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
