The striking story of how carved panels from Taranaki – known as the Motunui epa – disappeared from the region in the early ‘70s and later reappeared in Geneva is being told in ABC's podcast Stuff the British Stole.
Rachel Buchanan, whose whakapapa includes Taranaki and Te Ātiawa, features on the podcast and is writing a book on the story due for publication next year.
The Motunui epa. Photo: Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
She tells Colin Peacock the Motunui epa were made more than 250 years ago.
"They were probably made for two or three different pataka or food stores and then probably mounted, it's believed, around 1820."
At the time, the Musket Wars began in Aotearoa and Taranaki was invaded by people from Tainui and elsewhere in the Far North and the panels were dismantled, Buchanan says.
"They were placed carefully in a swamp, swamps were known as amazing places to preserve cultural treasures and so they were placed there and they had a good long moe (sleep) for 150-plus years.
"In 1971, they decided it was time to wake up and have a bit of a look around. That was on a farm on Motunui ... on land being leased by Pākehā farmers but it was on Māori land."
They were found by a man of Taranaki whakapapa, who was invited to the land by the farmers to inspect the site for any artefacts while ditches were being dug.
"It was one of those freaky things where a whole series of events happened like the finder of the panels apparently wanted to gift them to the Taranaki museum, the director of the museum didn't come to his house to look at them."
Other people and experts began to view the panels, including a dealer from the UK called Lance Entwistle, Buchanan says.
"Back then in the '70s, it was still seen as all right to kind of travel about the world and find what you could from other people's cultures and make money from it.
"So Lance Entwistle bought them from the finder and then smuggled them out of New Zealand in a crate, he told me, labelled furniture. There's all different stories about exactly the mechanisms but certainly no export permit was applied for, and that was required by New Zealand legislation at the time."
The Motunui epa ended up in New York, where collector George Ortiz - a descendant of one of the wealthiest families in the world in the 19th century - bought the epa and took them to Geneva.
The carvings are all the more important because art making and carving stopped in Taranaki during about 25 years of warfare in the 1800s, Buchanan says.
"While other iwi around New Zealand were making beautiful carved meeting houses, in Taranaki it was complete survival mode."
George Ortiz had to sell some of his collection to repay a debt he incurred when paying a ransom when his daughter was kidnapped. Photo: Actualites Suisses Lausanne/Central Press/Getty Images
In 1977, Ortiz decided to sell off some of his art - including the epa - to pay back a debt incurred in paying a $US2 million ransom for his kidnapped daughter.
The auction made the news and New Zealand realised a taonga was in the wrong hands, and a legal battle ensued.
Ortiz's son Nicholas also features in the podcast.
Buchanan says while it's clear to see that Nicholas helps correct the wrongs of his father, by agreeing to sell it back to New Zealand, there was a $4.5 million price tag attached.
"So it's not what I would see as an unparalleled act of generosity. While I acknowledge that Nicholas is clearly a person of mana, and [Dr Arapata Hakiwai of Te Papa] talking about going to see our ancestors inside the Freeport and Nicholas greeting the carvings in Māori, that's very moving, I acknowledge that."
But she hopes through her book she can provide a different insight than the podcast, shifting away from a focus on a multi billionaire collector to the work of Taranaki artists.
"I do think it's amazing that we're having this conversation now about art made so long ago by a culture that was really effectively, well the British and then the New Zealand government tried to destroy Taranaki, but were not destroyed and we're still here.
"I guess I want to ... say look let's think about the Māori people who made those carvings and ... let's just think about all the other people involved in the efforts to get them back, and that's like literally hundreds of public servants in New Zealand, mainly Pākehā people who just busted a gut."
