Maori, Pacific relics sent from US for sale

The collection includes a yellow pounamu and a Tongan whalebone breastplate. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Hundreds of Maori and Pacific artefacts housed in a modest Ohio museum since the 1970s have arrived in Auckland to be auctioned closer to home.

Most of the 300 to 400 items - half of which were collected by a United States foreign aid worker active in the Pacific for several decades from the 1930s - remain in a half-tonne shipment of boxes awaiting customs and biosecurity clearance at Auckland Airport.

But auction house Webb's has received and unpacked one carton containing such items as a giant 40cm adze, believed by managing director Neil Campbell to be more than 700 years old, as well as an unusually long taiaha and a rare yellow pounamu pendant.

Mr Campbell said the Zanesville Museum of Art east of the Ohio state capital Columbus dispatched its entire Maori and Oceanic collection to Auckland after he persuaded its trustees to repatriate the artefacts rather than send them to New York.

That was despite the museum's chances of commanding higher prices in the Big Apple than in New Zealand for the $900,000-plus collection.

The museum had decided to "de-accession" the collection to make room for more Native American material considered of greater relevance to its target audience, and approached him about six months ago to value some of the pieces.

He saw his chance to divert the collection to Auckland after discovering that several museum trustees had mixed feelings about the disposal of artefacts gifted to the institution by foreign aid worker Eric K. Young and a fellow American collector, Alan Gerdau.

"I was leaning on the idea that because it was a gifted collection, there should be some discussion about the person who originally gifted it and the amount of time he spent in this part of the world," Mr Campbell said.

"It was quite a surprising outcome - I certainly wasn't wildly confident we were going to be successful convincing them to go to the trouble and cost of shipping it back to New Zealand."

"It took three months to ship out - it's literally half a tonne of gear, 480kg."

Mr Young shared Zanesville as his hometown with famed American "western" novelist Zane Grey, another occasional visitor to New Zealand, and donated his collection to the museum shortly before his death in 1979.

He sold mining equipment for the Caterpillar engineering company in the Pacific in the 1930s and returned after World War II as an aid worker responsible for key agricultural projects, including a massive irrigation system in Indonesia.

"A lot of the artefacts were gifted to him by locals, because he did positive things for the people," Mr Campbell said.

The auctioneer said about 80 of the artefacts were from New Zealand, and the rest from Australia, Papua New Guinea and elsewhere in the Pacific.

His big task now is to value and catalogue the collection, ready for auction in June with rare artefacts from several other collectors, such as a whale jaw-bone chest-plate used to defend a Tongan chief against Fijian arrows, and a rei puta (Maori canoe captain's pendant) made from a whale's tooth - one of only eight known specimens.