The History of the Tusk

Before Aotearoa

Long before Aotearoa had a name, before humans crossed the Pacific, the ancestors of New Zealand kauri were already growing upon the ancient southern continents.

Agathis australis belongs to an ancient lineage of conifers whose history reaches deep into Gondwana. As Zealandia separated from the supercontinent and drifted into the southwest Pacific, its forests were carried with it, isolated for tens of millions of years and subjected to an evolutionary history unlike that of their relatives elsewhere.

The result was Agathis australis: the kauri of Aotearoa.

Kauri became more than a tree within its forest. It became one of the forces that shaped the forest around it. Its immense size, longevity, fallen timber, leaf litter and influence upon the soil create conditions that affect the plants and organisms living beneath its canopy. Scientists describe kauri as a foundation species—a species whose presence fundamentally shapes the ecosystem of which it is a part.

Kauri can live for more than two thousand years and grow beyond fifty metres in height, with trunks of extraordinary girth.

It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate material from which to make a relic.

Aotearoa

Around the thirteenth century, Polynesian voyagers reached Aotearoa, making it one of the last major landmasses on Earth to be settled by humans.

They encountered a world unlike any other.

For millions of years, New Zealand had evolved in extraordinary isolation. In the absence of terrestrial mammals, birds occupied ecological roles that mammals fill elsewhere. Giant flightless moa moved through the forests. Above them hunted Haast's eagle, an enormous raptor that had evolved to prey upon them.

It was, in many respects, a world unlike anything humans had encountered before—a living landscape that seemed almost primordial.

The people who settled there became Māori.

Kauri occupied an important place within the spiritual and material world of Māori, including its association with Tāne, atua of the forest. Kauri timber was used for waka, carving and construction, while the trees themselves became deeply embedded within the cultural landscape of Aotearoa.

The greatest surviving kauri is known as Tāne Mahuta.

The name is fitting.

It is a reminder that the great trees were never merely timber.

Within only a few centuries of human settlement, the great moa disappeared. Their extinction was followed by that of Haast's eagle. An ecosystem that had developed over millions of years without humans had begun to change almost immediately after their arrival.

The Forest Becomes a Resource

In 1769, James Cook reached Aotearoa and began charting its coastline for Europe.

What followed was a transformation of extraordinary scale.

Kauri forests once covered an estimated 1–1.5 million hectares of northern New Zealand. Today, only a tiny fraction of the original forest remains.

The forests were not destroyed simply because they were valuable.

They were destroyed because their value was enormous.

Kauri possessed qualities that made it exceptionally desirable for shipbuilding. Its immense, straight trunks provided extraordinary quantities of timber, while younger trees supplied masts and spars. European settlers rapidly recognized its maritime value.

The forest was converted into ships.

And the ships carried the forest farther across the world.

Kauri became part of the machinery of an expanding colonial civilization—its forests transformed into houses, ships, masts, infrastructure and commerce.

A tree that had stood for centuries could become part of a vessel that crossed an ocean in a matter of weeks.

The Last Forests

Protection eventually came, but slowly.

In 1952, the Waipoua Forest was placed under protection, preserving one of the great surviving stands of kauri and the immense trees that remained within it.

By then, most of the ancient forests were already gone.

The destruction had reduced one of the great forests of Aotearoa to a remnant of its former range.

And yet the story of kauri was not finished.

Some of it had already left the forest.

Some of it was at sea.

Walrus

In the years following the Second World War, a New Zealand boatbuilder named T.C. "Ces" Watson began producing the vessels for which he would eventually become known.

Among them was a vessel that would later become Walrus.

Built in New Zealand in approximately 1946–47, the vessel was a heavily constructed bluewater sailing yacht, built in the old tradition rather than as a lightweight modern cruiser. Its hull was constructed from multiple layers of New Zealand kauri and designed for the severe conditions of the South Pacific.

The vessel was not built merely to look beautiful in a harbor.

It was built to survive the ocean.

Walrus crossed the Pacific repeatedly, traveling between New Zealand and California before eventually finding its way into the strange maritime world of Sausalito's Richardson Bay.

For decades, the identity of Walrus's builder remained uncertain.

The vessel was known to have come from New Zealand in the years immediately following the war.

But the builder was unknown.

Then, during the destruction of the vessel, a small piece of evidence surfaced:

a hand-peened bronze plate bearing the Watson Boatbuilders name and Tutukaka association.

That plate provided a physical link between the surviving vessel and T.C. "Ces" Watson's boatbuilding operation.

For Busted Tusk, this distinction matters.

The history of the material is not being reconstructed from a romantic story alone.

The material itself carried evidence of where it came from.

Richardson Bay

Walrus eventually entered the waters of Richardson Bay, beneath the hills of Sausalito.

It was an appropriate place for the old vessel to end up.

During the Second World War, Sausalito's Marinship became one of America's great wartime shipyards. Roughly 20,000 people worked there at its peak, producing vessels for the war effort. When the war ended, the shipyard and its enormous stock of maritime infrastructure entered a new life.

Surplus boats, barges, lifeboats and other maritime materials became the raw material for something the shipyard had never intended to create.

A community.

Artists, veterans, boatbuilders, beatniks and people simply unwilling or unable to live according to conventional rules began constructing homes and studios along the waterfront.

The resulting community became one of the defining pieces of Sausalito's identity.

It was creative.

It was improvised.

It was anarchic.

And it existed largely outside the expectations of respectable society.

Richardson Bay became a place where discarded maritime objects could become homes, studios and works of art.

Walrus entered that world.

The Houseboat Wars

The waterfront community eventually collided with the authorities and developers who wanted the waterfront to become something else.

Beginning as early as the 1950s, officials attempted to regulate and remove the unconventional vessels occupying the waterfront. What followed became known as the Houseboat Wars—years of legal battles, political fights and physical confrontations between authorities and residents.

The conflict was not simply about boats.

It was about who had the right to occupy the waterfront.

Who had the right to live differently.

And whether a community could exist without conforming to the economic and social structures surrounding it.

By the late 1970s, some residents moved into permanent marinas and cooperatives, while others remained on the open water.

The Gates Cooperative emerged from this history. After a winter storm, several anchor-outs moved into a cove abandoned by a dredging operation, eventually forming the community that became the Gates Co-Op.

The anchor-outs themselves continued on.

For decades, people lived aboard vessels anchored in Richardson Bay, maintaining a peculiar maritime culture that had survived repeated attempts to regulate, relocate or eliminate it.

And eventually—

I became one of them.