Horatio Robley witnessed the most famous battle of the New Zealand Wars, he fathered a child with the daughter of a sworn enemy, his sketching helped end a war, his book helped save the art of Maori tattooing... But mostly he's famous for his grotesque collection of nearly 40 human heads.

Horatio Robley witnessed the most famous battle of the New Zealand Wars, he fathered a child with the daughter of a sworn enemy, his sketching helped end a war and his book helped save the art of Māori tattooing.

But mostly he's famous for his grotesque collection of nearly 40 human heads.

A Wall of Heads

If you type Horatio Robley's name into a search engine you'll find a seriously disturbing image (a censored version appears above).

In the foreground is Robley, dressed in a fancy suit and sporting an enormous handlebar moustache. In one hand he holds a mere (Māori club) and behind him... 35 mokomokai - preserved Māori heads.

The heads are in various states. Some are well preserved; you can still clearly make out their facial features and the beautiful curved lines of their tā moko (facial tattoos). Others are harder to look at; the lips are drawn back from the teeth, mummified skin clings to the shape of the skull.

Most disturbingly, one head in the bottom right corner of the photo clearly belongs to a very young child, maybe even a baby.

For the better part of a century this image has defined Horatio Robley. It's hard to look at a white guy sitting in front of a wall of Māori heads and see anything other than a monster.

"When were younger he was described as a macabre predator of culture," says Haami Piripi, a senior member of the mokomokai repatriation team for Te Papa museum.

But there's a twist in this story.

"Over time, as we've got to know him more and understand his motivation, we see that he really became a friend of the Māori."

So how do we go from a headhunting "predator of culture" to a "friend of the Māori"? That's a fascinating story in of itself. It's mostly been driven by the research of Tim Walker, a former curator at Te Papa who wrote his thesis on Robley in the 1980s.

"That's the image that people have of him," says Walker, gesturing to the gruesome black and white photo of Robley posing with his collection. "I think what we see generally is people's projections of their own sense of what was going on onto that image."

In Walker's words, Robley was a man "out of time". His motives were often misunderstood in his own day and are even more difficult to decipher from the perspective of 21st century Aotearoa.

Disaster at Gate Pā…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details