Te Motunui Epa: The complicated history of taonga smuggled, sold and finally returned home

Taranaki historian, Dr Rachel Buchanan, with Te Hononga at Te Wharewaka o Pōneke. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Airana Ngarewa talks to historian Rachel Buchanan about her fascination with five carved totara panels that led her to write her new book, Te Motunui Epa

Taranaki history is carved in wood and stone and – uniquely in this part of the world – into the side of cliffs. Better than any person or book, these figures and markings remember a time before this one, the journey of the three waka of this rohe across an ocean, the many kahui people who cared for this land long before those waka landed on these shores and the atua and the maunga who were chiefs even before then.

This rohe was once a living library, every hāpu charged with protecting the stories of their tūpuna, passing them down from old to young, carving them so deep into the fruits of te taiao that even when the tohunga themselves moved on from this world, their histories would live on. So precious were these taonga that when the British arrived and armed the enemies of Taranaki, the mana whenua here buried them in swamps and caves to protect them. It is here where the story of the epa begins, in a swamp at Waipapa just north of Waitara, in the takiwā of Ngāti Rāhiri of Te Ātiawa no runga i te rangi – Te Ātiawa from the heavens.

The epa themselves are five carved totara panels and were once the complete wall of a pātaka – a kind of storehouse in the days of yore typically elevated above the ground. Pātaka would hold kai, seeds and taonga. The oldest of the panels are thought to have been carved in the late 1700s. In the time since, the stories of the many figures who decorate the epa and the stories of those who carved them have been submerged. And yet this does not make them any less impressive to look upon. Such was their power in their day, undoubtedly a symbol of great mana to their tohunga whakairo and kaitiaki, and such also was their appeal to those who would later take them to New York, Geneva, London and the Royal Courts of Justice.

When I spoke with Rachel Buchanan, a descendent of Te Ātiawa and Taranaki iwi, at Puke Ariki, a museum in Ngāmotu where the epa now live, she told me how her new book about the panels, Te Motunui Epa, began in 2019 when she was visiting Aotearoa to give a Monica Brewster lecture. “I had an instinct,” she said. “I wanted to have a look at the taonga here. I had a look and I had a kick-in-the-guts type feeling, which isn’t normal for me. I was fixed to the ground. After that, I went and spoke to a few different people like [politician] Mahara Okeroa and [Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision CEO] Honiana Love and then I made an OIA [Official Information Act] request.”

Over the course of our kōrero, I was struck by Buchanan’s intimate connection with the epa. She spoke humbly not only about her journey to write her book but how hers was only one of many stories about the epa.

“I’ve told a story,” she said, “and that story was made possible by my life experience and who I am, having worked as a journalist and my work with archives, being trained as a historian in the Western world, and my 20 years of work with Taranaki histories. But I did not grow up in Waitara and I was not brought up in a whānau where there would have been stories about these carvings … So, yes, this is a story and there will be others whose connection to these carvings is different than my own.”

She went on to say how she hoped her book would be a catalyst for the whakaohooho [inspiration] of the many other stories about these taonga.

Her book begins with the epa being hidden during the northern invasion of the 1820s and 30s in Taranaki, then goes on to tell how the first piece of the epa was rediscovered in 1971 after being scraped by a digger. The operator was contracted by Cecil Smart, a tenant of Māori-owned land, to dig a ditch through a swamp a little outside Waitara. When the ditch itself was finished, Smart did not contact the owners of this land but an acquaintance of his, Melville Manukonga, who completed a careful search of the area and unearthed all five pieces of the epa. Manukonga later compared this mahi to a “gold prospector finding gold”. Still, neither the Skipper whānau who owned this land nor the hāpu nor even the iwi were made aware of these taonga. Instead, Smart and Manukonga washed the epa, covered them in wet sacks and stored them in Manukonga’s shed in Ngāmotu.

In 1973, after entertaining only a few visitors, Manukonga sold the epa for $6000, more than the average annual wage of that time. “It was challenging to come to terms with the fact it was a Māori who sold the carvings originally,” Buchanan said. “But those are the facts of the situation.”

The buyer was Lance Entwhistle, a British art dealer, who is said to have told Manukonga that the epa would stay in the country. They did not. Several weeks later, they were smuggled out of Aotearoa, eventually finding themselves in an apartment on the upper west side of Manhattan, New York where they were sold again to Swiss-based collector, George Ortiz, for US$65,000. And so this new chapter for the epa began, the taonga being swept away from their kāinga and being thrust into an adventure that included countless legal battles, parliamentary reform, a botched auction, a kidnapping, a death, and a multimillion-dollar deal.

Throughout the book, Buchanan embodies the epa, writing about them as if they are living and breathing, looking back at those who look upon them, blinking, feeling every touch of every admirer’s skin against their own. The epa express their own mind and will. The taonga crave, in many places through the book, to return home and in other places, when the taonga are locked away, they crave simply to be held.

As I walked through Puke Ariki with her, it was perhaps this aspect of her writing that most resonated with me. It inspired in me an appreciation for taonga unlike I had ever experienced prior. This was amplified even further by the incredible lengths Buchanan went to in order to track the movement of the epa from the moment it was unearthed again to the moment it was returned to the uri of its kaihanga and erected in Puke Ariki.

“I really came to believe that art is inherently so valuable,” Buchanan said. “You know, I saw my three teenage daughters locked up for two years during Covid and they were screen printing in the garage, drawing in the bedroom, folding paper cranes, knitting and teaching themselves guitar. I was out the back, writing. So when, in the book, I say this is a story about art to help us find a way through the darkness, well, that was a personal statement.”

Te Motunui Epa will be launched on November 21 at Puke Ariki at 6pm. The launch is supported by Ngāti Rāhiri, the original kaitiaki of the epa, and will include Rachel Buchanan herself, Peter Priest, Mahara Okeroa, Arapata Hakiwai, and Colleen Mullin.