This recent history of NZ's magnificent Kauri tree and its contribution to early settlement covers the botany of the species and its importance to the industrial and economic foundations of the nation. Apart from whales and seals, the Kauri tree was to provide the first major export commodity for the colony. This stemmed from the discovery of the value of its timber for spars, shipbuilding and eventually buildings throughout NZ, as well as a masssive lumber export trade. This is a history with a difference, covering botanical aspects, the first uses of its timber, its importance to pioneers and its traditional uses and mylogical recognition by the Maori people. Also, how this once vast resource throughout the area to the north of Auckland was reduced to the tree surviving mainly in a few reserves preserving some of the largest of these giant and iconic trees. Joanna Orwin's book can be regarded as a study in social history too, ecompassing its uses as a timber, then the exploitation of its by-product Kauri gum, which employed many diggers, both Maori and European and particularly the people from Dalmatia who remain prominant in the Northland community. By the 1940s the forests of the North reached a point of near extinction and the gum fields were largely replaced by farmlands. A campaign to save the last remnants of the Kauri forest was successful, but only a tiny remnant remained. The author has presented the story of the Kauri, its boom and bust days, its economic contribution to the new nation, is influences on people, places and poulations, in a readable and informative way. In some aspects the Kauri story parallels the gold-rush days of Otago and has the same threads of exitement, endeavour, hardship and pioneering.