The Waitakaruru Arboretum and Sculpture Park is located on the Waikato-side of a border that separates the Waikato and Matamata-Piako district council areas.  The arboretum can be found at the southern end of the Waikato/Matamata-Piako border.  Māori first settled in the area in the early 1300’s, although little is known today of the area’s pre-colonial history.  European missionaries arrived in the 1830’s to establish the first missions.  Traders then arrived in growing numbers during the 1850’s, and the first permanent Pākehā settlements were established from 1865 following the Māori land wars and subsequent land confiscations, which resulted in large tracts of swamp being cleared by Pākehā for agricultural farming.

The original boundary line that separates the Waikato and Matamata/Piako Districts was first drawn in 1864 following the land wars, and was later used to determine the then new council boundaries in 1876 when the District Councils were first established.  The boundary includes one particularly long perfectly straight line at about 10 degrees counter-clockwise from true north on the compass.  This boundary line stretches for over 43kms from the Orakei Stream in the north to

Pukemoremore Hill just south of the Waitakaruru Arboretum.  The boundary line encompasses mainly farmland plus 3 roads along its path: Manuel Road, Valentine Road and Pukemoremore Road.  Although not easily visible from the ground, the scale of this 43km long perfectly straight divide can be clearly seen from the air.

absolute divide reflects the artificial border or aukati that separates the Waikato and Matamata-Piako districts.  Using locally produced timber for fencing, plus sheets of marine plywood for the image substrate, a series of 180 vertical aerial photographs have been digitally stitched together to make one long single image that has been printed directly onto plywood using the latest eco-printing technology.  Governments and the military use vertical aerial photography for land surveying and human surveillance purposes.  The entire structure comprises two 26-meter long perfectly straight parallel wooden split-rail farm fences located 600mm apart.  The two post and rail fences support eleven 2,400mm plywood panels that, when aligned in a long row horizontally, present one long single photographic vertical aerial strip or line.