Digging for Kauri Gum by Paul Mason is an informative non-fiction text that weaves natural history with human experience to explore the rise and impact of the kauri gum industry in Te Tai Tokerau Northland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through clear explanation and historical examples, the text describes how resin from ancient kauri trees became kāpia, how it was used by Māori for practical purposes, and how it later became a valuable export for making varnish. The narrative explains why thousands of people travelled to the gum fields, including Dalmatian migrants, and reveals the tough conditions diggers faced while working in swamps and muddy ground. By tracing the growth and decline of the gum trade, the text also highlights its lasting environmental and social effects, including land damage and the spread of introduced plants such as gorse. Informative, visual, and grounded in real history, the text supports students to understand how industry, environment, and community are closely connected through lived experience and voice.
Description
The text is ideal for integrated learning across literacy, social sciences, and science, supporting inquiry into local history, migration, environmental impact, and continuity and change in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This pack contains wide range of response activities including:
- A guided reading plan exploring key literacy elements including inference and deduction, language use, making connection and text organisation, along with key questioning to promote emotional intelligence, metacognition and compassionate inquiry.
- An independent learning contract complete with explainer videos for activity clarity
- A wide range of response activities to support developing and embedding key literacy skills including sentence and word work, spelling, and cloze activities.
Curriculum Phase: Phase 2
Year Level: Year 4
English (NZC Levels 2–3): reading for meaning and enjoyment, identifying key ideas and facts, understanding informational and report texts, interpreting visual information, building historical and topic-specific vocabulary
Social Sciences – Aotearoa New Zealand Histories: local and national history, gum digging, migration and settlement, continuity and change, identity and belonging, work and daily life in the past
Science – Living World: plants and their uses, human impact on the environment, habitats and ecosystems, conservation and sustainability
Text type: Non-fiction, informational text, historical report, explanatory article
Key words include: Aotearoa New Zealand histories, kāpia, kauri gum, kauri trees, Te Tai Tokerau, Northland, gum diggers, gum fields, Dalmatia, Croatia, migration, settlers, Māori uses of kāpia, varnish, trade, industry, swamps, wetlands, digging tools, nuggets, nubs, peas, dust, hard labour, poverty, camps, storekeepers, gorse, introduced species, environmental damage, sustainability, conservation, land use, history of work, identity, belonging, community, resilience, adaptation, natural resources
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