Book review: Te Motunui Epa

Paul Radich KC*

Te Motunui Epa, Rachel Buchanan Bridget Williams Books, 2022

RRP $49.99

The decades from 1820 to 1880 brought devastation to Taranaki Māori. They were gutted by invaders from the north and then, in March 1860 at Te Kōhia Pa, the first shots were fired in the war between Taranaki and Britain. The military and legal plunder that ensued cast the world of the Taranaki people and their taonga into darkness.

Te Motunui Epa, Rachel Buchanan Bridget Williams Books, 2022

But Rachel Buchanan’s outstanding book, Te Motunui Epa, is not about those dark days or their intergenerational consequences. (For an arresting set of accounts of those times, Vincent O’Malley’s new book Voices from the New Zealand Wars is a recommended read.) Rather, it is the gripping story of five wooden panels carved in the late 1700s by ancestors in Taranaki. The carvings, now called the Motunui Epa, were hidden in a swamp in 1820 to protect them from the northern invaders. In 1971, the carvings emerged from their hiding place when a ditch was being dug. The finder sold them, illegally, to a dealer from England. The dealer exported them, illegally, to New York. There they were purchased and taken to Geneva by the head of a wealthy Bolivian tin mining dynasty; a collector of antiquities at a time when it was a practice for people from Europe to go abroad and return with antique objects.

In 1977, the daughter of the new possessor of the epa (for surely he could not own them) was kidnapped in Switzerland by Italian criminals. To repay a ransom loan, the epa were to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London with a fictional provenance.

This is the absorbing tale of a 40-year endeavour to get them back; a tale of intrigue and deceit, of international law and litigation, of diplomatic relations, of politics and of hard-nosed commercial negotiation.

The epa are striking. Made from totara and carved with stone tools, they come from two or three different pātaka, or food stores, in the Waitara area. They are the embodiment of ancestors with hands, tongues and bodies that are intertwined, without clear beginnings or ends. They depict a deep interconnectedness, a template for the story of an international journey full of twists and turns.

The Sotheby’s catalogue for the 1978 auction sparked the immediate attention of the New Zealand Government. Rachel Buchanan tells, with great skill, the story that then unfolded; a story of the endeavours of successive governments to bring them home to Te Ātiawa. She does so through the lenses of the people of Waitara, the finders of the epa, the possessors, the Ministers and officials, and of the epa themselves.

In 1979, a brave decision of the High Court of Justice in London favoured the New Zealand Government and halted their sale. The Court of Appeal allowed the appeal. While the outcome was deeply disappointing for New Zealand, a snippet from the beautifully written (as you might imagine) judgment of Lord Denning is worth recounting:

“Years ago in New Zealand, a great Chief of Māori had a treasure house. In it were stored such things as dried fish, special foods and valuable objects. At the entrance there was a great door. It was made of totaro [sic] wood. This great door was four feet high and nearly five feet wide. It had five panels carved with exquisite skill. These depicted human figures and serpentine bodies and wide pointed heads.”

The Court of Appeal and the House of Lords grappled with issues such as whether the Queen owned the epa through automatic forfeiture and whether New Zealand’s laws were unenforceable as foreign penal laws.

But who really owned the epa? Multiple statutes since the 1870s had confiscated, alienated or partitioned the land under which they had been hidden. Did old ‘finders keepers’ authorities apply? Did Te Ātiawa remain the true owners of the land and of the epa? What of the limitation issues?

The story of the epa became widely known. In practical terms, the publicity had the effect of placing a rāhui over them, warding off potential purchasers.

Rachel Buchanan gives us copies of documents from a fascinating historical record, comprising both government and personal papers. It is a record that unwinds, at the hands of a skilled storyteller, to show the ways in which, through ongoing litigation, legislation, treaties, diplomacy and negotiation – and ultimately through the perseverance of officials led by the then Minister and Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson – the epa came home. Readers will leave this work with a sense of enrichment.

* This article was written by Paul Radich KC who has since been appointed to the bench of the High Court | te Kōti Matua and is now the Hon. Justice Radich.