A bit more history ...

 Waiuku came into existence as a port in about 1843, on the then important trade route between Auckland and the agricultural area of the Waikato.

It was also the terminal of an ancient Maori portage between the Waikato River and the Manukau Harbour.

Waiuku was marked out by the Government as a town in 1851. During the Waikato War (1863–64), Waiuku became a frontier stockade guarded by a blockhouse. When the Waikato War ended, the traffic responsible for the early development of the town as a trading post dried up.

Waiuku later grew as a farming centre under road board administration, and in 1914 became a town district. It was constituted a borough in 1955, and subsequently amalgamated into the Franklin District Council [in 1988].

A major development for the town was the Government sponsored establishment, from the mid 1960s, of New Zealand's first steel plant at Glenbrook to convert ironsand brought from the black sand deposits at Waikato Heads into steel.

For statistics on Waiuku go towww.stats.govt.nz

For more tid bits ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiuku