Front Burner - Introducing: Stuff The British Stole

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the U.K. and the world. They usually come with polite plaques. This is a series about the not-so-polite history behind those objects. Hosted by Marc Fennell. More episodes are available at: smarturl.it/stuffthebritishstole

This is a CBC Podcast. Hey listeners, we have a special bonus episode for FrontBurners podcast subscribers from another podcast called Stuff the British Stole. Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today, those objects are housed in genteel institutions around the world accompanied by polite plaques. The podcast Stuff the British Stole dives into the not-so-polite history behind those objects. In each episode, award-winning journalist Mark Fennell picks one artifact and takes you on the wild, evocative, sometimes funny, often tragic adventure of how it got to where it is now.

Ultimately, this isn't really a series about the past. It's about making sense of the world today. Have a listen. This podcast is a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. Our sister was kidnapped in 1977. She was five years old. It was a big story in Geneva.

It was the story. On October 3, 1977, in Switzerland, the Ortiz family changed forever. They lived in a chateau that was really close to the centre of Geneva. She was grabbed from our home. She was on her way to kindergarten. The chauffeur had driven up to the house. The driver was chloroformed and the child was snatched by two Italians,

mafioso, so she was kidnapped. I was nine. My brothers and I were at boarding school. We had a boarding school, a news blackout, so that we wouldn't find out from the news. And then our mother came with our grandmother and told us what happened. What are the bits that stay with you?

We had outside the house, journalists lined up with their cameras, their zooms, in the trees, behind the fence, in the fence, in the garden. They were everywhere and our father had to go and make a press conference. You who have my daughter, don't make her suffer too much. Calm her down. Tell her she'll see her mother and her father in a few days' time. All these different thoughts are in your head. Five years old. What is happening to the child?

What is the child thinking? How is the child managing? The anguish of whether he would see her again, it was really, really harrowing. That was when the call came. The ransom for five-year-old Graziella Ortiz was to be US$2 million, all paid in used bills. And the clock was ticking.

And so, Graziella's dad, George Ortiz, a well-known art collector in Switzerland, made a panicked deal. Our father borrowed funds to pay the ransom. Then he had to pay back. He had to sell his collection. He then had to auction a whole lot of his work. So this is how the auction came about at Sotheby's, of George Ortiz's treasures.

Hidden in that collection of treasures at Sotheby's was a time bomb, something smuggled from the other side of the world that would trigger a decades-long conflict. Even today, I'm still a bit emotional. Yes, it something smuggled from the other side of the world that would trigger a decades-long conflict. Even today, I'm still a bit emotional. Yes, it was smuggled. No-one knew where they were. What the hell was going on? My name is Mark Fennell,

and this is the story of not one, but two abductions. It was fairly notorious, but I'm not going to say any more. I don't have any other comments to make. A secretive vault. This is like a Fort Knox. And they shouldn't get away with it. And one father's rage. When you're attacked, you fight.

Welcome to Season 2 of Stuff the British Stole. G'day I have to say when I said Mark I said to my kids, I go hey this guy Mark Fenella who's that, he's going to come and he wants to hang out with me and they go, with you? Why? Like, who the hell are you? Who the hell is Dr. Rachel Buchanan?

She is a lot of things. She's a writer, archivist, historian, and she would like you to know a particularly proud owner of a mullet. Just say something like, and I noticed her hair, and as soon as I saw that mummy mullet, I just thought Aaron Norton, Western Bulldogs, has been reborn in the body of a middle-aged woman. That's my big thing.

See? See? Look. Don't listen to her. It is a luxurious mullet. That's bullshit, but it's a statement hairdo, that's for sure. But there is one part of Rachel that has come to define her over the last two decades, and that is her Maori heritage. I'm a descendant of Taranaki, and for 22 years now, I've been researching stories connected with my waka papa, which is genealogy, stories connected with Taranaki. It's my, you know, spiritual homeland for sure. It is also her literal homeland.

Taranaki is on the west coast of Aotearoa, New Zealand, and it has this dramatic coastline. This is where Rachel grew up. The main thing about Taranaki is the mountain, so I've got... She's got this picture of a perfectly symmetrical mountain With green hills and crisp white peaks Oh wow That is a beautiful mountain It's like a stock photo of the perfect mountain

Yeah it's the second most perfect mountain in the world after Fuji And in fact it did stand in for Fuji During one of Tom Cruise's lesser known works The Last of the Samurai I don't think Australians understand Just sort of how green somewhere can be when all the trees are green all the time and beaches are all black sand, so it's iron sands. Oh, yeah, it's the most beautiful place in the world.

But 200 years ago, Taranaki was also a very dangerous place to be. It was pretty much 100 years of terror. That started in about late 1810, 1820. So, you know, probably a first act of colonisation or pre-colonisation was the arrival of weapons in New Zealand, muskets. These were the intertribal wars. Different iwi, Maori nations jostling for land, fuelled by the trade of

British-supplied muskets. Other northern tribes got hold of them first. I mean, more power to them. Everyone was seeking what they could to try and survive. And there were big tawa or raiding parties coming down from the north into Taranaki and far out. You know, when I think back what it was like in Taranaki, hearing a gun for the first time, you know, seeing what a gun could do to a human being as opposed to a spear or a club, people were terrified. So there was, you know, many, many massacres during that period. Thousands of people fled Taranaki.

A lot of my Maori relatives were forced to flee. People took what they could carry. But there were some things, incredibly valuable things, they hid instead. Because one of the things that happened when the invaders came from the north or when Taranaki was doing their own invading was you'd desecrate people's buildings. That was how you dominated.

And the carvings would have been placed in the swamp for safekeeping. Those carvings that Rachel's talking about, this whole saga is about them. Five thick, richly coloured panels of wood in the shape of a mountain, almost as tall as a human, carved with these undulating patterns, almost like writhing snakes. It's very deep into the wood. So the figures are very, the word serpentine is used, but it felt like something alive. It was mesmerising. The harder you look, the more detail you see. On the left, the left panel is a little bit different, maybe like a darker wood. Looks like it's almost been designed by somebody else. And then on the far right, the far right panel has this odd square hole in it, right in the

middle of the artwork. It's almost like a handle. And as you keep looking, that's when you realise it's looking back at you. There's all these faces looking from different angles. Wide-eyed, carved right into the wood. It was as if the people depicted in the wood could just step out of the wood. These wooden carved panels are known as the Motunui Epa, originally part of a storehouse and then buried

in a conflict in the north of Taranaki, an area known as Motunui, and then forgotten in the maelstrom. I mean, no one knew in 1820 what was going to occur. Thousands of people arriving from the UK and that the Taranaki world would be turned on its head. That is, until someone dug them up. It's a rainy day in New Plymouth, the biggest city in the Taranaki region. Here, come in. And the first thing you notice about Ron Lambert's house

is that it may as well be a museum. He's once here. I've collected things since I was about knee-high to a grasshopper. God only knows what. Ron Lambert is not the one who dug up the panels from the swamps of Motunui, but he plays a crucial role in this story. Back in the 1970s, Ron was working at a museum, the Taranaki Museum,

and he heard this rumour that something amazing had been pulled out of the swamps of Taranaki. And then he actually saw evidence of it. I found a couple of photographs that had five panels in someone's backyard and they'd been photographed. They were obviously dug out of the swamp and that's basically about when I realised that there was something floating around. This was one of the first times in centuries that anybody had laid eyes on the panels.

They are absolutely bloody stunning. There's no question about that whatsoever. They are very deep, almost three-dimensional figures, which has serpentine bodies and twisted limbs and things like that. So Ron now knows that somebody somewhere in this area has dug them up, these incredible pieces of work. But then they just disappear again. So it was very dicey sort of stuff.

So the next time you saw the panels, where was that? About six years after I saw those photographs and a friend of mine rang up one evening and said, did you see the news on the TV? And he was watching late night TV and saw a little BBC item about this auction of Ortiz treasures and saw an image of the Epa and heard the word Taranaki and was like, hang on, I don't know about that.

And he could not believe his eyes. Five panels, Taranaki panels that were being put up in Sotheby's, that could only be the five panels that we had a photograph of in 1972. So Ron immediately got on the phone to the director of New Zealand's National Museum. And asked him if he had a photograph of the panels that were on TV and he said yes I've got the catalogue in front of me at the moment. And I said, on the left, is it a totally different style? And the other side, on the right, is there a square hole in it? And he went silent for a while and then said, yes, how did you know?

And I said, well, I were in Taranaki in New Plymouth in 1972. And he said, but that can't be because the catalogue says that they were bought in America in the 1930s. How on earth did these five panels that were in a New Zealand backyard just a few years ago suddenly end up 18,000 kilometres away with this paperwork, this providence, claiming to be from America in the 1930s. It says provenance,

formerly the property of Mr Robert Riggs, Philadelphia. He had originally purchased them in an antique shop in New London, Connecticut around 1935. It was obvious that it was not true. Completely made up that it was not true.

Completely made up, like absolute total bullshit. That's amazing. When you were describing the panels to him on the phone, what was going through your head? Like, how were you feeling at that moment? Quite euphoric, actually, to be quite honest, because I never thought I'd see the things again because no-one knew where they were. And now they did know where they were.

New Zealand was not going to let them go. Within 22 days, the New Zealand government had issued the injunction to stop the sale. So, I mean, I work as a public servant now and I have deep respect for the public service, but to move that quickly, it is just unbelievable. I have pondered it, Mark, and I'm like, what the hell was going on?

These people were on fire. Just this frenzy of activity to find out what the hell has happened here. But what the New Zealand government didn't realise was that on the other side of the world, there was a very desperate, traumatised family banking on that sale. Could you introduce yourself and who you are?

Yes. Hello, I'm Nicholas Ortiz, son of George Ortiz. My father was a collector of antiquities, and I live in Lithuania, but originally from Switzerland, I guess. Tell me about your dad. Like, what was he like growing up? He was extremely strict, very demanding. So he was always around art, and he talked about art at home. We had curators, archaeologists, art historians, different people. Everything revolved around art.

George Ortiz, Nick's dad, was born into a life of incredible wealth. The descendant of a Bolivian mining magnate, he was raised in Paris. And, like, literally, the street he grew up in... It's the street that ends in the Arc de Triomphe, right? That's where he grew up. So the Arc de Triomphe was there. The Onassis' and the Rothschilds were their neighbours.

This is a childhood of privilege beyond what I can imagine. But I got the sense of someone who was a bit tormented and this collecting was a way that he could express himself and make his own name. This is the home of the George Ortiz Collection, the finest collection of antiquities in private hands with over 1,000 works of art spanning 30 different cultures. From ancient Greek and Roman sculptures

through to South American deities, there is a millennia of history in the Ortiz collection. For him, it wasn't just objects. It was much deeper. It was a way to soothe a certain maybe anxiety. I was looking for, seeking after God, looking for the truth. To be connected from the earth to the sky. And there I found my answer.

It was my birth, my spiritual birth. What George Ortiz may not have fully understood is that this collection painted a bullseye on his back. Which brings us back to Switzerland. They would have been a target. The year is 1977. Two men snatched Graziella Ortiz, George's daughter, Nick's sister. She was five years old.

She was grabbed from our home and sequestered for 11 days until our father found a way to settle the ransom. I mean, those 11 days were horrible. You can't imagine. I mean, it was really, really harrowing. George managed to borrow the $2 million he needed. The money was handed over. A few hours later, reportedly on the side of a highway

between Geneva and Lausanne, Graziella was found alive. After that, it was our sister. She had to sleep with the door open at night next to our parents. It's just hard to manage the anguish with her. How do you think it changed your dad? He couldn't talk about it for a long time. He just kept it inside himself.

He didn't want us to feel the anguish from that. But George Ortiz did have to pay for it, quickly. So he picked 234 objects from his collection and sent them to London to be put under the hammer by the auction house Sotheby's. So imagine George Ortiz's shock when just three days before the auction, a letter arrives out of the blue from the New Zealand government.

Shit, where is it? Okay, here we go. The Attorney General of New Zealand suing on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen and the right of the government of New Zealand. We command you, uppercase, that within 14 days after the service of this writ, so it's basically saying that if you don't withdraw these carvings from sale, we're going to issue this writ and then the legal action will begin. Our dad was furious.

Our dad was rightfully furious. He had to sell his collection. And here comes, well, we're going to contest the sale. When you're attacked, you get to an emotional state, well, you fight. If it hadn't been that, I think the whole thing would have been different. But here you had this whole emotional dimension

which made it supercharged, a supercharged issue. So, George Ortiz has his daughter stolen. He desperately needs the money to cover the ransom. Out of left field, he finds he's being sued by New Zealand. Then, at the same time, New Zealand have uncovered this long-lost Maori treasure that disappeared from right under their noses. You've got two sides here that could not be more opposed at this point. And yet, everyone has one big question.

everyone has one big question. How on earth did this centuries-old artwork end up in George Ortiz's collection? And to answer that, we need to go back to 1971 and those swamps in Motonui. Just off State Highway 3 in the north of Taranaki, this is where you find Motunui. In 1971, there was a lot of construction going on. Two landowners here decided they wanted to do some land clearing.

They decided that they would dig a ditch through their land. Like, there was a lot of that ditch digging, draining swamps, big waste of space, the swamps, let's get rid of them. But in the last few years, with all the construction happening in the area, Maori artefacts have been dug up here. So the two landowners, they reached out to a local man by the name of... Melville Manukonga, who owned a souvenir shop in the main drag of New Plymouth, and see if he wanted to come and have a look and see if there'd be any artefacts. He was walking through the ditch and saw one face looking at him and then as he kept

going there were more and more faces looking at him. Those wide-eyed carved faces, imagine them protruding out of the soil. And he excavated those carvings, that's how they came out of the swamp, and took them back to his house in New Plymouth. And at that time, he then made a decision. So he said that he would sell the carvings to the highest bidder. It turns out, by chance, a bidder was in town. The dealer was in New Zealand

and he found out there were some panels that some guy had found and they were in a gas station. A British art dealer in his late 20s by the name of Lance Entwistle was travelling with his American girlfriend. Yeah, this couple turned up, an English man and an American woman. They fell down on their knees in awe and longing at the sight of these carvings. He realised how important they were

and he gave the guy a bunch of money. They were masterpieces. The guy who sold it in New Zealand was a Maori. You know, the sale was illegal, really. You look, Melville did not have the mandate to do that, but he did do it. What Melville said is that it was $6,000 and that's in all the legal documents. And at that time, I mean, I looked it up,

that was more than an average year's income in New Zealand. So it was a substantial sum of money for someone running a small shop in a small town in New Zealand. So that's the choice he made. All right. Even if you put the mandate issue to one side, let's just say that despite the name of this show, this particular British art dealer, Lance Entwistle, to be very clear, he did not steal the Motunui epipanels.

But then there is the issue of how he got it out of New Zealand. And there's a story here that Lance himself has told multiple people that I've spoken to. And that story goes like this. He said that they put the carvings in a crate and shipped them out, labelled furniture. He bought some big cupboards or whatever and he wrapped it and put it inside the furniture and exported the furniture.

And the dealer told you that? Yeah, yeah, he told me how he did it, yeah. Now, here's the problem. And would that have been illegal at the time? Yes. Yes, it was smuggled. How so? Well, it would have been contrary to the New Zealand legislation.

The New Zealand legislation said that in order to export an object like this, you needed a permit. And he didn't have a permit. Really? It was fairly notorious. But I'm not going to say any more. Said like a proper lawyer. Once the lawsuit between George Ortiz

and the New Zealand government kicked into gear, suddenly all of these curious details started tumbling out into the open. My name is Patrick, Patrick Joseph O'Keefe. Patrick Joseph O'Keefe is, these days, a retired law professor in Australia. But back in the 1970s, he and his wife were like this crack team of legal experts hired to work on New Zealand's case. And it was a wild one.

Entwistle took it to New York, then contacted Ortiz in Geneva. Ortiz, by this point, was well known in the arts community for his love of Pacific art. So Lance contacted him and said, we've got something great here. This is how George Ortiz came to meet those fateful panels that would cause him so much strife. meet those fateful panels that would cause him so much strife. And George flew from Geneva to New York in 1973, and they met in this apartment near Central Park, and George agreed to pay $65,000. That's what occurred. So Lance Antwistle, British art dealer, buys these panels for $6,000 New Zealand dollars

from Manukonga, and then sold them to Ortiz for $65,000 US dollars. That is a huge profit margin. But the most interesting part of this transaction is that as part of the sale, Lance made Ortiz sign a document about the panels. Which said that he wasn't to disclose them to any, I think it was a New Zealand archaeologist or anthropologist. George was not allowed to talk about them or photograph them or let anyone see them for at least two years.

Two years. You would have thought George, with all his experience, would have realised alarm bells, perhaps that there was something odd about it. So why do you think Lance made Ortiz sign that document? Covering his own back. Lance Entwistle here. Please leave me a message after the tone. Thanks.

It's probably fair to say that a number of the details of this transaction, at least as they exist in court documents, they don't paint Lance Entwistle in a wonderful light. So for the past few weeks, we have sent emails, left messages. I call his very friendly office in Paris and use the one sad bit of French that I know. and use the one sad bit of French that I know. All to see if he was willing to have a chat about his career and if he wanted to add anything at all

to all of this stuff that's on the public record. And one day, he picked up. I'm all yours. Ah, fantastic. No problem. You don't mind if I record, is that okay? No problem. The line is clear. Fantastic, yep. The line is clear. Yep, the line is super clear. You don't mind if I record? Is that okay?

Fantastic. Yep. Yep, the line is super clear. You can hear me? Fantastic. All right. Well, can I just get you to start by introducing yourself and what you do for a living? Lance still remembers the moment he first saw the writhing figures of the Motunui Epipanels staring at him in Munaconga's garage. My impression of them when I first saw them was that they were martial carvings.

I was dumbstruck. I think we knew we were in the presence of great art. I do believe that the dispersion of art, which has been a factor of human commerce and experience since the ancient world, continues to be very important that art not be confined by nation-state borders, if you like. Lance, if you had your time over,

do you think you would have acquired it the same way or would you have done it slightly differently? I think it's quite difficult to project oneself back to what one did in one's late 20s, one's in one's mid-70s. I don't think I could answer that question. I mean, I could talk about their intrinsic quality, but I don't have any other comments to make.

Look, back then, Mark, I think most things were acquired in pretty dodgy ways. That's what was happening. Both dealers, collectors and institutions all operated by ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies. I think that it was just a sort of nudge, nudge, wink, wink scenario. And everyone just pretended that this was all legit. No one would dig deep. scenario and everyone just pretended that this was all legit, no one would dig deep. So this was, I really see this as just a huge blowing apart of all these little agreements that existed between privileged people. So with all of this now out in the open, the Mata Nui upper panels are sitting

in Britain at Sotheby's at the centre of a court case between a desperate George Ortiz and an enraged New Zealand. It was this real sense that New Zealand had been robbed. I think there was a lot of anger on both sides. I think that they got really pissed off that Sotheby's was like trumpeting it. I think what might have been at play was a sense of colonial fight back. You think we're nothing in New Zealand, but we've got our own culture. And how dare you Poms think you can sell our stuff?

And they shouldn't get away with it. The case made it all the way to the highest court in the UK. They went to the House of Lords. And so what happens when a distant island nation takes on a stunningly wealthy art collector? They lost. And George Ortiz won the right to keep the Motunui APA panels. Over the years, New Zealand tried a range of different arguments, but I think the most telling one is this.

It's when they tried to argue that the export itself broke New Zealand law. But this export law cannot be applied in England, so you can't apply your country's law in another country, right? This has always bothered Rachel. You couldn't have the law of New Zealand applying in the UK because that would be an exercise of extraterritorial sovereignty. And all I could think, Mark, was he's describing what colonisation actually was, like a massive exercise of extraterritorial sovereignty imposed upon Taranaki and everywhere else.

I mean, hello? The answer to the stuff the British stole is the British stole Taranaki. All of our ancestral land was taken by British law. And it was by British law that those panels were now bound. Ortiz eventually completed the Sotheby's sale without the panels. They were now too controversial to sell and so he locked them away. I mean it was huge. You could hear the stillness if you like of the air but

turning the handles and opening this huge door i said oh my god what's this ortiz locked them in a vault one of the most secretive vaults on the planet yeah look i've never experienced something like this before uh they did say that, well, this is like a Fort Knox, very much like a bank vault. The emotion was really, really intense. In the doors around you sits about $100 billion in art and antiques. This is the Geneva Freeport. Which is a big tax-free haven where people keep artworks and gold, cigars, cars, you name it. So it's a huge, I've heard it described as the world's biggest museum you'll

never see. Where theoretically you haven't arrived into a country because it's like a dead zone. About seven years ago, this guy you're hearing here, Dr Arapata Hakiwai, from New Zealand's National Museum, Te Papa Tongariwa. Well, the Ortiz family invited him here to this mysterious vault. A lot of people thought that would never happen. George Ortiz died in 2013. And there, in this vault, his son, Nick, turned on the lights. The power was immense. You know, it went right through me, Nick, turned on the lights. The power was immense. You know, it went right through me, actually, when I saw them.

Oh, it's sort of like, it's a real, it's just the sheer power of it in this dead space of concrete. For the first time in decades, the Mata Nui panels saw its people, a Nick Ortiz whose father had fought so hard to keep these panels. Nick opens his mouth. Nikolai spoke in te reo Māori, in the Māori language. We all felt that special energy. They were reconnecting to their ancestors.

And so we were moved to tears. That had a great impact on me. To me, there was sincerity, there was genuineness. He had taken the time, his pronunciation and what he said. To be quite honest, his Māori was far better than many Māori in Aotearoa and New Zealand. And so, how does it end? Okay, so when you walk into the museum, you will go in the front door, up a set of stairs.

It ends in Taranaki. And then you walk into this gallery here. In the Puke Ariki Museum in New Plymouth. At the entrance, we have the panels right there. It ends with its people. My name is Tō Mairangi Marsh. I'm a descendant of the Ngāti Rāheriri tribe of Motunui, so North Taranaki. Tumairangi Marsh is a guardian of the Motunui upper panels as they sit here today.

Even today I still get emotional bringing people up or just standing here with them. What do you think the story of the panels tells you about the history of this land? I think they are a very good example of resilience and hope. I never thought in my lifetime I would be standing here in front of these panels because I thought it was something. It was always a pipe dream for us and our history has been ugly, but we're still here. There is a curious and strange justice to this story. In the end, the Ortiz family actually sold the panels to the New Zealand government for about $4 million,

which would make it one of, if not the most expensive artefacts in the history of New Zealand. But it was done on this understanding that the New Zealand government, the Crown, was paying for something specifically so it could go back to the people of Taranaki. The British stole Taranaki, and now the Crown has acted for us and we've got these carvings back. So to me, it's an evening up.

It's a really rare example of the Crown using its enormous resources to act in the favour for the benefit of Taranaki people. Like, it just doesn't happen. And for whatever reason, it did happen. The days of the British Empire, as it once was, are now over. And yet it's built into the very DNA of how we live our lives, right down to our laws. Laws which held the Motunui Epa panels

hostage for decades. So it's kind of fitting that the case of the Motunui Epa would completely change laws all around the world as to how art and artefacts can be treated. It was a landmark case that led to the UNESCO Convention on Illegal Export Theft. to the UNESCO Convention on Illegal Export Theft. Yes, heavily influenced by this case, in the mid-90s, UNESCO set up a new convention to solve the problem of different national laws and make sure that stuff that was stolen had a pathway to coming home. I don't think anyone living in New Plymouth would have thought

of ourselves as coming from a place where New Zealand's most valuable work of art was about to overturn international law. No. No. And yet, that is precisely what they did. Stuff the British Stole is produced by Zoe Ferguson, with help from Leah Simone Bowen at CBC Podcasts. Mixing by Hamish Camilleri. The executive producer is Amruta Slee, and the head of society and culture is Julie Browning. Very special thank you to Robin Martin and Cassandra Saunders at RNZ, Richard Girvan,

and Anthea Moody too. Just a heads up, Rachel Buchanan is writing a book about all this, which will be probably amazing, and it's out next year. This is a production of ABC RN in partnership with CBC Podcasts. It was created and written by me. I'm Mark Finnell and here's a hint for the next episode. When the sunlight hits, it turns pink. That was the first episode from season two of Stuff the British Stole. You can listen to more episodes right now on CBC Listen and everywhere you get your podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.