.
Exactly when Tāwhaki disappeared, and where he went, largely remains a mystery. Tāwhaki is one of thousands of taonga that have gone missing from iwi, hapū and marae across New Zealand, now scattered around the world in museums, universities, and private collections.
What is known is that he – somehow – found his way to Germany, where he has spent the past 50 years in the southern city of Munich. But Rongowhakaata had no idea he was there until just a few months ago, when a chance discovery and a series of fortunate coincidences led them to the Bavarian capital.
“Our tīpuna have a funny way of making us remember or reminding us,” says David Jones, a Rongowhakaata descendant who works with the marae , and is now trying to piece together the mystery of Tāwhaki’ s journey. “He made himself known.”
“We hardly knew anything about him,” says Dr Hilke Thode-Arora, a curator at Munich’s Museum Fünf Kontinente, or Five Continents Museum. “He was always a big puzzle to us.”
The Hocken connection
Born in the midlands of England, Thomas Hocken trained as a doctor before deciding the UK was too cold. So he moved to Dunedin. He arrived in 1862 and promptly established a GP clinic in the centre of the gold-rush gilded city. Before long, he’d made a name for himself as one of the city’s most prominent – and wealthy – surgeons, expanding his résumé to become the town coroner and a lecturer.
Dr Thomas Hocken, pictured in his home library in 1893.
Elizabeth Mary Hocken / Hocken Collection
Hocken was also an obsessive hoarder. He travelled extensively on expeditions around New Zealand and the Pacific, accumulating anything he could find and hauling it back to his home on Moray Place which, by the 1870s, was filled with bones, hei tiki, kākahu, carvings, transcripts, journals, paintings, maps, books and anything else he could get his hands on. Before long, he was transporting entire panels from marae , his collection overflowing into what became the Hocken collection at Otago University (today one of Aotearoa’s premier archives).
He met another Englishman, Augustus Hamilton, a recent arrival from Hawke’s Bay who harboured a similar obsession. Hamilton was a scientist who had spent a great deal of time counting birds and fish, or studying fossils, while acquiring his own collection of Māori taonga . In Dunedin, he published prolifically, becoming best known for his book, The art and workmanship of the Maori race in New Zealand .
Hocken and Hamilton struck up a friendship. In 1895 they travelled to Tūranga , where they visited Manutūkē and were welcomed on to Whakatō marae. In Hamilton’s collection, there is a photograph of two poutokomanawa sitting on the mahau , the faint image accompanied by the caption: “Hamilton photoed the carved wooden effigies of te whaki and Te Apaapa ”.
Not long after, both pou disappeared.
Wellington Colonial Museum, c. 1880
James Bragge
“The next time we saw Te Apaapa was in Augustus Hamilton’s collection,” Jones says. “Our kōrero didn’t say anything about Te Apaapa being gifted or anything like that.”
In 1902, Hamilton became the director of the Colonial Museum in Wellington, a little two-storey building in Thorndon. Before long, Te Apaapa was on display there. But where was the other pou ?
Rongowhakaata, as a people, are no stranger to taonga going missing. “Our iwi’s always been on the precipice of old and new,” Jones says. “We were the first ones to meet Cook, you know,” a sly grin spreading across his face.
In 1769, the British seaman, Captain James Cook, arrived off the Tūranga coast. After his two-day visit, nine Māori were dead or injured, including the rangatira Te Rākau and Te Maro . On board his ship the Endeavour as it left were a collection of weapons and paddles – some had been traded, some were likely gifted to Cook’s Tahitian navigator Tupaia, but others were taken. The first encounter set off something of a trajectory for the iwi.
“We’ve got a lot of taonga that were stolen,” Jones says, a loot that includes entire wharenui.
Te Hau-ki-Tūranga is an elaborately carved whare whakairo, renowned for the beauty of its carvings that date to the early 1840s, They were etched under the supervision of Raharuhi Rukupō , who is regarded as one of the great carvers of the 19th century.
In 1867, the government minister James Richmond was deployed to Tairāwhiti with the task of getting Rongowhakaata to cede their land. He visited Manutūkē and was mightily impressed by the whare, so he asked for it.
Rukupō politely rejected the request in several letters, but the Crown ignored him and sent troops to dismantle the whare and take it away.
For us, if you’ve got an encyclopaedia, which is your whare, and you’ve got pieces missing, then parts of the book are missing in your encyclopaedia.
David Jones
Te Hau-ki-Tūranga then passed through several museums. Many of its components were stripped from it and have since scattered around the world.
“For us, if you’ve got an encyclopaedia, which is your whare, and you’ve got pieces missing, then parts of the book are missing in your encyclopaedia,” Jones says. “When you think about what a carving represents and the role of the carver, the carver was the historian of the iwi.
“Through their carvings, through the mnemonic devices that they created, our carvers were able to tell our story. So the loss of our land, the loss of our people, the theft of Te Hau-ki-Tūranga still sits in the recent memory of our people.”
In 2011, when Rongowhakaata signed its Treaty settlement, the Crown acknowledged that “it forcibly took possession” of Te Hau-ki-Tūranga, saying it was “immensely sorry” for the pain it had caused. That settlement included a provision for Te Papa to establish a relationship with Rongowhakaata , with the intention that it would eventually be returned.
That led to an a 2017 exhibition, Ko Rongowhakaata Te Hau-ki-Tūranga and Te Apaapa as focal points. “As part of our iwi exhibition and the relationship with Te Papa , [the] marae asked for the return,” Jones says.
Augustus Hamilton, scientist and director of the Wellington Colonial Museum.
James Ingram McDonald. Te Papa
While preparing for this exhibition, researcher Dr Amber Aranui came across the old photograph in Augustus Hamilton’s collection. There was Te Apaapa . But who was that with him?
“Te Apaapa was always remembered, right?” Jones says. “But I never knew there was a Tāwhaki ”.
Aranui reached out to Tanith Wirihana Te Waitohiterangi , an historian with the Rongowhakaata Iwi Trust, who happened to be researching Te Hau-ki-Tūranga and Raharuhi Rukupō .
“Amber opened that doorway and Tanith was in the right place at the right time,” Jones says. “I think that’s just divine intervention by our tīpuna .”
The search
Around the same time, Dr Hilke Thode-Arora was also doing some research in Munich.
The Five Continents Museum is a big stone building, built as an ostentatious display of power, possession, and the spoils of empire. Among its collection are some 80 or so Māori taonga, with many more from around the Pacific.
The Museum Fünf Continents (Museum Five Continents), Munich.
NICOLAI KAESTNER
Thode-Arora, who is the director of the museum’s Oceania Gallery, has been trying to work out where much of the collection is actually from for many years. “My stance has been for a long time to get these taonga in contact with the descendants of the earlier makers or owners,” she says.
But much of the taonga is poorly labelled, if at all. The majority of taonga Māori in collections overseas is unprovenanced, to use the industry jargon. There is no record of where they came from, how they got there, or the kōrero behind them. They’re often reduced to labels as sparse as “Māori spear: North Island, New Zealand”.
A decade ago, Thode-Aroroa worked on an exhibition, From Samoa With Love? .
“Museums – like natural history museums, archaeology, technology, history and art museums – have not been brought together from no man’s land, they have also very often a colonial context,” she says. “There is a growing awareness that one needs to engage with Indigenous communities.”
After the Samoa exhibition, Thode-Arora had been working through the rest of the collection, lining the taonga up, taking pictures, and scratching through the museum’s files to find any leads. When it came to the five-foot poutokomanawa sitting in storage, she started working her way through contacts.
One day, Samoan photographer Tony Brunt suggested someone who might know about this figure: Tanith Wirihana Te Waitohiterangi . Thode-Arora emailed him with a picture and some details. As Jones tells it: “He’s sitting in Te Hau-ki-Tūranga, our tīpuna whare , writing about our tīpuna Rukupō , who also carved Te Mana-o-Tūranga.
“And this tīpuna drops in front of him and goes: ‘Hey, I found you’.”
Tāwhaki, as currently displayed at the Museum of Five Continents, Munich.
NICOLAI KAESTNER
The reunion
David Jones was in his terrace flat in southwest London when he received a phone call last year. “My cousin [Tapunga Nepe , the director of Gisborne’s Tairāwhiti Museum], rings me and says, ‘Hey, we’ve got a tīpuna in Germany’,”.
“I said, ‘Pardon?’ He said, ‘Yes, the poutokomanawa of our whare is in Germany’.
“So I ring them and jump on a plane, because I wanted to go and see our tīpuna and just reconnect to that whakapapa and kōrero .”
He recalls the feeling of laying his eyes on Tāwhaki for the first time, the chill he got when he leant in for a hongi . Tāwhaki had obviously been well looked after for the past 125 years, Jones says, but his whereabouts for that time was still a mystery.
A member of the Rongowhakaata delegation meets Tāwhaki at Five Continents Museum, Munich.
NICOLAI KAESTNER
The earliest trace of Tāwhaki outside of Manutūkē is a photograph taken in 1902, in a catalogue for the Umlauf Trading Company. In that catalogue, he had been positioned in a sort of model’s pose outside the whare Ruatepupuke, which was sold to the Field Museum in Chicago, where it still sits.
“The Umlauf company was a Hamburg-based company dealing in ethnographic objects, as they put it,” says Thode-Arora. Nobody knows who he was sold to, but he then disappeared again for nearly six decades until he was bought by the Five Continents Museum in 1960.
The museum bought him from a man named Ludwig Bretschneider, a dealer Thode-Arora called “notorious and strategic”. Born in 1909, Bretschneider made his fortune trading non-European taonga, much of it illicitly. He was arrested in 1932 for taking treasures, including a eucharistic dove, from the Salzburg Cathedral and smuggling them across the border to sell on the German black market. During World War II, Bretschneider sold paintings from Jewish families to the Nazis, before making a post-war career pivot to dealing in “exotic art”.
“You would have, for example, museum directors not very knowledgeable or interested in Pacific taonga ,” Thode-Arora explains. “So they might prefer to get Chinese or African or Asian artifacts. And they said, ‘Okay, we have these Pacific artefacts here. So if you want them, why couldn’t we do an exchange?
“For example, there is a beautiful tekoteko, which was part of the Munich collection which, again, Bretschneider exchanged out of our museum, sold to Mr Rockefeller and which is now part of the Metropolitan Museum collection in New York. So this is the way he acted and this is why we don’t know where Tāwhaki has been. Tāwhaki might have been in a different museum and Bretschneider might have exchanged him from there, or he might have sat in a private collection for many decades. We have no idea.
“Those dealers tended to keep their contexts sort of secret. Only if they could enhance the financial value by revealing something, they would do that. We have the very bare information that Tāwhaki must have come from New Zealand, but we didn’t know much more.”
Members of the Rongowhakaata delegation at the powhiri at Five Continents Museum, Munich.
NICOLAI KAESTNER
For now, Tāwhaki is keeping his secrets. But a few months ago, a Rongowhakaata delegation travelled to Germany for a reunion. David Jones led a procession of karakia into an exhibition curated to surround their newly-found tīpuna.
The exhibition, called He Toi Ora , is a display of Tāwhāki in all his pride, Jones says. “That he is not just a carved figure, he is part of the tapestry of our kōrero ”. Also there are dozens of other unprovenanced taonga . They’re hoping a miracle might repeat and they, too, may be reunited.
Dr Hilke Thode-Arora says it is proving incredibly popular, with tens of thousands of people filing through to see Tāwhaki . She says guided tours are fully booked weeks in advance.
“There’s still a lot that needs to be pieced together,” Jones says. “It also goes to show that after 125 years our tīpuna is saying, ‘Right, I’m ready to come home now’.”
That conversation is happening, but repatriation involves an often-laborious process.
“They would like to see Tāwhaki return home, which is also something I very much support,” Thode-Arora says.
