The Forest Walkway opens with the Māori creation account of the forest: Tāne separating Ranginui and Papatuanuku and clothing his mother in trees. Kauri, in Māori tradition, are taonga and the ancestors of the forest. The walkway moves from this creation account through the Jurassic emergence of kauri to the present, framing what follows in the galleries as the story of what happened to something sacred and ancient.
The museum's operational machinery wing contains a working recreation of a kauri sawmill at its heart: a Davey Paxman Portable Steam Engine built in England in 1921, one of the last ever made. A 1929 Caterpillar 60 Bulldozer, NZ's earliest surviving tractor, sits alongside it. These machines were the instruments of an industry that cleared millions of hectares. Seeing them in operation makes the scale of that history physical and immediate.
A single kauri slab measuring 22.5 metres in length. The scale is only intelligible in person. Ask students to measure it against something familiar before they see it and then stand at one end while someone stands at the other. This single exhibit communicates more about what was lost than any paragraph can.
The largest collection of kauri gum in the world, ranging from pale gold to deep amber. Kauri gum is the hardened resin of kauri trees, some pieces tens of thousands of years old, preserved in the soil long after the trees that produced it have gone. The gum-digging industry drew migrants from across Europe, creating a distinctive Northland economy and community. The collection is also scientifically significant: ancient gum can be analysed for paleoclimate data and sometimes contains perfectly preserved prehistoric insects.
Kauri logs preserved in swamps for tens of thousands of years emerge intact when land is developed or dug. Swamp kauri is both a commercial material and a scientific record: tree rings from ancient kauri logs have been used to reconstruct past climate conditions going back 45,000 years. The museum holds examples that make this timescale tangible.
Life-sized recreations of the spaces that structured daily life in the gum-digging era: the boarding houses where gumdiggers ate and slept, the post office that connected isolated communities to the wider world, and the 1878 school where the children of settlers received their first formal education. The mannequins and models are based on real people.
These prompts build on what students saw, held, and questioned at Matakohe. They work best when students have a specific object, exhibit, or moment from the visit to anchor their AI conversation. The gum they polished, the slab they stood beside, the desk they sat at in the Pioneer School: these are the starting points, not the AI.
Hold your polished piece of gum and ask a gen AI chatbot: "What is kauri gum, how old can it be, and why did people dig it up?" Then tell it: "I polished a piece of kauri gum at the museum. It came from a tree that might have lived thousands of years ago." Does the AI's answer feel different now that you have held a piece?
You sat at a kauri desk in a school from 1878. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What was school like for children in New Zealand in 1878?" Compare its answer to what the museum teacher told you. What did the AI include? What did it leave out that you actually experienced?
Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What happened to the kauri forests of Northland, New Zealand?" Then look at the 22.5 metre kauri slab you saw at the museum. Tell the AI how long it was and ask: "How old would a kauri tree be to produce a slab that size?" Does the number it gives you change how you feel about what was cut down?
The Forest Walkway began with the Māori story of Tāne and the forest. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "Who is Tāne in Māori tradition and why is the forest connected to him?" Compare its answer to what you saw and heard in the walkway. What did the walkway show you that the AI cannot?
Ask a gen AI chatbot: "Who were the kauri gumdiggers of Northland and where did they come from?" The gum-digging workforce included people from Dalmatia, Britain, and various Pacific communities, as well as Māori. Does the AI's account reflect this diversity accurately? What does it emphasise and what does it underplay?
Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain why the kauri forests of Northland were almost entirely cleared between the 1840s and the 1970s: "What economic, political, and social forces drove the clearing of kauri forests in Northland, and who made the decisions?" Evaluate the response against what you learned at the museum and in class. Whose interests does the AI's account centre?
The museum holds kauri logs preserved in swamps for tens of thousands of years. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What is swamp kauri, how is it preserved, and how do scientists use ancient kauri logs to reconstruct past climates?" Then ask it: "What does this tell us about the relationship between living trees and scientific knowledge?" Compare its answers to what you saw at the museum.
Based on your museum visit, ask a gen AI chatbot: "When an ancient forest is cleared for an industry, what kinds of things are lost that can never be recovered?" Give it specifics from the museum: the 22.5 metre slab, the fossilised gum, the machinery. Evaluate its response: does it account for ecological, cultural, and historical loss equally?
The kauri industry operated within a colonial economic framework that treated the forest as a resource to be extracted. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What were the colonial land use policies that enabled the clearing of Northland's kauri forests, and how did those policies affect Māori relationships with the land and the forest?" Critically evaluate the response against the historical material at the museum and any primary sources your teacher provides. Whose perspective is centred in the AI's account?
Ancient kauri logs preserved in swamps have been used to reconstruct climate conditions going back 45,000 years through dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. Ask a gen AI chatbot to explain the methodology and its significance. Then ask: "What are the limitations of this data and where does uncertainty remain?" Verify the response against at least one peer-reviewed source. Where is the AI accurate? Where does it overstate certainty or miss complexity?
The kauri gum industry employed thousands of workers, most of them migrants, in difficult and poorly rewarded conditions. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "Who captured the economic value of the kauri gum industry in Northland, and how was that value distributed between landowners, merchants, exporters, and workers?" Use the museum's collections and historical displays as your primary evidence base and evaluate how well the AI's account matches what you encountered.
The kauri dieback crisis today places the remaining kauri forests under existential threat, as the earlier logging did. Ask a gen AI chatbot: "What does the kauri dieback crisis of the 21st century have in common with the colonial-era clearing of kauri forests, and what does the comparison reveal about New Zealand's relationship with kauri over time?" Write a short historical essay in response: draw on the museum visit, the Waipoua Forest protocol if you have done that visit, and the AI's response as a source to interrogate.
| Level | Years 0–6 | Years 7–10 | Years 11–13 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Student names at least one thing they saw or did at the museum and can explain in simple terms what kauri gum is and why it was valuable. Understands that the forest they saw in the Forest Walkway no longer exists in the way it once did. | Student identifies the key phases of the museum's narrative: the ecological story of kauri, the gum-digging industry, the sawmill era, and the pioneer community. Can make a basic historical claim about what the kauri forests contributed to and what their loss meant. | Student produces an accurate account of the ecological, economic, and cultural history of kauri in Northland, drawing on specific exhibits encountered at the museum as evidence. |
| 2 | Student makes a connection between the museum's objects and the forest: the gum came from a tree, the slab was a tree, the furniture was a tree. Can say why so many trees were cut down in simple terms: people needed timber and money. | Student explains the economic and social forces that drove kauri forest clearing, links these to the objects and recreations in the museum, and identifies at least one consequence of the clearing that is still felt today. | Student constructs a causal account connecting colonial land use policy, the economic incentives of the kauri and gum industries, and the near-complete loss of kauri forest cover in Northland, using museum evidence and at least one additional historical source. |
| 3 | Student compares what a gen AI chatbot says about kauri or the gum-digging era with what they experienced at the museum. Can name at least one thing the AI knew and one thing the museum showed them that the AI could not convey. | Student systematically evaluates AI outputs on kauri history against their museum experience and at least one authoritative source, identifying where the AI's account is accurate, where it is incomplete, and what the physical encounter at the museum added. | Student produces a critical analysis of AI outputs on kauri history and colonial land use, evaluating whose perspectives the AI centres, what it omits, and what the museum's primary collections reveal that secondary and AI-generated accounts cannot. |
| 4 | Student explains what being at the museum added that reading about kauri could not: holding polished gum, standing beside the 22.5 metre slab, sitting at a kauri desk in the 1878 school, hearing the sawmill run. | Student articulates what the physical encounter at Matakohe provided that no secondary source can replicate: the scale of the slab and the machinery, the texture and warmth of polished gum, the smell of old timber, the spatial experience of the recreated boarding house. | Student reflects on what primary material encounter at the museum contributes to historical understanding that AI-generated summaries, textbooks, and documentary accounts cannot, connecting this to the epistemological value of material culture in historical inquiry. |
| 5 | Student generates one question about the kauri story that they could not answer at the museum and identifies where they would go to find an answer: a library, a kaumatua, a DOC ranger, the museum's archive. | Student formulates a sustained inquiry question arising from the museum visit: about the gumdiggers' lives and communities, about the policy decisions that allowed forest clearing to continue, about the relationship between the museum's collections and living kauri today. | Student designs or begins a sustained historical or scientific inquiry project grounded in the Matakohe visit: a research essay, an oral history project, a policy analysis, or a community history contribution, with clear connection to the evidence base encountered at the museum. |