I started my adult life as an anthropologist focussed on Africa and nomadic peoples.  My first year offerings as a graduate student at Columbia University included a field work course with Margaret Mead.  I didn’t know when i signed on that this would be her final teaching semester.  A decade later, I was traveling up the Sepik River on a reconnaissance trip and found ghosts of the anthropologist greats journeying alongside me.  When we got to the highlands, Mead and Bateson  where joined by filmmaker, Robert Gardner’s, indelible images from Dead Birds, one of the greatest ethnographic films of all time and a required viewing in Melanesian studies.  That trip, for me, was fascinating yet an unnerving plunge in to an aesthetic, cultural and psychic world vastly different from anything I had experienced until then.

And so it was with huge pleasure that I arrived at the Australian Museum yesterday to revisit the cultural material of a place that still stands uniquely alone in my travel memory.  Accompanied by a curator, we walked the off limits stacks of art and artifacts from the indigenous peoples of  Australia, New Guinea, New Ireland and more and ended our tour with a glimpse into the boxes and trays of pieces from the extraordinary James Cook Collection.

We viewed shelves and shelves of boomerangs, didgeridos and spear throwers sourced from different parts of the continent and from different time periods, made of different woods and with a variety of carved and painted designs.  There were simple baskets and extremely beautiful, finely woven conical ones.  Mourning headdresses of gypsum and net sat next to children’s rattles and arrows.  And one of the most wonderful boxed collections contained scores of string figures from Yirrkala.  Canoes made from bark, beautifully carved prows, feather headdresses, pearl shell necklaces, hand axes and quartz knives, delicate early bark paintings, some of the first dot paintings on paper –  the quantity and diversity of material is staggering.  My favorites were the Malagan ceremonial mask figures and posts from New Ireland as seen above and below.

A sidebar to the collections housed in the back rooms of the Australian Museum were the snippets of history I picked up from the curator on how and by whom these pieces had been accumulated.  This is a parallel story of colonials, traders, and seafarers, a tale of passion and power that I find equally compelling.

http://australianmuseum.net.au/