Image Description from historic lecture booklet: "The Wairua Falls, " the Niagara of New Zealand", is fifty feet high and about two hundred feet wide. The rocky gorge below the falls is verdurous [SIC] on either side with native vegetation, and the river bed is piled high with masses of great Kauri logs. floated down from the upriver forest, on their way to the Wairoa mills. The logs lie here jammed in wild confusion, until swept down by floods; on the very verge of the falls are perched--in the summer time--more logs. stranded until the winter floods send them hurling over the precipice into the whirlpool below. During a flood the falls present a magnificent spectacle. "