In color kauri gum varies from pale yellow to reddish-brown and black. When first taken from the earth its color is obscured by soil, which has to be scraped off before the gum is marketable.
After the industry was fairly started gum digging proved so profitable that it attracted thousands of men. To-day there are five thousand permanent and three thousand casual gum-diggers. The greatest aggregation of diggers are Austrians, who were attracted to New Zealand many years ago by the inspiriting accounts of two sailors and, later, by the success of two Austrian gum-diggers who returned home with $45,000 won by them in a Tattersall's sweep. Usually they work together in gangs of from twenty to thirty, spending the summer in the swamps and the winter on the hills. They work long hours on the fields and spend parts of the mornings and evenings scraping gum in their dilapidated-looking camps.
In his quest for gum the digger works with spear and spade. The spear is a pointed rod from eight to twelve feet long which is thrust into the soil to locate the gum. When a deposit is discovered the spade is used to uncover it. In some places the gum lies so deep that extensive excavations are required, and in very wet swamps hand pumps are employed to draw off the water. In such places digging is very disagreeable.
In good deposits diggers earn from fifteen to twenty-five dollars per week, and for a while sometimes double these sums. At Ahipara a gum-buyer told me that one
