About Parry Kauri Park

The Warkworth Museum is located within the grounds of the beautiful Parry Kauri Park.

The Kauri Park and the grounds surrounding the Museum contain some of the larger items of the Museum’s collection as well as some placed there by the local Kauri Bushmen’s branch.

To the right of the car park is a bushman’s hut with a shingle roof. Alongside it is an open shed containing a large Kauri log on a bullock cart.  There is a whim that the bushmen used to haul the logs out, and other items connected with kauri logging.

Recently reconstructed is a foot powered grind stone.  Only a few farms or Bushmen’s camps would not have one of these for sharpening the many axes and other tools required in those days.

Inside the Museum you will find displays of kauri digging implements, photographs of gum-digging, giant pieces of kauri gum, saws, native timber, a bushman’s hut and other items connected with the gum digging days.

Accessing The Park

Entrance to the Parry Kauri Park itself is from the car park located next to the Warkworth Museum. There is no fee to enter the walk.

You can take an easy stroll along one of the well-made boardwalks, through native bush, to the lookout and kauri tree grove.  Free brochures are available from the Museum shop which describe and identify native trees and shrubs that can be found along the path. The Mid-North Branch of the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society provided the signage along the boardwalk that winds through the park.

In the early years of European settlement, Parry Kauri Park was part of the property owned by Rev McKinney, the first minister of the Presbyterian Church in Warkworth and Mahurangi. The land was later purchased by the Simpson family who requested that on the sale of their land, the trees and bush be offered for purchase as a public amenity.

The two large kauri trees are named McKinney and Simpson in honour of these former landowners. The park and the driveway into it bear the names of Harry Parry and Tudor Collins, local identities who were largely responsible, along with the Kauri Bushmen’s Association, for raising the money to purchase the land.