Tauteihiihi Marae

While Kohukohu once boasted nearly 2,000 residents fueling New Zealand’s timber industry in 1900, the town’s population has since plummeted to around 180. The hotels, banks, and bustling wharves are mostly gone. The town itself is literally built on kauri sawdust, reclaimed from the harbor after whole hillsides were stripped bare by mills whose owners believed the forests would never run out.

They did run out, eventually. But through boom and bust, Tauteihiihi Marae, one of three marae serving the hapū Te Ihutai, has remained. The Te Rarawa iwi of Northland maintained their mana across centuries of colonization, and in Kohukohu that continuity is architectural and spiritual, the marae outlasting the timber barons, the merchants, and the infrastructure built around extraction. The forests have regrown on the hillsides. The harbor is quiet now in a different way.

Some towns hollow out when the industry leaves. Kohukohu endures because what anchors it was never the industry to begin with.