NORTHLAND: The economic potential of the tung tree, whose seeds produce an oil that has been used by the Chinese as a natural varnish for 2,500 years, was identified and promoted in parts of the North Island in the 1930s as a sure-fire investment.  

Its future, however, appears to have been cut short by climate, mismanagement, and the dire impacts of the Great Depression.  

For Kerikeri resident, Jack Kemp, the tung nut collapse in the 1930s is personal. One of his great aunts – Daisy Herd – invested in the fledgling tung oil industry and felt firsthand the ‘tung lashing’ that happened when the whole scheme collapsed. 

“Somewhere I have a solitary nut from one of the tung trees that was growing in the Te Paki area where my aunt was living and working,” says Jack who is a regular volunteer in our Northland Office. 

“It’s really the only tangible product of what was promised would be a highly lucrative industry.”   

Daisy Herd was a teacher based at Te Paki in the Far North, and like many people invested her hard-earned cash into the widely promoted scheme. She lived close to a tung tree plantation that was trumpeted in a bit of advertorial appearing in a 1931 edition of the Northland Age as being, “destined to be in the near future the centre of a great Tung Oil industry that will add greatly to the prosperity of the North.” 

The anonymous copywriter described the hospitality of Mr and Mrs Richardson, whose estate covered 47,000 acres and ran “right across the peninsula.” Here, tung oil trees were being raised from an impressive 147,000 seeds in a nursery that had been established onsite.  

The writer continued: “The soil, a light loamy one, had been ploughed and disced, reduced to a fine tilth, for the reception of seeds [which were] planted in rows about 2ft 3in apart.” 

Clearly everything was all go in the Far North – and Daisy and the Richardsons weren’t the only ones to sign up to the tung oil revolution. In Kerikeri, a scheme like the Alderton Income Homes Schemes which promoted citrus orchard ‘home and income’ packages also operated, promoting the tung nut tree to potential buyers instead.

George Alderton had founded the Northern Advocate in his early twenties and retired from journalism in 1897 at the age of 43. Swopping journalism for real estate, in 1925 he started promoting the idea of settlement in Kerikeri offering the idea of ‘home and income’ citrus groves – similar to schemes he had seen in America – as the ultimate lifestyle block.  

The New Zealand Tung Oil Corporation – one of 11 such companies operating in New Zealand according to local historian Nancy Pickmere in her book Kerikeri: Heritage of Dreams – offered a similar product. Clearly Kerikeri was the new frontier for slightly off-the-wall, almost-too-good-to-be-true settlement schemes.  

“By the early 1930s, soon after its inception, Alderton’s North Auckland Land Development Corporation found itself in serious difficulties,” says Jack.  

“The investors pulled through it, however, and with hard work and grit established what would become a flourishing citrus and horticulture industry in and around Kerikeri. Sadly, the tung oil industry wouldn’t be as fortunate.”