‘The carvings wanted to speak’

Anew book tells the extraordinary story behind the return of this country’s most valuable artwork.

- RACHEL BUCHANAN

Created, buried, unearthed, sold, smuggled, then sold again, the five carved pātaka panels now known as the Motunui Epa have rewritten the rule book on art, law and even Treaty settlements.

These carvings, made in the late 1700s by tohunga whakairo in Taranaki, left New Zealand in secret in 1973 and returned in 2014 in a blaze of publicity as this country’s most valuable and influential artworks.

From 1978, successive governments – both National and Labour – worked extremely hard to retrieve these taonga from Swiss-based collector George Ortiz. In 2014, after secret face-to-face negotiations in Geneva, Ortiz’s widow and children accepted an offer of $4.6 million for the carvings. If you add to this sum the $300,000 or more the government spent on landmark international litigation between 1978 and 1983, these carvings are worth more than any work by Colin McCahon, Charles Goldie or Bill Hammond – the Pākehā greats that are still too often the measure of excellence in art that is produced here.

As an uri of Taranaki, I feel a huge sense of pride and awe when I think about these carvings and the artists – and culture – that created them. They were carved in the old world, pre-colonisation, slept in a swamp through all the terrible wars of the 19th century in Taranaki, then woke up in the early 1970s and went on an international rampage that has transformed New Zealand law on the protection of cultural property and strengthened international protections.

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