” says Uta Alexander. He’s from Patea – ‘Poi E’ country, as his wife Grace puts it – and sells his knives under the name Zander Blades.

    “I was in the New Zealand army and just buying off-the-shelf knives which weren’t cutting it,” he says. “The edge would never hold up, it was never well made.”

    He likes to work with premium-grade stainless steel. Why? Well. Every so often he’ll snap a piece and examine the grain structure inside.

    “What we’ve found is that the kind of stainless steels that we use have got a very fine, pearly grain structure… It looks very smooth, kind of silky. We accidentally snapped a Stevens knife and it was like sand, it was just so coarse.

    “No wonder they don’t hold their edge.”

    Traditionally Damascus steel is made from carbon steel, which rusts unless it’s well cared-for. Uta’s just conjured a Damascus blade from premium stainless and put it through three months of everyday use in his kitchen. Didn’t need sharpening once.

    “I mean, that’s like, it’ll shave [hairs off an arm] after three months.”

    Cool but my Briscoes knives have gone three years without being sharpened, I tell him.

    “In general, people tolerate a dull edge,” says Grace. Burn.

    Uta: “A dull knife is actually far more dangerous than a sharp one.” He mimes knife versus pumpkin. “Pressure… more pressure… gone.”

    Speaking of sharp. The daggers on the table of Peter Parkinson seem to emanate their own light. Thin and mean – and beautiful, utterly beautiful. 

    They’re replicas of the Fairbairn-Sykes British commando dagger. The finest anywhere in the world, adds Sandow. The two work on these daggers together.

    From start to finish each dagger takes about eight to 10 weeks; Parkinson spends two weeks simply polishing the blade.

    These knives are bound for display cases, and mostly sell to collectors overseas. But they’re designed to slip between ribs. Per one of the original designers, William Ewart Fairbairn:

    “It is essential that the blade have a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges, because an artery torn through (as against a clean cut) tends to contract and stop the bleeding. If a main artery is cleanly severed, the wounded man will quickly lose consciousness and die.”

    Steel (Photo: Sylvie Whinray).

    Tip: when someone hands a knife to you, always point the blade up. “Especially if you get given a sword,” says Shea Stackhouse, of Wellington’s Stackhouse Knives. Also, if you’re having a nosy at a knife, it’s terrible etiquette to touch the blade with your hands.

    Not because anyone’s particularly worried about your hand.

    “You’ve got very corrosive acids on your skin that can cause the blade to rust.”

    Stackhouse started making knives in a blacksmith studio at art school when he was 16. Now in his 20s, he has his own workshop in Wellington, and has sold roughly 1000 knives, for anything from a couple of hundred dollars to well over $1000. His wife Lena carves the handles – she likes to use insect anatomy as inspiration – and they teach knife-making courses.

    People say: “‘Oh no, I’m not creative, oh I don’t do that.’ It’s like, ‘Here’s a piece of steel and

    you can hammer it’ and they’re like, ‘Oh man, I love this!’”

    Come for the craftsmanship, stay for the characters.

    “I certainly view the world as a bad place getting worse,” Stephen Little says. He’s here with an importer called Knives for Africa. He’s heavily into knives. He’s also a prepper, as in preparing for the apocalypse.

    What knives has he… prepared?

    He snorts. “I’ve got 300, so it’s not like I don’t have enough. And that’s just knives. I’ve got everything else as well, so.”

    Everything else?

    He pauses. “You know. Crossbows. Bows. Guns.”

    He shows me pictures on his tablet. To shoot his knife collection he arranged the blades on a pool table. He had to do it in three batches. The fourth photo is a spread of weapons. It looks like he’s looted the Batcave.

    Holy shit, I say. Oh my God. He laughs. It was studying business ethics that put him in the prepping frame of mind. “Through that I started to look at what was happening in the world, and studying the damage, desertification…”

    Little grew up shooting rabbits and possums with 22’s. His grandfather worked at the Patea freezing works, hence the knives.

    “All my years in Scouts mean I know how to camp, know how to live in the wild, know how to…”

    He trails off, looks at the knives.

    Dispatch a pig?

    “Exactly.”

    Moving on.

    I come to a table dominated by knives thick and brutish.

    Fighting knives, Nik Wilson tells me. He’s from Westland. The knives are fully functional, he says, hardened and tempered, based on designs from the American South.

    “I’m not a redneck.”

    You’re allowed to be, I say.

    “I’m not a redneck,” he repeats. “But they’re my bread and butter.”

    Nik Wilson (Photo: Sylvie Whinray).

    Wilson prefers the kitchen knives: he picks up a long, glossy blade with a handle of pounamu, turns it to the light. That’s his idea of a knife. He strokes the mānuka burl handle of a perfect, tiny “everything knife”; shows me the intricate patterns he’s pressed into copper handles. But those crude, heavy fighting knives are the ones that sell. He made six of them last summer and a tourist cleaned out his entire stock: about a dozen all up; worth about $5000. All winter he worked, making more.

    “I kept thinking, well, they’re selling, you’ve got to keep making them…”

    Wilson hasn’t been around this many people in years. “It’s just like, holy moly…”

    That beautiful chef’s knife trembles in his hand.

    “Oh, did you notice that I shake a bit? I’m on high doses of medications eh, so yeah I do shake a bit sometimes.”

    You okay?

    “Yeah, yeah. I’m good as gold. Yeah.” Not really. It happened about 10 years ago, down the mines.

    “We were all lifting this big beam up and I was on the end of it, trying to put the bolt in, and the guys down the far end of it couldn’t hold it up any longer. They dropped it and it caught me in the neck and shoulder.”

    He’s still in pain. Does he miss working with his mates? Oh yeah, he says, emphatically. “It’s good that you noticed that, because [knife making] is probably too solitary, eh.” Wilson was in hospital when the Pike River Mine blew, killing seven of his workmates. His mates.

    I’m sorry.

    “Oh, no. S’alright.”

    He’d been planning to jump ship to Pike – liked the idea of all the nice new machinery.

    “But anyway, this is what I do instead and I think it’s way better. There’s no windows down a coal mine, eh. You can’t put an aerial up on your radio or nothing. We were six k’s down. Six k’s.”

    He’s on a sickness benefit, and spends a couple of hours a day in the workshop. He sells his knives at the i-Site information centre in Greymouth, near the railway station. Nabs the tourists. But enough about knives. Nik wants to know, have I done the TranzAlpine, the train through the Southern Alps?

    “It’s awesome, eh,” he says. “It’s pretty cool in the winter, with all the snow. But in the summer, there’s wild lupins everywhere, just massive fields of lupins, eh, all in flower.”

    He gives the smallest shake of his head. “Stunning, eh.”

    This content was created in paid partnership with Barkers. Learn more about our partnerships here.