Day 13 - Coromandel Peninsula

General

The Coromandel Peninsula is a long, rugged promontory on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island, projecting roughly 85 kilometres northwards from the western end of the Bay of Plenty and measuring up to 40 kilometres across at its widest point. It separates the Hauraki Gulf and the Firth of Thames on its western shore from the open Pacific Ocean to the east, and in clear weather it is plainly visible from Auckland, about 55 kilometres away across the gulf. Administratively it forms part of the Thames-Coromandel District of the Waikato Region. Its Māori name is Te Tara-o-te-Ika-a-Māui, “the barb of Māui’s fish”, from the legend in which the demigod Māui fished up the North Island, Te Ika-a-Māui, from the sea; the English name records HMS Coromandel, a Royal Navy ship that called at Coromandel Harbour in 1820 to load kauri spars.

The peninsula is steep and hilly and largely covered in native bush. The Coromandel Range forms its backbone for most of its length, while the Moehau Range at the northern end rises to nearly 900 metres, the highest ground on the peninsula; the interior and the far north beyond Colville remain sparsely inhabited. The Coromandel Forest Park, established in 1971 and covering 71,899 hectares under the care of the Department of Conservation, protects much of the central hills, and beyond the northern tip the forested bulk of Great Barrier Island, separated by the Colville Channel, is in effect an offshore continuation of the same ranges.

Almost the entire population lives on the narrow coastal strips, and only five towns pass the 1,000 resident mark: Thames, the largest with 7,212 people at the 2023 census and the seat of the district council, Whitianga with 6,054, Whangamatā with 4,269, and Coromandel and Tairua. Numbers are strongly seasonal. Whangamatā swells past 25,000 around New Year, and in Whitianga about two-fifths of all dwellings stood empty on census night 2013, a measure of the bach and holiday-home culture that draws Aucklanders south in summer. State Highways 25 and 25A form a loop around the peninsula, some secondary roads such as the 309 Road between Coromandel and Whitianga remain unsealed, and a passenger ferry links Whitianga with Ferry Landing across its harbour.

After the kauri and gold industries that shaped the nineteenth century faded, dairy and sheep farming, fishing and small-scale industry carried the local economy, and tourism, established from the 1940s, has become its mainstay; Whitianga serves as the shopping and service centre of the eastern coast. The peninsula also keeps a long reputation as a haven for artists, craftspeople and alternative lifestylers, reinforced by the back-to-the-land settlers of the 1970s, and its beaches, forests and quiet harbours remain a favourite escape for holiday homes, surfing, sailing and bush walking.

History

Te Ara, the national encyclopaedia, dates the first settlement of the wider Hauraki region to the thirteenth century, when Polynesian migrants arrived by canoe. Local tradition recorded at Whitianga claims a still older occupation linked to the voyager Kupe: the town’s full old name, Te Whitianga o Kupe, means “the crossing place of Kupe”, and Mercury Bay was long known as Te Whanganui-a-Hei, the great bay of Hei, after the ancestor from whom Ngāti Hei, the iwi of the Mercury Bay coast, takes its name. From about 1550 peoples of the Tainui migration entered the district from the west and formed the Marutūāhu confederation, the group of tribes including Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Tamaterā and Ngāti Whanaunga whose territory spans the Hauraki shores of the peninsula. The fortified pā of this era were formidable: Whitianga Pā stood on a rock defended on three sides by cliffs and cut off on the fourth by a deep man-made ditch, while the great pā of Te Tōtara at Thames was stormed in December 1821 by a Northland war party during the Musket Wars.

Captain James Cook brought the Endeavour into Mercury Bay in November 1769 so that his astronomer, Charles Green, could observe the transit of the planet Mercury, which was recorded on 9 November; Cook named the bay for the event, and locals told him that Whitianga Pā had lain unused for a generation after an earlier attack. Later visitors were less fortunate: in August 1815 a party of Māori attacked the brig Trial and the schooner Brothers in Mercury Bay, killing several sailors, and in 1840 the naval storeship HMS Buffalo, which had carried some of Adelaide’s first settlers in 1836, was wrecked in the bay in a storm; Buffalo Beach keeps its name.

Kauri forest clothed the peninsula when Europeans first arrived, and its timber became the region’s first great export. Spars for the Royal Navy were being cut by the 1820s, and from mid-century kauri milling and shipbuilding flourished around Mercury Bay: the stone wharf built at Whitianga in 1838, the oldest surviving wharf in New Zealand, served a timber mill and shipyard, and over roughly sixty years an estimated 500 million feet of kauri was shipped from the Whitianga district, much of it in sailing vessels from Britain and Scandinavia. Kauri gum digging followed the loggers, with gum exported from 1844 and peaking at more than 11,000 tons in 1899. Māori land and labour underpinned much of this trade, and Hauraki communities supplied the young Auckland market with food.

Gold brought the transforming boom. In 1852 Charles Ring panned flakes of gold at Driving Creek near Coromandel town, the first recorded discovery of payable gold in New Zealand, although the alluvial find proved small. The real wealth lay locked in quartz reefs, and the great rush came to Thames in 1867, after the civil commissioner James Mackay leased mining rights from local Māori for 5,000 pounds a year and the Thames goldfield was proclaimed on 1 August; on 10 August William Hunt found gold in the rock of a waterfall in the Kuranui Stream. The twin boom towns of Shortland and Grahamstown, merged as the borough of Thames in 1874, exploded: some 18,000 people lived in the area at the peak of the rush in 1868, making it one of the colony’s largest urban centres, although the town itself was estimated at about 15,000 in 1870 and had fallen below 5,000 by 1881 once the richest reefs were worked out. Official records credit the Thames mines with more than 2.3 million ounces of bullion; at Karangahake in 1889 the cyanide process was first used on a large commercial scale, making low-grade quartz payable.

By the 1890s the great rushes were over. Thames settled into its role as a quiet service town; dairy farming became the region’s principal industry from about 1900, and forestry and gum digging lingered into the twentieth century. Holidaymakers discovered the coast from the 1940s, and in the 1970s communes and back-to-the-land settlers gave the Coromandel its lasting reputation for alternative lifestyles and environmental politics. Peninsula mining dwindled and most of it had ceased by the 1980s, although the great goldfield at Waihī, on the southern edge of the field, was reopened in 1987, and modern exploration still returns to old prospects, at times inside the conservation estate, which remains a live point of contention. Today the district markets itself on its beaches, forests and slow coastal towns.

Geology

The Coromandel Peninsula is the eroded remnant of a once far larger volcanic arc, the Coromandel Volcanic Zone, which stretched from Great Barrier Island in the north to the Kaimai Range in the south and is regarded as the tectonic precursor of the still active Taupō Volcanic Zone, today’s dominant volcanic region of the North Island. Volcanism began in the north about 18 million years ago, with the Port Charles andesites of the northern tip among the oldest rocks, and the focus of activity then migrated irregularly southwards and eastwards until the birth of the Taupō Volcanic Zone roughly two million years ago brought significant Coromandel volcanism to an end.

The character of the eruptions changed as the arc aged. For its first eight or nine million years the volcanism was overwhelmingly andesitic, building large cone volcanoes whose dissected roots form the western ranges of the peninsula. From about 9 million years ago the style shifted towards rhyolite, with major calderas collapsing along the central and eastern belt: the Kapowai Caldera beneath the central Coromandel Range erupted the great Wharepapa Ignimbrite about 8 million years ago, the Tunaiti Caldera south of Whangamatā collapsed around 7 million years ago, and dome-building rhyolites spread across the hills of the central-east, the transition visible in the country between Whitianga and Whangamatā. Between about 6 and 5.5 million years ago bimodal basalt and rhyolite volcanism built the mineralised structures around Waihi, and the last eruptions on the peninsula proper, dated between 4.7 and 4.2 million years ago, were basaltic, well displayed today in the Mercury Islands offshore.

Erosion has since carved the volcanic piles into the present landscape of bush-clad ridges, steep stream valleys and bays. The western shore of the peninsula fronts the Firth of Thames, which occupies a rift valley, or graben, between the Coromandel Peninsula and the Hunua Ranges and continues southwards into the flat Hauraki Plains; the faulting and subsidence of this basin accompanied the later stages of the arc. On the eastern side, drowned valleys form deep, calm harbours. The arm of Mercury Bay that runs six kilometres inland to Whitianga is one such estuary, and Cook, seeing its mangrove flats, called it the River of Mangroves. Where hard volcanic rock meets the open sea the coast runs out in cliffs and rocky points, and in the sheltered embayments between them beaches of pale sand accumulate behind dunes.

Volcanic plumbing also left a mineral legacy. Hot, mineralised waters circulating through the young piles deposited gold and silver in quartz veins and altered the surrounding rock, creating the epithermal ore bodies of the Hauraki Goldfield that nineteenth century miners followed, and modern exploration of the same belts continues beneath the forest. Traces of that deep heat still reach the surface: at Hot Water Beach, on the central east coast between Whitianga and Tairua, hot springs still break through the shoreline sand at low tide, and warm springs also rise near Te Aroha at the southern foot of the peninsula.

Things to See

Whitianga and Mercury Bay: Mercury Bay is a broad, V-shaped bight on the peninsula’s east coast whose mouth is about ten kilometres wide, and Whitianga, the bay’s main town, lies at its southern end behind the five kilometre sweep of Buffalo Beach, the town centre sitting where the beach meets the harbour. With about 6,000 permanent residents at the 2023 census, Whitianga is the second largest town on the peninsula, but it is above all a holiday town: the sheltered bay is a renowned yachting and game fishing ground, the local club mounted New Zealand’s first America’s Cup challenge in 1987, and the town fills in summer. A passenger ferry crosses the harbour mouth to Ferry Landing in a few minutes, saving a long drive around the inlet; near the landing stands the stone wharf of 1838, the oldest surviving wharf in the country, and beyond it lie the sandy coves and headlands of the bay’s southern shore, among them Cooks Beach, Flaxmill Bay and Wharekaho, and the Te Whanganui-a-Hei (Cathedral Cove) marine reserve, whose great rock archway draws boat trips and walks from Hahei.

Whangamatā: on the south-eastern coast, about 30 kilometres north of Waihi, Whangamatā is the peninsula’s archetypal surf town. Its two long ocean beaches, set between a boating harbour and a tidal estuary, are counted among the safest surfing and swimming beaches of the North Island’s east coast, and in summer the town of about 4,300 people swells towards 25,000 at New Year. Offshore views are framed by little wooded islands: Whenuakura, known locally as Donut Island, hides a collapsed blowhole that encloses a tiny inner beach, while Hauturu, or Clark Island, can be reached on foot at low tide. The name Whangamatā means “bay of the hard stone”, a reference to the obsidian that washes up on the shore.

The eastern coastline: between the surf beaches the east coast runs in a chain of green headlands and turquoise bays that the loop road crosses by low saddles and long views. Sheltered coves of clear water open between the points, offshore the island groups punctuate the horizon, the Mercury Islands about ten kilometres off Mercury Bay, the Aldermen Islands and Slipper Island further south, and the roads end at lookouts above layered hills that fall away to the sea. The clear coastal waters are popular with divers, kayakers and sailors, and little ferry and charter boats serve the quieter bays.

Rocky shores, wetlands and birdlife: the headlands between the beaches end in rock stacks and boulder-strewn points where gulls and small black-capped terns rest, and low rocky islets offshore carry the same flocks. Behind the coast, farmed valleys hold small lagoons and rush-fringed wetlands where herons, stilts and other wading birds feed, and sheep graze the pasture headlands above the bays. At the peninsula’s foot the mudflats of the Firth of Thames form a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar convention, one of New Zealand’s great roosting and feeding grounds for migratory shorebirds.

Forested inlets and baches: many of the quietest corners of the coast are reached by narrow roads or only by water, where steep bush-clad hillsides drop to emerald inlets with tiny beaches of pale sand and a single boat shed, a small jetty or a moored boat marks a summer bach. This scatter of holiday cottages and sheds, painted in the bright colours of the New Zealand coast, is part of the Coromandel’s character, and the boat sheds and jetties of the sheltered harbours still serve the fishing boats of the district. Inland, tracks climb from the coast into the bush of the Coromandel Forest Park, where the Kauaeranga Valley below the ranges offers swimming holes and forest walks.

References

1. Monin, Paul (2001). This Is My Place: Hauraki Contested, 1769-1875. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.
2. King, Michael and Morrison, Robin (1993). The Coromandel. Auckland: Tandem Press.
3. Adams, Christopher J., Graham, Ian J., Seward, Diane and Skinner, David N. B. (1994). Geochronological and geochemical evolution of late Cenozoic volcanism in the Coromandel Peninsula, New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics 37 (3): 359-379. doi.org/10.1080/00288306.1994.9514626
4. Story: Hauraki-Coromandel region. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. teara.govt.nz/en/hauraki-coromandel-region
5. Story: Gold and gold mining, page 5: Coromandel Peninsula. Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. teara.govt.nz/en/gold-and-gold-mining/page-5
6. Coromandel places to visit. Department of Conservation. www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/coromandel/
7. Coromandel Peninsula. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Peninsula
8. Coromandel Volcanic Zone. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Volcanic_Zone
9. Thames, New Zealand. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames,_New_Zealand
10. Whitianga. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitianga
11. Mercury Bay. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_Bay
12. Whangamatā. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whangamatā
13. Coromandel Forest Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Forest_Park
14. Marutūāhu. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marutūāhu
15. Ngāti Hei. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngāti_Hei
16. Firth of Thames. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firth_of_Thames