Rex Bunn

2025 sees the culmination of my decade of research in the Rotomahana Basin, home of the Pink, Black and White Terraces, the lost Eighth Wonder of the World in New Zealand. The twentieth and final paper 'Surviving the Tarawera eruption: the experience of Māori settlements in the Red Zone' is on SSRN. Here is a list of later papers charting the development of the Hochstetter Paradigm:

1) Resolving the 1886 White Terraces Riddle in the Taupō Volcanic Zone

2) Identifying and Dating the White Terraces: New Zealand’s Eighth Wonder of the World and the 1886 Rotomahana Basin Hydrology.

3) Coanda and Venturi Effects at the Eighth Wonder of the World the White Terrace Resolving the East Wind eruptions at the White Terraces

4) Flames at the Pink and White Terraces: The Cold Case of Edwin Bainbridge

5)The Eighth Wonder of the World in New Zealand─ the Black Terrace Discovery

6) Ferdinand von Hochstetter’s November 1860 Folio of New Zealand survey data and the location of the Pink and White Terraces.

7) The Eighth Wonder of the World in New Zealand: Seismic studies confirm the new Hochstetter paradigm.

8) One Plate to Find Them.

To this must be added:

9)The first evidence-based altimetry for locating the lost Eighth Wonder of the World: the Pink, Black and White Terraces

Also this year I completed my trilogy on the 'Quest for the Pink and White Terraces'.

Only the Great Pyramid of Giza survives among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Yet there is another, older than the seven, that was found and then lost again in the 19th century and is once more located by the research herein: the White Terraces of New Zealand.

After a decade of research, Australian-based researcher Rex Bunn this week published the White Terraces location in the leading international journal Frontiers in Earth Science. Bunn triangulates the location with a combination of topography, indigenous knowledge and a recovered 19th-century survey diary.

Using topographic navigation with Māori navigation knowledge, the site of the White Terraces has been triangulated and lies buried under ash.

This resolves the controversy since 1886 when the fabled Pink and White Terraces, the greatest geoscience and tourist attractions in the southern hemisphere were lost in the 1886 Mt Tarawera eruption. Surprisingly, Bunn’s new evidence demonstrates that the White Terraces should have been located after the 1886 eruption with mapping available since 1864. Exploration and excavation of the Terraces are now possible. Even if degraded by the 1886 eruption, the White Terraces may earn a World Heritage listing and a second life in global tourism.

The evidence in this paper has been available for 137 years. This examination integrates the historical record, cartography, photography, topography, altimetry, and Mātauranga Māori records. This canon forms a new paradigm for the lost Wonder of the Rotomahana Basin, outside Rotorua, the tourist capital of New Zealand. The research traces the chain of navigation waypoints leading to the White Terraces’ location and triangulates this with terrestrial survey and Mātauranga Māori mental mapping to validate the findings. The research hypothesis is accepted, i.e., that the surveyed White Terraces location is buried under ejecta from the 1886 eruption and is verified by triangulation.

Rex Bunn is a polymath who graduated from the University of NSW and Macquarie University and spent many years in field research in New Zealand. He is the most published researcher working in this field and this new paper is his fifteenth published on this lost Wonder of the World.

Before 2014, I was engaged in writing motorcycle engineering treatises, a biography and a military aviation unit history.

The 2015 work 'Sons of Asclepius', is the biography of an Australian intellectual and surgeon Dr Anthony (Tony) Parker [1920-1973]. After a stellar beginning, life in his middle years was neither as he wished it, nor expected. He was unfairly dismissed from his hospital post of sixteen years and never told the grounds. He died aged fifty-two, after the dismissal from a heart attack. In my view, his death was precipitated by the cruel nature and distress of the dismissal. His final epistle to his protege reveals a man suffering unbearable distress with grace, and issuing wise, Socratic counsel in the last weeks of his life.

The 2014 work 'The King's Crew' is the 460-page illustrated Unit History of No. 14 Squadron (City of Gisborne) Air Training Corps (ATC), with 351 charts, tables and illustrations. This is one of the few ATC unit histories written since the ATC was founded in WWII and the most comprehensive. The ebook has a companion multimedia film "King's Crew".

'Motorcycle Blow-by: A Shower of Sparks' is the abridged edition of the 2013 magnum opus 'Motorcycle Crankcase Ventilation'. The abridged edition meets rider needs for a simpler guide to oil leaks and signs of poor crankcase ventilation, and to fitting crankcase breathers.

My longer works include:-

* Quest for the Pink and White Terraces (2016) and (2020).

* Sons of Asclepius (2015)

* The King's Crew (2014)

* Motorcycle Blow-By: A Shower of Sparks (2013)

* Classic Motorcycling (2013)

* Motorcycle Crankcase Ventilation (2013)

* Kings Crew, film (2012)

* Classic Motorcycling- A Guide for the 21st Century (2007)

* Economic Change and the Health of the Community (1978)

For ten years, I researched the mysteries of motorcycle crankcase ventilation and developed breather solutions. Rex's patented 'Bunn Breather Kits' were widely used around the world on classic, vintage and modern motorcycles. He is a statistician with a special interest in time series analysis: useful when studying reciprocating engines. He served as a director in engineering-driven companies and worked in healthcare internationally. He is also a diagnostic radiographer with degrees in commerce and econometrics.

Rex's 2013 magnum opus 'Motorcycle Crankcase Ventilation' is the first book to map this part of motorcycle engineering, one which troubles riders of classic, vintage and modern bikes. This book shows how to improve crankcase breathing, reduce power losses and cut oil leaks.

To view a video of the pulse flow bench developed to test 'Bunn Breather Kit' valves, see the Video section at Author Central on this page.