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UNDER this headline, the 16 December 1955 issue of the twenty-four page newspaper The New Zealand Herald carried a two-page spread to mark the first time that the paper was printed entirely on newsprint made in New Zealand. "With it a 30-year-old dream comes to life - the dream of a great newsprint industry based on the softwood resources of the 260,000-acre forest planted on the Kaingaroa Plains in the 1920's and early thirties. "Few of the people who watched the early plantings of insignia pine on the pumice lands of the Kaingaroa Plains could have foreseen the ultimate use of all the miles of forest - the raw material for one of the biggest forest-utilization plants in the Commonwealth. "It would have been difficult then to visualize a time when £28 million would be spent to exploit these forest riches, entailing the building of huge modern mills, roads, railways, and a deep-sea port, the organization of highly mechanized logging operations, and the development of two new towns to house several thousand people." THE: Kaingaroa State Forest, from which the newsprint, pulp and sawmills draw their raw materials, is the largest planted forest in the world. A vast belt of pine trees, 15 miles wide and 50 miles deep, it covers 260,000 acres of pumice land which 30 years ago was an uninhabited wilderness of fern and tussock. It was the discovery, soon after the turn of the century, that the then-despised New Zealand pumice soils could grow a species of pine tree faster than any other softwood in the world that first turned the thoughts of forestry experts to the prospect of establishing a forest big enough to become a source of supply either to the building industry, or a pulp and paper industry, or both. The facts were fantastic. In 1897 four small experimental plots near Rotorua had been planted with Pinus radiata (more widely known in those days as insignia pine, and familiar to Americans as Monterey pine). From 1902 to 1920, some 300 acres were planted every year by prison labor, supplemented in 1917 by the work of returned servicemen of the First World War. THE trees grew with incredible swiftness reaching maturity in 25 years, whereas in Canada black spruce, the principal newsprint species, took from 80 to 100 years to mature. It was this discovery, together with the realization that the country's dwindling resources of native timbers had got to be preserved at all costs, that persuaded the Government in 1920 to set up the New Zealand Forest Service. From that moment New Zealand became committed to a scientific tree-growing policy, centered on the vastness of the Kaingaroa Plains. It was at the Southland Paper Mills in Texas that the final tests of New Zealand radiate for newsprint production were made in 1947: there and at the Australian Newsprint Mills at Boyer, Tasmania. Newsprint made from these samples of New Zealand woodpulp was used by a number of New Zealand and Australian newspaper publishers with favorable results. All the experts were agreed that the project had high economic promise. "Today sees the culmination of 30 years of brilliant effort in the creation of a new national industry. In the main we owe its success to the enormous amount of patient research that went into its planning, but above all to what the present Minister of Forests has called ' the imperturbable and unshakeable belief ' of the New Zealand Forest Service in its economic feasibility." |
